Electric cars, clean energy and e-cigarettes

When big automakers turn away from polluting, gasoline-burning cars to make cleaner electric vehicles, they’re cheered.

Likewise, fossil-fuel companies are praised when invest in solar or wind power to help drive the transition to renewable energy.

Yet when tobacco companies develop safer ways to deliver nicotine–a concept known as tobacco harm reduction– they are denigrated and demonized by nonprofits that purport to care about public health.

This makes no sense.

Progress is progress, no matter who’s behind it.

But in the world of tobacco control, any action associated with a tobacco company is deemed toxic.

Consider the unfortunate story of the Foundation for a Smoke-Free World. Created in 2017 by global tobacco giant Philip Morris International, the foundation researches and supports safer alternatives to combustible cigarettes, among other things. As soon as it opened its doors, the foundation was denounced by mainstream tobacco-control groups as an industry front. Those who accepted the foundation’s money were barred from attending academic meetings or publishing in academic journals. Derek Yach, its first president, became persona non grata in the world of tobacco control.

This fall, Cliff Douglas, a lawyer and anti-tobacco activist who has spent decades battling Big Tobacco, took over as president and CEO of the foundation. As a condition of taking the job, he went to great lengths to separate the foundation from Philip Morris Internation and to refuse to accept any more industry money.

Douglas’s bona fides as an opponent of smoking are impeccable. He helped whistle-blowers expose industry secrets. He helped drive the campaign by flight attendants to ban smoking on airplanes, long before smoke-free workplaces became common. He joined in at least a half a dozen lawsuits against tobacco companies, including the case that led to the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement that transformed tobacco control. He led anti-smoking efforts at the American Cancer Society.

In a 2000 book, Civil Warriors: The Legal Siege on the Tobacco Industry, investigative reporter Dan Zegart wrote: “No single person had done more to make America hostile to tobacco than Cliff Douglas,”

But when Douglas joined the Foundation for a Smoke Free World in October, some of his former allies all but accused him of selling out.

Speaking to Reuters, Yolonda Richardson, president of the Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids said that it was “ludicrous” for the foundation to claim independence after accepting a hefty payment from Philip Morris International. Deborah Arnott, chief executive of a UK health charity called Action on Smoking and Health, said the foundation was “irredeemably tainted” by the tobacco money.

In a rational world, people like Richardson and Arnott would respond to the news that Douglas was joining the foundation with curiosity, not scorn. They would take seriously the foundation’s claim that it would like to see lethal combustible cigarettes replaced by newer technologies like e-cigarettes, heat-not-burn products and oral tobacco that deliver nicotine to people without killing them. Despite the sordid history of the tobacco industry, they would be open to the possibility that the industry is changing, if only because fewer people are smoking these days, at least in the US and Europe. Tobacco companies need to develop new products to survive. [See my Medium story, Can we learn to love Big Tobacco?]

Last week, I wrote about Douglas and the Foundation for a Smoke-Free World for the Chronicle of Philanthropy. The headline: How a Debate Over Vaping Might Derail the War on Tobacco.

The story argues, among other things, that the strident opposition to vaping by nonprofits funded by Bloomberg Philanthropies is making it harder for adults who smoke conventional cigarettes to switch to vapes.

Citing the risks to kids, the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, Parents Against Vaping E-Cigarettes and Truth Initiative have led successful legislative and regulatory efforts to ban flavored vapes, which are popular with adults as well as young people.

The unintended consequences of their crusade is that more people are smoking, as the story explains:

Bans on flavored e-cigarettes, which now cover nearly 40 percent of the country, have been associated with increased sales of conventional cigarettes, according to several academic studies and financial analysts.

Douglas told me: “These bans disincentivize the far safer product and move people back to a product that’s going to kill one in two of them.”

Again, this makes no sense.

Douglas hopes to find common ground among the opponents of e-cigarettes, who argue that they are a gateway to smoking, and the advocates of harm reduction who regard them as a pathway out of smoking. The evidence favors the latter group.

There’s more in the story, including the encouraging news that smoking is way down in countries where less harmful nicotine products are available and people have access to science-based information about the relative risks of nicotine delivery systems. Sweden, Japan and the UK have all seen dramatic declines in smoking.

In the US, too, the number of people who smoke deadly cigarettes is falling — just not fast enough. It’s time to accelerate the transition to less harmful nicotine products. Lives are at stake.