LONDON — While the U.S. scrambles to crack down on vaping, Britain has embraced electronic cigarettes as a powerful tool to help smokers kick the habit.
The Royal College of Physicians explicitly tells doctors to promote e-cigarettes “as widely as possible” to people trying to quit. Public Health England’s advice is that vaping carries a small fraction of the risk of smoking.
U.S. public health officials have taken a more wary approach, and have been slow to regulate e-cigarettes. That caution turned to alarm, though, with an explosion in teen vaping, prompting the federal government and some states to take steps to ban fruit and minty flavors that appeal to youths. And now, with hundreds of U.S. cases of a mysterious lung illness among vapers, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is recommending that people consider not using e-cigarettes, especially those with THC, the compound that gives pot its high.
The U.S. reaction is “complete madness,” said Dr. John Britton, director of the U.K. Center for Tobacco and Alcohol Studies at the University of Nottingham. “The reality with smoking is, if you tell people to stop vaping, they will go back to tobacco and tobacco kills.” Regulations about e-cigarettes vary by country, making for a patchwork of policies. More than 30 countries ban e-cigarettes outright. Many European countries including Austria, Belgium, Germany and Italy classify e-cigarettes as tobacco products, subjecting them to strict controls. They are mostly sold as consumer products in Britain and France, under more lax rules.
Since arriving in the U.S. in 2007, e-cigarettes have been largely unregulated. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration didn’t get the power to do that until three years ago and is still working out the details. Black market versions, meanwhile, have flourished. Appearing before Congress last week, the U.S. FDA’s acting commissioner was pressed to explain the agency’s position. Several lawmakers suggested e-cigarettes should be completely removed from the market.
“We do not consider these products safe, we think they have harm,” said Dr. Ned Sharpless. “We do not think really anyone should be using them other than people using them in place of combustible tobacco.”
In Britain, a review by Public Health England, an agency similar to the CDC, concluded that vaping is about 95% less dangerous than smoking. A leading British anti-tobacco charity, Ash, even called for e-cigarettes to be provided free to smokers trying to quit by Britain’s government-funded health system.