Consumer advocates from various countries are seeking unity in their fight against smoking, bound by their shared goal to provide adult smokers who choose to continue using nicotine with less harmful alternatives to cigarettes.
“We now work as a network,” said Ignacio Leiva, founder and president of the Association of Vaporizer Consumers of Chile (ASOVAPE) and secretary of ARDT Iberoamerica. “I’m very proud of the new advocacy groups working together in Chile and across Latin America.” Leiva spoke at the 11th Global Forum on Nicotine (GFN) in Warsaw, Poland on June 13 to 15, 2024.
Consumers discussed during the forum initiatives aimed at encouraging smokers to quit or switch to less harmful alternatives. Leiva, a key figure in promoting tobacco harm reduction (THR) in Latin America, said, “I started a community of e-cigarette users on Facebook to educate them about the benefits and potential drawbacks. User awareness is crucial.”
Leiva credited the GFN with empowering consumer activism in Chile. “The GFN helped us professionalize our advocacy,” he said. “We gained knowledge about harm reduction and what we were fighting for. We were advocating for something we couldn’t properly articulate before.”
Consumer advocates face challenges, including the complex THR environment across countries, their exclusion from policy discussions and the World Health Organization’s resistance to their views.
Often neglected in debates that result in restrictive regulations, sales and use bans and outright bans on smoke-free products, consumer groups are at the forefront of the global campaign to end smoking. They urge authorities to adopt a science-based approach and recognize smoke-free alternatives as better substitutes for cigarettes.
These devices are part of THR—a public health approach that aims to lessen the harm caused by cigarette smoking, the most dangerous form of tobacco use. Scientific studies show smoke-free products are at least 95-percent less harmful than traditional cigarettes. Unlike cigarettes, these products don’t burn tobacco or produce smoke containing thousands of harmful chemicals.
Asa Saligupta, director and founding member of ENDS Cigarette Smoke Thailand (ECST) and a member of Parliament’s Committee on Laws and Regulations of E-Cigarettes, highlighted challenges in Asian countries like Thailand, where e-cigarettes have been banned for a decade.
“Despite the ban, Thailand has over 1.5 million vapers,” Saligupta said. “Importing and distributing e-cigarettes is illegal, so you can’t sell them. But buying, possessing and using them are not illegal. Vaping itself isn’t illegal because there are no laws controlling it. You can even vape in no-smoking zones without penalty.”
Saligupta said ECST, with over 100,000 members, has been working to educate the public and advocate to government officials to reverse the ban.
Carissa Düring, director of Considerate Pouchers in Sweden, a global consumer advocacy group promoting a smoke-free world and consumer rights to alternative nicotine products, pointed to Sweden’s experience as a successful THR example.
“Since 2016, we’ve had nicotine pouches,” Düring said. “They were invented here, and they have contributed to decreasing smoking rates, particularly among women. For the entire population, we now have a very low smoking rate of 5.6 percent, the lowest in the European Union.”
Sweden’s success, Düring said, stemmed from consumer choice. “When we entered the European Union, consumers said, ‘Don’t touch our snus,'” she said. “That’s why Sweden has had snus for a long time. This is a consumer-driven movement, not a government policy.”
“Swedish politicians don’t realize we are becoming smoke-free,” Düring said.