Ottawa Needs To Rethink Its Smoking Fight
The third week of January, marked as National Non-Smoking Week, arrives every year with great sanctimony but without much action to back it up. Canada, despite this week coming and going every year, continues to have a significant number of smokers. As of 2022, 10.2 per cent of Canadians still partake in the ritual of lighting up. This revelation should provoke not just a week of platitudes but an urgent reevaluation of our strategies.
Our approach to smoking cessation is not merely deficient; it’s a deliberate exercise in self-sabotage. The Canadian government, in its infinite wisdom or perhaps infinite folly, has chosen to ignore the potential of reduced risk products like vaping, nicotine pouches, and heat-not-burn devices. Compare this to Sweden, with a more enlightened policy on harm reduction, where the smoking rate is just slightly above 5 per cent.
For those who’ve tried to quit smoking, the experience is brutal and painstaking. Quitting isn’t just a matter of willpower; it’s about offering viable alternatives. Sweden has shown the way by embracing products that allow smokers to transition from the consequences of combustion to something far less harmful.
Yet, Ottawa, in its bureaucratic zeal, has systematically erected barriers against these life-saving transitions. Take nicotine pouches, for instance. German researchers have found them to be 99% less harmful than cigarettes, yet Health Minister Mark Holland has seen fit to limit their flavors to mint or menthol and ban their sale alongside cigarettes in stores. This policy demonstrates a bizarre logic where corner stores can be trusted with the sale of cigarettes but not with these safer alternatives. The dissonance here is as thick as the smoke the Minister so passionately wants to vanish.
Contrast Mark Holland’s view with that of his former international colleagues. There is a long list of former health regulators who agree that these are useful as a quitting tool, including the former head of the U.S. FDA Scott Gotlieb, saying “we have to embrace them and offer adult smokers modified risk products”. That fact is in large part why the FDA approved Zyn in the United States, in 20 flavours, as a smoking cessation tool
The hypocrisy doesn’t end with pouches. The war on vaping, which Public Health England has shown to be 95% less harmful than smoking, continues unabated. Flavour bans loom, despite evidence from a study of over 17,000 Americans demonstrating that flavoured vaping products significantly increase the likelihood of quitting smoking. Ottawa’s approach seems designed to ensure we never actually achieve the goals of National Non-Smoking Week.
But it doesn’t end there either, unfortunately. Heat-not-burn products, which avoid the harmful combustion of tobacco, have been endorsed by the FDA, and shown to reduce harm by 90%.
Yet, Canada’s tax regime treats these products the same as traditional cigarettes. The excise “sin tax” demands a minimum of 50 grams for stamps, meaning a 5.33-gram pack of heat-not-burn units is taxed the same amount as a package containing 50 grams. That means Canadians are paying this sin tax at nine times more than the regular rate, and three times more than a pack of twenty traditional cigarettes. How can Canadians looking to switch to a less harmful product rationalize such a cost? This is a moral failing that punishes those seeking less harmful options.
The purpose of the sin tax on traditional cigarettes is to discourage people from purchasing them, and of course to raise money for the government. However, if it is proven that heat-not-burn products reduce harm to the smoker, and potentially acts as a way for people to transition away from smoking, then the purpose of the tax no longer makes sense for heat-not-burn.
Canada faces a stark choice: follow Sweden’s lead or continue this charade of public health concern while the smoking rates remain stubbornly high. The evidence is before us, the success stories are clear, but only if we have the intellectual honesty and moral courage to act on them. Otherwise, National Non-Smoking Week will remain a hollow gesture, a week where we pat ourselves on the back while we accomplish very little.