To Be Serious About Stamping Out Smoking, Next NZ Government Needs To Embrace Consumers' Lived Experience

Consumer advocates, representing Kiwis switching to vaping from deadly cigarette smoking, are calling for the next National or Labour Government to embrace consumer participation in its own policy-making, and at an important upcoming World Health Organisation meeting in Panama.

“The WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) claims global leadership for anti-smoking and tobacco control measures, but WHO's leadership stubbornly closes its mind to the net benefits of Tobacco Harm Reduction (THR) alternatives, including vaping", said Nancy Loucas, a prominent New Zealand public health consumer advocate and executive coordinator of CAPHRA.

"WHO needs to provide honest, risk-proportionate communication and regulatory guidance to member states for THR products, including vaping. Its unbending promotion of blanket prohibitions, treating vaping and smoking as equally dangerous, are misguided", Ms Loucas said.

"While not risk-free, THR products are less harmful alternatives to smoking. They can help smokers quit, and the current Labour and previous National government recognised that", Ms Loucas said.

"It's now critical that smokers have access to accurate information about these alternatives, and that regulation of THR products is risk-proportionate."

“Instead of ignoring them, WHO, and member countries including New Zealand, should consult with, and include, vapers and other THR product users in the formulation of policies hugely affecting their lives.”

"Furthermore, engaging with adult consumers can help WHO, and domestic policy-makers, better to understand real problems including youth vaping and the vaping black market, and to implement programmes and strategies to combat them", Ms Loucas said.

"It's a no-brainer."

CAPHRA is calling on the New Zealand Government and next Minister of Health to ask all Member States attending the 10th FCTC Conference of Parties on November 20-25 in Panama City to reject prohibitionist proposals on the agenda that will just further contribute to millions more of unnecessary deaths from smoking.

"The public health establishment internationally is so set in its ways, so blinkered in its outlook, that it refuses to see that THR, as a major disruptor of Big Tobacco's business model, has far more upside then downside", Ms Loucas said.

"But consumers know this very well from their own lived experience.

"Consumers want to with the public health establishment, and governments including the next New Zealand government, as partners with lived experience, instead of being treated as ignorant or as enemies. 'Just talk to us' is our message.

"And, as a jurisdiction where more liberalised THR access and regulation is contributing to serious progress in reducing smoking rates, New Zealand's can be an influential voice in Panama City on behalf of the over one billion smokers whose lives are in danger if they continue to smoke,” Ms Loucas said.

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