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Opinion: The WHO wants nine times more money to control tobacco. Don’t pay!
This article was originally published in The Financial Post.
The organization would discourage non-tobacco products that helped millions of smokers to quit. That's backward policy
The COPs are everywhere! As the UN’s COP30 on climate change winds down in Brazil this week, the World Health Organization’s COP11 — its 11th nicotine/tobacco-focused “Conference of Parties” — has opened in Geneva. Health Canada has sent a delegation.
For some months, the WHO’s elves and gnomes have been busy developing anti-nicotine measures for approval at COP11. Delegates’ job will be the “hard work” of agreeing on what degree of nicotine authoritarianism to present to the world, working heroically through the night on a diet of canapés.
The WHO’s tobacco budget is just over US$1 billion, much of it provided by a normally wonderful philanthropist, Michael Bloomberg. But the WHO has been advertising it really needs US$9 billion to do its job properly: eliminate nicotine use. Yep, that’s an 800 per cent increase.
The WHO does not need this money. Regarding nicotine, it is a reactionary organization. It refuses to recognize the benefits of “new generation products”: e-cigarettes, oral pouches and heated tobacco products. These NGPs are reduced-harm products, much as cannabis is relative to opioids or near-beer to real beer.
The NGPs deliver between one and 10 per cent of the toxins cigarettes do. Yet the WHO and most national governments demonize them, in many cases treating them as if they are as dangerous as cigarettes. Nothing could be further from the truth. Public Health England, the research network Cochrane and the U.K.’s Royal College of Physicians say unequivocally that NGPs are effective quit-smoking devices, even if they are not 100 per cent safe. Health Canada’s website says the same thing.
But that’s not good enough for the WHO, nor for many Canadian advocacy associations that promote abstinence based on a faulty reading of evidence. Their game is to interdict nicotine, as well as tobacco. But e-cigarettes are not carcinogenic. We should allow adults to make their own choices regarding reduced-risk products.
Smoking is plummeting in many developed economies, and the gnomes at the WHO evidently fear irrelevancy. So they have refocused their energies on the best quit-smoking device ever invented: e-cigarettes. And this new endeavour comes at a slight cost: the 800 per cent increase in their budget, proving once again that bureaucracies that build restrictions on adult behaviour rarely achieve more than generating an income for themselves at taxpayer expense.
Health Canada houses many accomplished scientists who well understand the benefits of harm reduction. So do other national health agencies around the world. For these scientists, this week at the WHO will be like what an evolutionary biologist would experience attending a conference of creationists. The challenge for scientists is twofold: speaking up for harm reduction at COP11, even at the risk of verbal bludgeoning by the sinecured interest groups, and continuing the struggle domestically against a dominant culture policed by self-appointed moral guardians whose harassment of all forms of nicotine serves primarily to delay more smokers’ transition to low-toxicity products.
Backing off on nicotine does not mean we shouldn’t continue to discourage smoking, which kills tens of thousands of people a year in Canada and millions worldwide. But a more effective strategy would be to: recognize the value of NGPs as quitting devices; inform the public of their very small risk compared with cigarettes; and introduce appropriate incentives into the marketplace.
There are several things we could do. We could require cigarette packs to give a positive message about how there are much safer products on the market that can satisfy users’ nicotine urge without killing them. We could raise the legal age for buying cigarettes and leave it at 18 for NGPs, a difference that would send a clear signal on risk. We could run a U.K.-style “Swap to Stop” campaign, which aims to convince one million smokers to give up their cigarette pack in return for a vaping device. And we could take care when regulating NGPs to avoid measures with adverse consequences — such as driving users to an illegal market.
Finally, as smoking declines dramatically as a result of these initiatives, we could start distributing pink slips at the WHO.
Ian Irvine, an economics professor at Concordia University, has worked as a consultant on alcohol and tobacco to both the private sector and the federal government. Some of his recent research has been funded by Global Action to End Smoking.
