ETHRA has made a submission to the Netherlands Ministry of Health, Wellbeing and Sports’ public plain packaging consultation, which ended last Friday. The purpose of the draft legislation is to “set requirements by ministerial regulation for the standard packaging of cigars and electronic vapor goods.” If enacted the legislation will see plain packaging requirements, which are currently applied to combustible tobacco products, also applied to products which are far less risky to health, such as vaping products.
Read more: Neutral packaging for safer nicotine products will cause more smoking
Europe's Beating Cancer Plan
(EBCP) is a key EU initiative put in place to combat cancer, a leading cause of death in the EU, claiming an estimated 1.3 million lives each year. The initiative was launched on February 4th at an event in the European Parliament in Brussels, and includes two public consultations: the roadmap and a public consultation.
DADAFO and ETHRA have written to the Danish Health Minister, MPs and MEPs to outline why some of the proposed measures in the Bill amending the Act on the ban on tobacco advertising etc will be detrimental to public health. We have also submitted the letter to the TRIS notification for the bill.
Here we publish the letter we sent to the Dutch Health Minister Mr Blokhuis and to the Parliament yesterday, to protest against the proposed ban on e-liquid flavours. The letter is signed on behalf of ETHRA and Acvoda by Sander Aspers, Acvoda’s Chair and is also signed by ETHRA’s scientific partners.
You can read about the Dutch proposals in the government press release here. The reasoning behind the flavour ban? It is the same baseless assumption that has been made in other countries, that the sole purpose of flavouring in e-liquid is to attract youth. Yet again there was no regard given to the devastating impacts such a preposterous decision would have on adult ex-smokers who rely on flavoured e-liquid in e-cigarettes to remain smoke free, or the impacts such a move would have on future cessation efforts, given that vaping is the most popular and effective method of smoking cessation available.