EU UK moves towards safe and effective electronic cigarettes and other nicotine-containing products

[m00sey]

The title of the press release from the MHRA.

http://www.mhra.gov.uk/NewsCentre/Pressreleases/CON286855

Ok to get my head around this from 2016 (in the UK) all nicotine products including the ecig will become regulated as a medicine.

Im sure there are other threads about the pros and cons but can someone give me an upshot on a few questions?

1/ Will this mean you could get ecigs (good ones!) and juice as a prescription?

2/ Will it be hard for the current good ecig suppliers and juice suppliers to get a medical licence?

3/ Will it make vaping safer? ie stop any potential cheap or dangerous liquids becoming available?

4/ Make regular/normal vapers have to purchase their products/juice illegally!!!?? Which would be stupid.

5/ Do you think it will make MODS like the Itaste MPV2/Provari impossible to get and stuck with rubbish E-lite products!!

6/ Juice price will increase alot?

Thanks

 

[supertrunker]

1 - yes why not.
2 - definitely medical trials take years
3- not really - it will mean you are stuck with only 'approved' ones
4 - if they want new flavours then they will have no choice except make their own
5 - i'm sure there will be a thriving black market for them
6 - of course, see 2 and 3 and name a cheap medicine!

T

 

[daz2013]

That press release was from last June and i don't think they are still after med regs.
The eu tobacco directive that is in the process at the moment could mess things up for vapers.

Sent from my GT-S7500 using Tapatalk 2

 

[supertrunker]

i believe mr Cameron said he'd press ahead with regulation as medicines regardless of the EU defeat. I'm not a lawyer so i don't have the post at hand but i'm sure someone will.

In any case, i have always thought it odd for the UK to class them as medicines, when no e-cig manufacturer to my knowledge makes any such claims. They do not cure an illness.

On the upside, you can then take your 'medicine' any place at all - planes, public places, you name it! Another example of the law of unintended consequences i suspect.

T

 

[daz2013]

One way or another they will claw the money back from loss of revenue from tobacco sales.

Sent from my GT-S7500 using Tapatalk 2

 

[The Ministry]

Whatever they do will be to regulate to tax.

 

[tonyph]

Just VAT on over the counter medicines and no vat on prescription meds. So med regs will not help tax revenue.
There is currently an whole string of vapour products applying for medical licences in the UK. The government also appear to be supporting article 18 of the EU tobacco product directive. It may end out under 20mg/ml nicotine regulated by article 18, over 20 med regs. Consumers will end up with a cig a likes, Big T get what they want & Big P get a cut.
To get e-cigs on prescription will take years. It takes at least 4-5 years to get the medicine licence. BAT say they expecting to get theirs next year. That means they must be well on the way with clinical trials. For e-cigs to be given out by prescription they have to be approved by NICE. That takes years after the licence is given and they may never approve them. It will be a political issue, e-cigs on the national health?
Fortunately for vapers there aint a cheaper substitute for PG and its a very basic recipe for juice so what we get by majority is pretty good now. What worries me about article 18's 'must deliver a consistent dose' and med regs is that this will give the large corporates a chance to add extra ingredients, will they be safer?
Article 18 clearly gets rid of all mods, any device that can hold more than 2ml of juice, so they are gone. The clause that says must 'deliver a consistent dose' and other testing requirements will most likely be used to put all the small players out of the market when they can not afford millions in testing.
Obviously prices will increase. It will be at least cig a like prices.
Its pretty inevitable there will be a black market especially among currently established vapours. Vaping as we know it though is only a very small part of the market the corporate giants are after.

 

[rolygate]

If the MHRA pursues medical regulation, it will almost certainly be defeated in court. Every attempt to medicalise ecigs in the world has been defeated at law when challenged, with the majority of cases in the supreme courts of EU countries. There is a massive amount of case law and it seems impossible that the MHRA could prevail.

Of course, this depends on the independence of the UK courts. So far, the pharmaceutical industry has not been able to buy the courts, but we just might have to wait and see if this applies in the UK. In my opinion the UK government is no less corrupt than others, but with centuries of practice it is concealed exceptionally well. For example: it is perfectly acceptable to kill hundreds of thousands of citizens as long as it benefits a major industry or two (the Snus ban kills at least 10,000 UK citizens a year), and not a single voice is raised, such is their skill; one of the Lords recently caught in the cash-for-lobbying stings told the BBC quite openly on Radio4, when asked if he was embarrassed being caught negotiating for payments: "But that's how Parliament works".

You can imagine how much the top guys are paid by billion-pound industries when the bottom-feeders are paid £5k a month. People at Dalli's level in the EU and UK governments are worth tens of millions for their 'assistance'.

If the TPD goes through as it is, at least 75% of current products will be made illegal - and of course this is the designed effect: the tobacco product classification is the fallback plan, and will eventually allow as good a job as medicalisation for killing off ecigs. A long time back I warned that medicalisation was a red herring because it would never fly, the plan is to sneak tobacco rules in under the radar. Funnily enough I was right.

The advantage of this method is that:
a) All energy is expended on fighting the medical regs (probably a waste of time because it won't stand up in court in any case).
b) No energy is left to fight tobacco product rules, which look much softer, so they can be pushed through easily.
c) Tobacco rules can be tightened up every year in order to kill off ecigs.
d) Tobacco rules can be used to block internet sales - you can bet your bottom dollar they'll be trying that as soon as possible.
e) In addition, ecigs can be taxed at any desired rate as 'they are tobacco products'.
f) They can be taxed out of contention, in order to kill them - and no one can stop it.

Like I said a long time back, these people aren't stupid. They have tens of millions of pounds to spend on ensuring they get their way - they hire the best legal minds and EU consultants available. They buy the legislators. The idea they are plank-think stupid and think they can get medicalisation through is just plain crazy. They have a far better plan.

There will be a huge black market, eventually it will eclipse any other for anything ever seen. You're talking about 6 million people in the UK using the ecig black market on a daily basis.

This will gradually become a voting issue, so at some point there will be trouble, if the UK is still in the EU. Cameron and Miliband are desperate to keep us in, so you can expect a lot more of the same. The EU is the most corrupt organisation anywhere in the world; although it's probably best to say, "the most corrupt *political* org", since the WHO comes pretty close.

 

[djsvapour]

Med regs is DEAD. We all know that.

The reason why people are saying it is alive is because many factions want it to be true. The BBC and NHS are still saying e-cigs will be regulated as medicines in 2016 because they do not understand what has been going on and it suits their propaganda.

Also, the MHRA still wants it because it's multi-million pound earner for them!

The UK gvt could go solo on this at any moment and kill of ecigs almost immediately if they wanted. We are going to get some brutal regulation of another sort fairly soon anyway.

However, all is not lost. We live to fight another day and there are now players in the market ready to challenge through the law courts.
As the maze gets bigger, neither the entry or the exit is easy to find.

I don't believe all people want e-cigs completely gone, but the legislators do not understand what they are doing.
Linda McAvan actually thinks the products we use will somehow bounce back.... all glistening and safe with no detriment to users. It's never going to work that way.

 

[rolygate]

Linda Mcavan has already admitted working for Pfizer on the front page of her website. She stated that she will be 'working closely' with a pharma front group operated on behalf of Pfizer. Multiply that by 100 and you have what the issue is.

Nobody could get fooled enough that they think killing tens of thousands of people somehow benefits public health. They are paid to do it. Dalli is a very rich man and it didn't come from local politics in Malta - an EU committee position is a license to print money.

The most corrupt and incompetent scum in European politics float to the top in the EU, that's how Dalli got there: when a politician is trouble but too powerful to be sacked, they can be kicked upstairs to the EU. We end up with the most worthless scum in Europe running the show.

 

[makeyourself]

Some very interesting and well thought-out posts in this thread, nice to see the UK-specific situation being discussed in detail. I'm obviously quite new to vaping but I take an active interest in all matters political so I've read up a lot about this whole saga. The latest position of the MHRA is that they will not regulate them as medicines but will "reflect the outcome of continuing negotiations of the European Tobacco Directive".

Obviously the MHRA's current position is a backtrack on their previous announcement, they seem to be reluctant to isolate themselves and go against the rest of the EU. In my opinion, their original decision to regulate as medical products was quite shocking when the details are examined. Firstly there is the fact that health experts that advised the MHRA to make the decision in fact had undeclared interests in big pharma. Secondly the MHRA conducted a public consultation on the issue and received over 1000 replies. They found that

The majority of importers and users of unlicensed electronic cigarettes were opposed to regulation by the MHRA

From this they inferred that

The response to consultation suggests there is clear support for MHRA regulation

My primary reaction to this is who the hell do these people think they are? If the people that use the products do not want a certain type of regulation and the people that sell them don't want the regulation either, then what right does anybody else have to impose it upon them? I know this is academic to an extent now but I think it clearly illustrates the sort of attitude that we are dealing with here from the government and EU.

 

[rolygate]

Very true. Welcome to the world of ecig politics, where up is down and down is up.

- Find a way to reduce smoking mortality by about 70% - then try to ban it.
- Find a way to solve the problem that smoking prevalence has remained at around 20% of the adult population for many years - then try and ban it.
- Find a way to reduce the number of UK smokers, which has grown by around half a million in the last few years (not reduced as you would imagine from the propaganda) - then ban it.

It's all about the money, and health is irrelevant. Everyone who depends on smoking is fighting hard against ecigs - because they have to or see their jobs go. That includes Cancer Research UK, ASH UK, the Dept of Health, the MHRA, and legislators without number at EU level. They are all owned by the smoking economy. They need to protect cancer, protect smoking, and protect pharma - your life and health are of less relevance than a gnat's.

By the way, the response to the MHRA's 'consultation' went like this: the stakeholders (those whose lives and businesses are at stake, and the vast majority) responded that ecigs should be left alone by the Dept of (Pharmaceutical) Health. The troughers (the rent-seekers and parasites in public health who depend on pharma funding) wanted medicalisation in order to kill off ecigs. As the vote was only about 100:1 against the parasites, they won.

The EU's 'consultation' went the same way: from about 80,000 responses, virtually all wanted no medicalisation. A few rent-seekers wanted medicalisation. Therefore of course it was medicalisation that won.

A 'consultation' means a process whereby stakeholders are ignored and corrupt, incompetent parasites get their way: money talks.

The mass media don't talk about the murderous corruption in our governments (UK and EU). It doesn't pay.


--------------
Disclaimer: all opinions are personal opinions of the posting member or those of 99.99% of the population and are not those of ECF.
ECF believes that cancer charities work unreservedly toward the elimination of cancer and that any suggestion they don't is unsupportable supposition.
ECF believes that all decisions made by government are in the best possible interests of the people.

 

[Julie W]

Excellent and impressive summary

 

[DelboyinDorset]

A serious problem that was highlighted in this weeks Independent newspaper is the NHS in the UK, as it is elsewhere on the continent is stuffed to the gills with lobbyists working for big pharma, big tobacco, big money and it is the battle of the grubby handshake which will decide the laws, not actual real reasons or concerns.

If you go to the top level, it was revealed that the WHO is pretty much under the control of companies like GKL, Bayer etc etc who mercilessly declared a world pandemic over bird flu in order to force countries to buy in Tamilflu and its similar brand products, the UK was stiffed for 5 billion pounds worth of useless and somewhat dangerous medication that it looks like will be thrown away simply because the pandemic advisory board are executives from big medicine companies.

I read somewhere that the one reason tobacco is allowed to remain as it is, is it is an enormous means of putting other things ills into tobacco's pocket, here in the UK calls for investigations into airplane fuel pollution will be quashed out of hand directly by the Prime Minister, which suggests to me there is something there we should know, especially as people who have never smoked, have never had second hand smoke etc are developing COPD and related illnesses, doctors have been scratching their heads over Leonard Nimoy who hasn't smoked for 30 years yet has developed COPD but Mr Nimoy does live in one of America's most polluted areas and try and get an investigation into aviation pollution in the US and you walk into the same brick wall.

 

[FourWinds]

I find the whole thing depressing. Well for my part, regardless of the law, I think I have the right to save my own life.

We shall have to wait and see how many things about vaping those financially interested can devalue (the cost, the flavours, vaping in pubs...), and respond accordingly. I'm not a fan of breaking laws, but as I said above, I think that it must say somewhere I have the right to protect my life, and I'm guessing that that will trump all this BS.

 

[FourWinds]

I was just sent this by an MEP I had written to:

"E-cigarettes are not medicines but products that smokers enjoy using as an alternative to cigarettes. They should meet product safety standards and that there should be restrictions on their advertising and marketing, but they still have a major role to play in reducing tobacco-related deaths.

The Tobacco Products Directive will regulate several things, namely products which do not contain tobacco but are closely linked to tobacco, labelling and packaging of products, additives, internet sales and the tracking of these products.

You might find this useful guidance from the European Commission on what it has proposed: http://ec.europa.eu/health/tobacco/docs/fs_ecigarettes_en.pdf "

So, this is the future that that MEP seems happy with.