MHRA (UK) announcement on the future of e-cigarettes due today

Posted this in current events because... well, it's a current event.

The Medicines & Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) are due to publish an announcement on the findings of their public consultation into the regulation of e-cigarettes today at 1300 BST.

If you don't know the background, I've lifted this from their website:

Public consultation (MLX 364): The regulation of nicotine containing products (NCPs)

This consultation sought your views on whether to bring all nicotine containing products (NCPs) – with the exception of tobacco and tobacco products - within the medicines licensing regime. This would require all currently unlicensed NCPs on the market, such as electronic cigarettes containing nicotine and nicotine gels, to apply to the MHRA for a medicines marketing authorisation (MA).

Lots of interesting information on the MHRA website

Basically the consultation gave respondents three options:

• Option 1 - regulate and remove from the market within 21 days
  
• Option 2 - regulate within one year
  
• Option 3 - take no action
  

The part that shouldn't surprise anybody; amongst the respondents wishing to regulate e-cigs and remove them from the market within 21 days are the following:

• Imperial Tobacco Limited
  
• Rosen Holdings
  
• Meldex International
  
• Johnson & Johnson
  
• GSK
  
• Pierre Fabre Medicament
  
• Novartis
  

So the big money in the guise of the tobacco and pharma companies come out into the open. Hardly surprising. One of those industries wants to keep killing people whilst the other wants to keep selling people who don't wish to die their spectacularly ineffective nicotine replacement therapies.

But wait; there's more. According to Vivian Nathanson of the BMA they are definitely a menace. Why? Because they are a gateway drug for children.

source: BBC News

From that report you might be forgiven for thinking that we currently have an epidemic of e-cig toting kids running around our schools. My partner is a teacher, and she recognises a problem in schools with cigarettes but has yet to see for herself a child using an e-cog. And as she uses one herself, she would certainly know one if she saw one. Obviously this is one person in one school, but at least in her school there's hardly evidence of widespread use amongst children.

Personally, I think that this is a potentially massive public health prize that is in danger of being sacrificed ont he altar of big business lobbying. I have to say I do have something of a vested interest here as I now use e-cigs exclusively after 20 years of smoking tobacco cigarettes.

This should prove to be quite an interesting day.

Bloomin nora...I just started on E-Cigs and now they will ban em....grrrrrr

instead of buying the expensive tips which could contain anything in them get some glycerin from the chemist/drug store and refill them yourself and works just as good

I'm absolutely furious about this.

So much so, i'm finding it VERY difficult to comply with ATS T&C against colourful language TBH (i hope you appreciate my restraint mods!)

MONEY is the reason for this, nothing else.

Pharma is losing money, and has had the rubbish it's been conning the NHS and British people with for years shown to be next to useless, not fit for purpose and actually harmful (the drugs, have contributed to deaths by people taking them).

Pharma has and continues to make hundreds of Millions of £'s from it's patches, gums, pastles, drugs, sprays and inhalers....none of which has a 'quit success' rate above 11%...they are useless.

A 'quit success' is defined as a smoker or user of traditional tobacco products quiting cigarettes or tobacco for a year or longer using a 'quit aid'.

If you took an academic or physical exam and scored even 20%, you'd be considered a dunce and fail miserably...well, by this token Big Pharmas rubbish 11% average would be a double dunce of a percentage!

Ecigs have a 'quit success' rate of over 85%..that is 85% of people who use them as an alternative nicotine delivery system, quit tobacco and quit it for a year or longer, of the remaining 15% of those who try ecigs, a large percentage of that number drastically reduce their tobacco usage to only one or a few cigarettes a day. So they still smoke, but have cut right down with the help of ecigs...but the vast majority give up tobacco immediately and never go back to it.

I'm one of the 85%.

Two and a half years since my last cigarette and counting. Same for my wife.

Yes, we still use nicotine and no, we don't create second hand smoke, tar, cancer causing lingering smog, filthy smells.

I feel so much healthier, more alive, have more energy, more endurance, lifted mood after using ecigs and giving up tobacco than i have done in the last 30 years!

The argument against ecigs CANNOT be targetted at their success rates of helping people give up tobacco and stay off it, it CANNOT be targetted at their drasticaly reduced harm profile for the user and those around him or her, so they are trying to claim ecigs are a menace to children! (GGGGRRRRRR!!! FYGjhjk;jkl sknuohuje mnakJAHBV!!****)

I'm SO angry at this point, i'm having trouble typing..

These arseholes are claiming children will be harmed by ecigs...NONE of the ecig outlets sell ecigs to children, they have a VOLUNTARY minimum age restriction of 18 years without it being compulsory already!

Here's a wake up for those people who have been living with their heads in the sand for most of their lives, ready for this are ya?

CHILDREN SMOKE TOBACCO...is that clear enough?

I SMOKED regularly as a child, so did the majority of my peers at home and at school. Everyone knows what the 'smokers corner' is in schools, ALL the teachers knew the regular smokers at school and only halfheartedly tried to stop it.

The question is, we know children smoke...we know children will always experiment with illicit substances and practices..we know tobacco causes them great harm, so which is the better option for those children who already smoke tobacco or may be thinking of starting to use tobacco, should we continue to turn a blind eye to the kids who fake a note from their mum to buy tobacco, or who get an older sibling or friend to go to a shop, petrol station, off license, or coin operated cigarette machine and buy it?

Or should we be adult and rational about the reality of the matter and ackknowledge that while the ideal position would be for kids never to smoke, never to use nicotine or any other substance, we ought to be aiming for a harm reduction strategy, initially at the very least and ecigs are so less harmful than tobacco it's ridiculous to even consider banning or restricting them.

Ban or restrict ecigs and millions more deaths illness and disease wiull ensue when people go back to tobacco, while the next generation of smokers will be puffing away on tobacco at school, poisoning their young bodies with carcinogens and poisons from cigarettes while they could have been using cleaner, healthier and far less harmful ecigs instead.

It's absolutely ALL about money and pharma and BT crapping themselves as they see their cash cows coming to an end.

The hypocrisy is stunning.

Did i mention i'm furious!?

Well, I'm furious too. Having smoked since I was 16 years old (late developer) I had tried everything to give up with the exceptions of hypnotherapy, acupuncture and Champix (varenicline, we shall come back to that in a moment) and I had given up on the idea of giving up. This may sound over dramatised but the instant I tried my first e-cig, a plain vanilla cig-a-like mini, I knew I had found the magic bullet. I haven't touched a cigarette since. Not only have I not touched one, I've come to prefer my e-cig to the point that on a recent day trip to London when I found myself with a pocketful of flat batteries I chose to go without rather than buy cigarettes. So, yes, I'm # furious.

I said we shall come back to Champix and so here we are. Champix (which is Pfizer's brand name for varenicline) is a prescription medicine for the treatment of nicotine addiction. In much the same way as the Methodone prescribed to heroin addicts contains no heroin, Champix contains no nicotine. In nothing like the same way as methodone, Champix substitutes a relatively benign psychoactive (nicotine) for one of questionable provenance. The MHRA - the same MHRA behind this consultation - tested Champix on a whole 479 people for 6 - 12 months and then deemed it safe. Champix is strongly suspected to be linked to depression, suicidal and erratic behaviour and an increased risk of cardio-vascular disease. At the risk of being accused of sensationalism, it may (emphasis on the may) be a factor in 2500 deaths to date. Is it just me, or does that seem slightly "unsafe"? But the children card has been played. It's game over man, game over.

reply to post by roguedesigner


I'm so right there with you mate, it's unreal.

I agree with people on here a lot, but this is probably one of the few times i'm 100% in agreement.

The 'children' card is their only card to play, they couldn't target any other aspect of ecig use, and certainly couldn't compare tobacco and ecig use on their own merits...so they try and frighten the middle-English, the people who know relatively little about tobacco or ecigs and claim that children are being damged and led astray by ecigs.

Sounds scary, until they realise that given smoking or vaping as choices, (apart from using neither of them) ecigs can be thought of as about as damaging as a cup of caffine laced coffee or tea, whereas tobacco could be thought of as sipping on a bottle of bleach in terms of harm.

IOW, don't they get it? If kids and teenagers are going to smoke anyway, which they do in large numbers in the UK, the markedly safer option if for them to be steered away from killer tobacco and use ecigs as a safer alternative! FFS!

And what about the health of the millions of tobacco smokers who want a safer option?

They're just making the announcement on the news...ecigs are going to classified as medical devices, what that will mean, we'll have to see.

Going to listen to the announcement, and post when i get more info.

Good thread Roguedesigner..........

I think the issue here is not so much the health issues when compared to traditional cigarettes BUT

1. The advertising and promotion of the e-cigs as ALL the current rules around cigarettes do not apply to them and therefore retailers have no limitations on how, whom and what they can sell.
2. The margins on these things is around 28 - 44 % which makes them currently a VERY valuable product to sell...... again retailers morals may go out the window in preference for profit and returns...

Interesting to see what happens here......

Regards

PDUK

I agree PDUK, there does need to be some regulation (and many UK e-cig companies agree also) but to over regulate them will "break" them. One of the proposals is to ban ALL additives to the basic nicotine/ propyl glycerine/ vegetable glycerine mix. Which would include flavourings. Oh boy.

Latest news is that from 2016 e-cigs WILL be classed as a medicinal product.

Latest: BBC News

Latest: ITN

They're currently trotting out the arguments on the BBC news as I write this (the joys of working from home). One stand out moments for me is one of the talking heads (whose name I did not catch, my apologies) claiming that "not enough is known about the long term effects of e-cig use" (heavily paraphrased). Well sparky, we know plenty about the long term effects of tobacco; and yet all tobacco related legislation is very carefully constructed so that it stops short of the point at which cigarettes are no longer an effective method of delivering nicotine to the addicted. I really should sign off as "disgusted of Manchester" at this point.

ETA: If you would like to follow a (possibly one sided) discussion of this on the UK Vapers forum, knock yourselves out;

MHRA announcement discussed on UK Vapers

#fuming

No real information in the news piece.

Just that they are to be classed as 'medical devices' meaning they will be regulated as such (taxed).

Their angle is that quality will be ramped up. Quite how they will achieve that, when Pharma grade ingredients are already used (and have the assay lab results to prove it) in eliquids, is a mystery to me. How can you get purer quality ingredients than medical grade? Is there a higher purity grade than pharmaceuitical grade? If there is, i've not heard of it.

At the moment, ecigs have a voluntary code of practice among UK retailers and manufacturers.

Ecigs and eliquids are lab tested for purity and safety and results are posted online and on retailers websites, there are existing laws in place on strengths of raw nicotine allowed to be imported into the UK (and much of Europe) and there are EU directives already in place regarding hardware minimum quality standards.

This is about being able to regulate and earn tax and licence monies from manufacturers and retailers and make it more difficult to make the switch from tobacco to ecigs...a lot of people will probably end up dying from tobacco related diseases because of these money grabbing swine.

But health has never been the main driver of this legislation...the big boys losing money is. If they lose money, the government loses money. About £12 Billion in annual UK tax from tobacco sales buys a lot of votes and opinion. Even if we deduct what they claim smokers cost the NHS annually, about £5 Billion, the government is still in profit from tobacco to the tune of around £6-7 Billion a year.

They are seeing this shrink of course, and this is the reason they want to get their share of the ecig pie, the way they do that is regulate them, even though no harm has been attributed to ecigs.

How many have died from tobacco today..many thousands...and from ecigs? None.

Here's a quote from the UK's Independent newspaper, back in 2008:

Independent 2008

Dying for a fag?

How the search is on for a smokeless alternative to cigarettes

Nicotine is largely harmless but cigarettes are lethal . Now, the search is on for ways to deliver the pleasure without the risks. Jeremy Laurance reports

the article goes on;

Professor John Britton, consultant respiratory physician and chief author of the RCP report, said: "The ideal product would be a nicotine inhaler like an asthma inhaler, that delivered a hit of nicotine as close as possible to the experience of smoking a cigarette.

The evidence suggests that nicotine is, if anything, less harmful than caffeine – if it carries less risk than a cup of coffee, where's the problem in making it freely available in a more attractive form? He says: "If these people can be encouraged to use a safer product instead, the impact on public health would be huge. If we end up with a society in which a lot of people use a safe nicotine product every day, so what?"

That's what we have now in ecigs. Ecigs that are now being attacked, for being too effective presumably.

This whole deal is like Stanley Meyer's fuel cell..... made real. Big business vs. common sense. Anybody want to bet on the winner of that battle?

#pissed off

Wife used them to quit. Over 3000 less cigs went through her since the new year.
I used the "do you want to live to see your granddaughter get married',
on her and bought her one to try. A couple weeks later she had switched over to E cigs, hopefully for good.
6000 cigs a year x 20years = 120,000 cigs, A little less than a pack a day.
WE want our Freedom. Leave us alone.

reply to post by MysterX


That was beautifully put.
I think people should change their shopping habits, so that when we want to buy something, check who manufactures it, and don't buy from a Company on our personal boycott list. If we don't know the parent/umbrella Company, go home and check (or go online while you're in the shop, if you have the capacity), but don't just purchase because we need it. Plan ahead, buy before you run out of something. The only thing this scum listen to is money. I've just added Johnson and Johnson to my list, they manufacture baby products for goodness sake.

It was pretty clear the pressure would be put on Govt. agencies to make e-cigs harder to obtain, or more regulated, or more expensive -- or all of the above. Big Tobacco just has too much to lose, and considering the taxes many govts pull in from tobacco products I don't think Big Tobacco had to push too hard in the UK.

E-cigs work. I am a very recent "convert", still weaning off regular cigs after years of going through over two packs a day. (I averaged 15 to 16 packs a week.) Already the effects have been dramatic. I cut down to half my previous smoke consumption within days and now I'm steadily reducing it still further, with the goal of ditching smokes altogether within another month. And yes, I'm confident I can do that.

Nothing I've tried in the past has worked or even come close. Cold turkey was murder and I always caved in very soon. Nicotine chewing gum is utterly vile and didn't help much with the cravings anyway. Trying to reduce gradually (without the substitute an e-cig gives) was just day after day of torture.

I'm sure some of you know what I mean.

My doctor tried to get me to use Champix. But I'd read up on it and just didn't like what I saw. He never suggested I try an e-cig, though. Odd, that. Surely doctors know of their benefits?

Oh, I forgot: Big Pharma makes big bucks out of their "stop smoking" products with their woeful quit rate, and most doctors are quite friendly with the local pharmacies, after all...

No, my doctor was no help. It was a family member who used to smoke three packs a day and now doesn't smoke at all. All he used to quit was an e-cig. That sold me.

Now, besides all the health benefits of my drastically reduced smoking, I'm not burning anywhere near the money I was before.

And that last point is the only one the tobacco companies care about. They couldn't give a damn about my health, or yours, or your kids', or anyone else's kids either. If they did give a damn, they wouldn't put other chemicals into cigarettes to make them burn faster, chemicals to vary the "hit" and to hook you faster and make it harder to get unhooked.

All they care about is money. Now while there is nothing wrong with a business wanting to make a profit, there is plenty morally wrong with the tobacco industry. They'll do anything they can to keep their customers, and keep them paying for their products until the day they die. Literally.

So now they are doing their calculated lobbying to hang on to their market and try to make e-cigs look like a threat to kids, when it's the cigarettes they produce and push at huge profits that are the root of the problem -- and have been for decades!

Funnily enough, I just bought my first e-cig Yesterday. It is E-Lights and tastes a bit like the smoke machines in nightclubs I used to frequent in my clubbing days.

...one more glass of red and im off for a boogie.


Does anyone have an opinion on what brand is the best?

Originally posted by Knobby
Funnily enough, I just bought my first e-cig Yesterday. It is E-Lights and tastes a bit like the smoke machines in nightclubs I used to frequent in my clubbing days.

...one more glass of red and im off for a boogie.


Does anyone have an opinion on what brand is the best?

edit on 12-6-2013 by Knobby because: YOU REALLY HAVE ASK??!!???

edit on 12-6-2013 by Knobby because: JESUS FARKING CHRIST....I EVEN BUGGERED UP THE EDIT. I REALLY CAN'T SPELL FOR #!

Totally Wicked are a decent company.

For your first e-cig it doesn't matter to a great degree I don't think, not so much as the juice. Finding some juices you like can be tricky. Do you want PG or VG, or a mix? VG produces more smoke but gives less of a throat hit, VG also tends to taste sweeter. Then you have nicotine levels, even if you found a flavour you really like, if you went to a higher nicotine level with the exact same juice the taste could be ruined as nicotine has a peppery taste that can corrupt the flavours. So to start with I'd look to a cheap rechargable and spend the money you save buying as many sample packs of juice from as many different companies as you can find.

Find yourself some flavours you like before going out and buying an expensive e-cig

In the meantime as well as the taste being crap they can dry your throat out so I'd pair up some mints or chewing come with the cig you've got, it should do a lot for the naff taste

They always use kids, as a last resort. Always. Like others have said, if they really cared they wouldnt sell their product lol.

Originally posted by billdadobbie
instead of buying the expensive tips which could contain anything in them get some glycerin from the chemist/drug store and refill them yourself and works just as good

Er.. not quite. E-liquid contains vegetable glycerin, Propylene glycol, liquid nicotine and or flavorings.You never know whats in the flavorings but you can make an e-cig without them. There are known chemicals in the making of some of the flavorings that are bad and e-cig juice makers try to avoid these.

For legal reasons in the USA the advertising cannot say they are used to treat any type of medical problem. They cannot say you use them to quit smoking tobacco. They can say you can use them for regular nicotine intake and switch to them if you like. This is what keeps the e-cig from being a " medical device" I'm sure some agreement like this could be done in the UK.

Of course Big Pharma is Pissed because e-cigs are at least 45 percent effective as a quit smoking product whilke the Big Pharma drugs only have a 6 percent rate.

So what was the outcome?
E-cigs are legal here in Australia, but nicotine containing jells or liquids are illegal!!! So it is OK to smoke the crap jells made in china that taste like #, but not OK to use them to help you with your nicotine addiction. Seems pretty stupid to me.

The freaks who are determined to Stop Smoking Forever are all Car Drivers ok;
One question,
Have heard of a person entering a garage with a car and committing suicide.
Who has ever entered a garage with a cigarette and used ciggie smoke to repeat the exercise ????

Cars create a low Zone that causes more Asthma, and in a busy area can pollute the air with Cancer causing fumes. When are they going to Ban Cars ????