CAPHRA Writes To Delegates
The Coalition of Asia Pacific Tobacco Harm Reduction Advocates has written a letter to the delegates attending this week’s COP9 event
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by Dave Cross
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CAPHRA says: “Dear Minister(s), International Law recognizes health as the right of the individual and thus its protection should be undertaken by the governing bodies across nations. In the context of the health policies aimed at tobacco control globally. The mandate of FCTC identifies tobacco harm reduction (THR) as a core tobacco control policy but after all these decades it is yet to be given its due prominence among the policy-strategic directions undertaken in most of the countries. Either THR remains non-existent or exists only in the annals of historical documents but never a lived reality for many tobacco users across regions in the world.
“Over a decade of evidence has established the potential of innovative technology-aided products such as snus, electronic nicotine delivery systems (ENDS), aka ‘E-Cigarettes’ and electronically heated tobacco products (EHTP), aka ‘Heat Not Burn/HnB’, to combat the rise of combustible tobacco use and associated harms of said use. Despite this evidence, governments continue to implement policy measures that are harming the potential for current tobacco consumers to switch to reduced risk modes of consumption of nicotine. Consumers are forced to ‘accelerate’ their harms rather than reduce them because of the restrictive options bestowed by these policies and the lack of widely available information from trusted sources.
“We deeply urge all parties to uphold Right to Health and the implementation of tobacco harm reduction as key strategies for tobacco control addressing the existing gaps. We add our voice in this movement against failure of the governing bodies mired in unaccountability for their harmful actions against public health. We enclose the attached “Asia Pacific Declaration” on behalf of all the consumers of these reduced risk products in Asia Pacific and ask your consideration of the document as our submission to the proceedings of the COP 9 taking place in November.
“Thanking you in advance - the consumer member organisations of CAPHRA.”
The organisation urges all officials to:
- Realise that smoking causes the vast majority of tobacco-related death and disease
- Recognise that safer nicotine products are dramatically safer than cigarettes and have already helped millions switch away from smoking or unsafe oral tobacco
- Recall that harm reduction is at the core of international treaty obligations
- Realise that vapers and smokers pay the price for undue precaution
- Regulate rather than ban
- Adopt Risk Proportionate Regulation
- Rethink dogma
- Remember that public health is about people
- Simply tell the truth
Dave Cross
Journalist at POTVDave is a freelance writer; with articles on music, motorbikes, football, pop-science, vaping and tobacco harm reduction in Sounds, Melody Maker, UBG, AWoL, Bike, When Saturday Comes, Vape News Magazine, and syndicated across the Johnston Press group. He was published in an anthology of “Greatest Football Writing”, but still believes this was a mistake. Dave contributes sketches to comedy shows and used to co-host a radio sketch show. He’s worked with numerous vape companies to develop content for their websites.
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