Canada Proposes Making Quitting Smoking Harder For Adults
OTTAWA, December 18th, 2020 – Today, the Canadian federal government proposed lowering allowable nicotine levels in regulated vapour products, which would minimize their value to adult smokers seeking to transition to a reduced risk category.
The effectiveness of vaping as a harm reduction product is contingent upon smokers having access to an alternative with sufficient nicotine.
“A limit of 20mg/mL is simply too low for many smokers,” said Allan Rewak Executive Director of VITA of Canada. “Adult smokers need access to higher nicotine vapour products at the beginning of their journey from smoking to vaping. Lowering this limit is just going to keep more smokers smoking.”
Vaping does not involve combustion and is recognized by Health Canada as “less harmful than smoking.”[1] According to the Royal College of Physicians (UK), the available data suggests that vapour products “are unlikely to exceed 5% of those associated with smoked tobacco products and may well be substantially lower than this figure”2.
“Considering the disparity of harm between vaping and smoking, we don’t understand why the federal government would be using Health Canada resources during a global pandemic to explore making it harder for adult smokers to switch to a reduced risk product,” said Daniel David, VITA President.
In April of 2020, Nova Scotia instituted a 20mg/mL nicotine cap coupled with a flavour ban and saw legal cigarette sales increase over 25% – a rate four times higher than surrounding provinces. Moreover, 50% of all specialty vape stores immediately closed, putting hundreds of Canadians out of work.
Please visit www.vitaofcanada.com for more information or contact Allan Rewak (647) 206-1231
[1] https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/services/smoking-tobacco/vaping/smokers.html
2 https://www.rcplondon.ac.uk/projects/outputs/nicotine-without-smoke-tobacco-harm-reduction
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