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United Kingdom Government

UK Government To Offer One Million People Vapes To Cut Smoking Rates (miragenews.com) 144

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Mirage News: One million smokers will be encouraged to swap cigarettes for vapes under a pioneering new "swap to stop" scheme designed to improve the health of the nation and cut smoking rates. As part of the world-first national scheme, almost one in five of all smokers in England will be provided with a vape starter kit alongside behavioral support to help them quit the habit as part of a series of new measures to help the government meet its ambition of being smoke-free by 2030 -- reducing smoking rates to 5% or less. Local authorities will be invited to take part in the scheme later this year and will design a scheme which suits its needs, including deciding which populations to prioritize.

In a speech today, Health Minister Neil O'Brien will also announce that following the success of local schemes, pregnant women will be offered financial incentives to help them stop smoking. This will involve offering vouchers, alongside behavioral support, to all pregnant women who smoke by the end of next year. The government will also consult on introducing mandatory cigarette pack inserts with positive messages and information to help people to quit smoking. Additionally, there will be a crackdown on illicit vape sales as part of measures to stop children and non-smokers take up the habit -- which is growing in popularity among young people.
Health Minister Neil O'Brien said in a statement: "Up to two out of three lifelong smokers will die from smoking. Cigarettes are the only product on sale which will kill you if used correctly. We will offer a million smokers new help to quit. We will be funding a new national 'swap to stop' scheme -- the first of its kind in the world. We will work with councils and others to offer a million smokers across England a free vaping starter kit."
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UK Government To Offer One Million People Vapes To Cut Smoking Rates

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  • by xack ( 5304745 ) on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @08:12AM (#63440972)
    I know more obese people than smokers these days (including myself). Smoking is already on the decline with cigarettes in plain packaging and costing over £10 a packet. Also the government needs to retrain all those laid off coders into the construction industry and solve our housing shortage.
    • You do know that people are not fungible, yes? Else we could turn CEOs into productive members of society.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Train0987 ( 1059246 )

        It's seems obvious what's changed to make us all fatter. Everyone is more sedentary due to available technology and entertainment options and it's starting at a very young age now. When was the last time children actually went outside to run around play? Same for adults. Our "labor" force does little to no actual labor any more either, we have machines for most of that now. There is no solution either.

        • by Immerman ( 2627577 ) on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @09:03AM (#63441080)

          That's obviously not helping anything, but obesity is increasing even among lab animals on calorie controlled diets.

          There's obviously more to the story - a lab animal locked in a cage in the '70s wasn't getting any more exercise than one locked in a cage today, and even though their calorie intake is the same, the ones today are getting fatter.

          As I've heard it there's two major theories:

          1) modern food (including animal feed) is far more heavily processed - e.g. the calorie balance has shifted from lots of fiber and complex carbohydrates, to simple carbohydrates that are easier to digest and thus have a greater *effective* calorie content - food calories are measured by burning food samples in a calorimeter - and fire can release a lot of calories that wouldn't actually be released by digestion (such as those in fiber, which passes untouched through most animal's digestive track), or which require more energy-intensive digestion processes, reducing the effective calorie yield.

          2) The entire fricking planet is now saturated with synthetic, bioactive organic molecules which are almost certainly having poorly understood effects on living creatures of all kinds. Pseudo-estrogens in particular (mostly from birth control and plastic additives like BPA, BPB, etc) are well know to promote weight gain, are present in significant quantities in every waterway on Earth, and are not generally removed by water treatment plants or common home water filters

          • by elcor ( 4519045 )
            3. the planet is flooded with cosmic energy so our need is less but we still eat the same = calorie surplus
            • Yeah, you go ahead and keep feeding "cosmic energy" to your unicorn. Leave the adults alone when they're talking about real things.

              We are bathed in energy from the the cosmos, in the form of high-energy hard and particle radiation, but
              1) Our bodies have no way to convert radiation to useful energy, instead it actually consumes energy to repair the damage it causes.
              2) there isn't actually all that much of it in terms of wattage - you get more from the radiation emitted by the ground beneath you
              3)And what do

      • by DarkOx ( 621550 )

        We know what changed:

        Diets have shifted heavily toward foods with high glycemic index, and an overall jump in caloric intake; coupled with an increase in sedentary activities.

        The real answer is nobody wants to do anything about it. The fix is simple - eat your vegetables, drink lots of plain water, and spend time outdoors at sport, walking, physical labor, etc..

        The hard part is getting people to want to do that stuff. No staving required - well as long as you are willing to forgo the calorie dense options.

      • by printman ( 54032 ) on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @09:01AM (#63441074) Homepage

        The change is actually easy to see - 70%+ of food items now have added sugar (even some kinds of salt!) and sugar (specifically fructose) tells the liver to create/store fat. The mechanism is well understood and historically is how we "fattened up" for winter when high-sugar fruits ripened in the fall/early winter. Now of course we can get those fruits and lots of other sugar-laden foods all year 'round, not just a few months of the year.

        There are also a lot of social behaviors that reinforce/emotionally reward eating "treats" (sugary foods), and your gut biome also influences your mood (cravings for sugar), so losing weight and keeping it off can be challenging even when you know what is happening in your body. That's why most successful weight loss regiments include physical activity since it both removes toxins (lymph system) and stimulates production of endorphins that help to level out your mood and cravings. Remove the sugar and do some light physical activity and you'd be surprised how easily the weight comes off. Add some intermittent fasting to get through plateaus...

      • It's not that baffling why people have gotten fatter. With ever more demands on our time, most of which are directly related to sitting and staring at a screen, rather than hard labor, there's little time for exercise. And while it may not apply to the UK, here in the US, we also have the industrialization of food to consider. The sugar lobby exists. The people that determine "best practices" for diet are usually bought and paid for by the preservatives makers to make sure all the shit they shovel into most

        • It is baffling to mainstream medical science, because obesity is still higher than what we would expect given people's habits.

          It's pretty obvious what's going on, though, and what makes it obvious is how people lose weight with poop transplants. Our internal biomes are getting fucked up by something (I vote for practically everything as the culprit, but especially antibiotics, and the sketchier preservatives, and oh yeah microplastics) that affects obesity. All that stuff about people's eating and exercise

          • by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

            This thread is amazing.

            One post says "it's obviously this!" Another replies "it's obviously this!"

            Then you point out that actual scientific study indicates all the obvious explanations don't completely explain the effect... then say "it's obviously this!"

      • Get a dozen gym rats and a dozen fat weeble wobbles and ask each group what causes obesity and what they could do to be thin.

        It will become totally obvious why the fatties are fat.

    • by Calydor ( 739835 )

      You know it's possible to work on more than one problem at a time, right?

      • You know it's possible to work on more than one problem at a time, right?

        You know it's possible for people to make their own health versus lifestyle decisions, right?

        • by Calydor ( 739835 )

          I do, yes. I also know addiction isn't something you choose to just give up.

          My mom used to smoke. Switching to vaping got her off the cigarettes. Trying to quit in any other way just did not work for her, and believe me - she tried.

    • I know more obese people than smokers these days (including myself). Smoking is already on the decline with cigarettes in plain packaging and costing over £10 a packet.

      I got a better idea. How about we let people decide for themselves whether smoking, vaping, crisps, skiing, bungie jumping, driving too fast, being a couch potato, tanning, promiscuous sex, working a stressful job, and a zillion other things are worth the costs (including health consequences)? It's not like the information isn't widely available.

      I trust people to make decisions about their own lives much more than I trust you or me to make decisions about their lives.

  • A bit of information from the article: "In 2021-22, £68 million of public health grant funded was spent on stop smoking services by local authorities and nearly 100,000 people quit with the support of a stop smoking service." This is equivalent to £680/person. It will probably take more than that, because the first people who quit are the easier/willing cases. On the other hand, there is less incentive for people to start smoking if there are fewer people smoking.
    • If it prevents one in a hundred of them from getting a long drawn out lung cancer or other expensive condition, it will probably still net a health spending savings in the longer term.

  • by CubicleZombie ( 2590497 ) on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @08:40AM (#63441026)

    Show me one case where someone has been harmed by vaping. And exclude the back alley THC oils that caused EVALI and home made vape devices that shorted and exploded. Those are edge cases and not what's on the shelf at Tobacco Hut. If vaping was inherently harmful, we'd know it by now.

    Cigarettes, on the other hand, are basically 100% fatal. Yeah, they said 2 out of three. Both of my parents died from COPD caused by smoking.

    If you're reading this and you smoke, switch to vaping immediately. It's easy.

    • Don't exaggerate, it weakens your case.

      "As many as one-third of heavy smokers age 35 will die before age 85 of diseases caused by their smoking.."

      https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p... [nih.gov]

      Given your genetics, you are correct to avoid smoking. In my family the ill affects show up as heart disease instead of lung problems, so I don't smoke either.

      • Even if the lung damage doesn't kill you, quality of life is pretty bad. My Dad spent his last decade chained to an oxygen tank, struggling for every breath.

      • And what percentage of non-smokers will die before age 85 from other causes?

        TBH, living to age 85 seems like quite an accomplishment; if you told people there was a drug which gave you a 2/3 chance of living until 85, I bet most people would take it.

    • by smoot123 ( 1027084 ) on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @08:51AM (#63441050)

      Show me one case where someone has been harmed by vaping...If you're reading this and you smoke, switch to vaping immediately. It's easy.

      The irony being that there's a huge movement in the US to suppress vaping because activists are making the perfect (not using nicotine at all) be the enemy of the good (using nicotine in a much safer way).

      I'm sure politicians go along because they're addicted to the tobacco settlement money so they don't actually want to see people stop smoking cigarettes.

      • by cmseagle ( 1195671 ) on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @10:33AM (#63441318)

        There's a very fine line to walk between encouraging and suppressing vaping. Vaping is the lesser of two evils, but it's still a worse outcome than "don't be a nicotine addict in the first place".

        If it works as a smoking cessation tool for 10 smokers, that's great! But if in the process the marketing of the cool new cherry bubblegum flavor in Teen Vogue gets 10,000 kids (who largely had little interest in cigarettes to begin with thanks to previous success of anti-tobacco campaigning) to get hooked on nicotine for life, that's a downside.

        We've got to weigh the cost and benefit, and reign in the nicotine dealers as needed.

        • You are the problem mentioned in the post you replied to.

        • As long as they stick with vaping, nicotine isn't really that much worse for you than caffeine. However, nicotine is typically delivered in far higher equivalent doses than caffeine over the course of the day. Again, something that would be far less harmful to teenagers than adults other than the lifelong addiction part. I definitely have a lifelong addiction to caffeine and nobody tried to keep me away from it as a kid.

          So while teen vaping is "bad" it's probably not a good enough reason to keep interest

      • by arQon ( 447508 )

        The irony being that there's a huge movement in the US to suppress vaping because activists are making the perfect (not using nicotine at all) be the enemy of the good (using nicotine in a much safer way).

        Yeah, this baffles me. Even with the various "unknowns" of vaping factored in, the chances of it *not* being much better for smokers than cigarettes are basically zero, because what we do have is a very good understanding of just how devastating to health smoking is.

        Once vapes appeared on the market, it seemed obvious to me that any sane / responsible / competent government at either Federal or State level would increase the taxes on cigarettes relative to the taxes on vapes, and could then just sit back an

    • ...then it is bad for you. Ask a dentist.

      • ...then it is bad for you. Ask a dentist.

        Tomatoes?

        • Tomatoes are fairly acidic and thus not great for having in contact with your teeth for very long. But it only has about 1/10,000 the nicotine content of a single cigarette.

    • by omnichad ( 1198475 ) on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @09:45AM (#63441208) Homepage

      If vaping was inherently harmful, we'd know it by now.

      It could very well be harmful. Almost certainly not as harmful as cigarettes but those take 40 years or more to kill you. We haven't even had 40 years of vaping to study.

    • Allergic reaction to the glucose that the chemicals are suspended in... In highly "sensitive" to all of the vapes that I've tried.
      • by Kelxin ( 3417093 )
        Evidently there's no edit or delete button anywhere on slashdot now.... What I meant to say was the Glycol in PG and VG solutions.
    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Indeed. Same addiction, _much_ less harm.

    • If you're reading this and you smoke, switch to vaping immediately. It's easy.

      Or quit. I mean that's an other option as well. Vaping is cheap and all, but quitting is even cheaper.

    • Show me one case where someone has been harmed by vaping.

      Ok. See these sites and the references they contain.

      https://www.hopkinsmedicine.or... [hopkinsmedicine.org]
      https://www.lung.org/quit-smok... [lung.org]
      https://my.clevelandclinic.org... [clevelandclinic.org]

      All I did was search for "harms caused by vaping" and click a few of the top results at reputable sites. The Cleveland Clinic page has a concise list of specific harms caused by vaping, including asthma, lung scarring, organ damage, EVALI (e-cigarette, or vaping, product use associated lung injury), and addiction. The American Lung Association page lists s

  • Meanwhile in the US (Score:4, Informative)

    by quintessencesluglord ( 652360 ) on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @08:53AM (#63441058)

    They have made it exponentially harder to vape than smoke.

    I use to be able to buy directly from a US manufacturer with a lab you could contact to verify its purity.

    With FDA guidelines, I now have to go through an "authorized" storefront, with whatever his supply chain is, if he can even order from my previous manufacturer.

    Safer my ass.

    • I can order tobacco online and have it shipped to my door. But not vape supplies.

    • I use to be able to buy directly from a US manufacturer with a lab you could contact to verify its purity.

      What, you'd call them up and they'd say "yeah it's totally pure"?

  • Vaping doesn't cut smoking rates, but it may reduce cancer by reducing carcinogen intake. So good luck with that program!
    • Reading between the lines a bit here, you seem to be classifying not-smoking in the smoking category.

      Do I have that right? Or does the data actually show that people are taking up smoking (actual smoking) at the same rate that people are switching from smoking to not-smoking?

  • How about they just make tobacco products illegal? All this half assed namby pamby bullshit with taxing them and spending the money to tell people not to use them is weak. Just fucking make it illegal to sell any dried tobacco product already. Statistically nobody will grow their own tobacco. Also, make it illegal to smoke anywhere anyone else might breathe in your smoke, inside or out. Smokers can go to lounges with air filtration equipment. Or, hear me out, they can buy their own fucking vapes.

    All kinds o

    • "How about they just make tobacco products illegal?"

      "This must have something to do with titled families which got rich on slavery-based tobacco."

      Its purely a function of the fact that if they did so they'd lose the next election, and they know it.

    • How about they just make tobacco products illegal? All this half assed namby pamby bullshit with taxing them and spending the money to tell people not to use them is weak. Just fucking make it illegal to sell any dried tobacco product already. Statistically nobody will grow their own tobacco.

      New Zealand is trying this, by annually raising the age at which people can buy tobacco: https://www.theguardian.com/wo... [theguardian.com]

      So, we just have to wait a few years and we'll know if works.

    • Just making it illegal worked great for the American Prohibition for alcohol!

  • They offer financial incentives to smokers, but what about those who never smoked in the first place?
    Some companies also offer smoking breaks to smokers, but don't offer equivalent breaks to non smokers.
    These things actually serve to encourage smoking.

    • Some companies also offer smoking breaks to smokers, but don't offer equivalent breaks to non smokers.
      These things actually serve to encourage smoking.

      If I had mod points, you'd get them. The current situation is all stick and no carrot.

  • Vaping is far cheaper than smoking. Anyone who can afford to smoke can afford to vape instead (and save a shitton in the process). People who don't vape don't do so because they don't want to.

    • Funny thing - most of the price of a pack of cigarettes is tax. Governments make far, FAR more from tobacco than tobacco companies do.
  • Kids love vapes. Previous generations may have taken up smoking because it was "cool", but smoking is a fairly unpleasant activity.

    Vapes have the same "cool" factor and come in raspberry. This is a problem.

    • I vape. I DO NOT WANT tobacco flavored juice. I love the fact there is a wide range of flavors to choose from! The companies are marketing to what sells, and what sells are all sorts of fruity, sweet, etc flavors. I dont care for the sweet flavors, but my brother does. Pure flavors like Apple are my favorite.

      I am not a kid, and haven't been one for decades. Same for literally everyone I know, and NONE of these adults want no flavor or tobacco flavors, they all switched to vaping to stop smoking c

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