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Protecting those who don’t smoke

Effective tobacco regulation is crucial to protect unintended audiences, such as youth, while also enabling adult smokers to learn about and access better smoke-free alternatives.

Protecting Unintended Audiences

How can we protect those who don’t smoke?

 

Regulations should focus on:

 

Preventing Youth Access: Implementing strict measures to prevent underage access to these products

 

Responsible Marketing: Ensuring that marketing and sales practices do not target or appeal to youth.

 

By doing so, we can reduce the likelihood of youth initiation and protect future generations from the harms of smoking.

 

Unintended audiences, such as youth, former and never smokers, should not use any tobacco or nicotine-containing products.

Empowering Adult Smokers

At the same time, it is essential to recognize that adult smokers who do not quit need access to accurate information about better alternatives to continued smoking.

 

These alternatives, such as heated tobacco products, e-cigarettes, and nicotine pouches, whilst addictive and not risk-free, have the potential to be less harmful than continuing to smoke cigarettes. Regulation should facilitate the availability of these products to adult smokers, allowing them to make informed choices.

 

A Balanced Approach

The focus of regulating smoke-free products must be on providing better choices to the adults who continue to smoke today while protecting unintended audiences.

 

Policies that enable adult smokers to access and learn about smoke-free alternatives can provide hundreds of millions of men and women who smoke with better options than continued smoking.

 

By introducing a balanced approach to regulation that takes into account both of these focus areas, it is possible to create regulatory frameworks that bring an improved public health impact.

 

Governments have already started to think beyond traditional tobacco control and embrace harm reduction as a critical tool to accelerate smoking decline, recognising that smoke-free products can be a better alternative to combustible tobacco for smokers that do not quit, and factoring this into their policies.

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