Moving targets: how the rapidly changing tobacco and nicotine landscape creates advertising and promotion policy challenges

Abstract

Tobacco, nicotine and related products have and continue to change rapidly, creating new challenges for policies regulating their advertising, promotion, sponsorship and sales. This paper reviews recent commercial product offerings and the regulatory challenges associated with them. This includes electronic nicotine delivery systems, electronic non-nicotine delivery systems, personal vaporisers, heated tobacco products, nicotine salts, tobacco-free nicotine products, other nicotine products resembling nicotine replacement therapies, and various vitamin and cannabis products that share delivery devices or marketing channels with tobacco products. There is substantial variation in the availability of these tobacco, nicotine, vaporised, and related products globally, and policies regulating these products also vary substantially between countries. Many of these products avoid regulation by exploiting loopholes in the definition of tobacco or nicotine products, or by occupying a regulatory grey area where authority is unclear. These challenges will increase as the tobacco industry continues to diversify its product portfolio, and weaponises ‘tobacco harm reduction’ rhetoric to undermine policies limiting marketing, promotion and taxation of tobacco, nicotine and related products. Tobacco control policy often lags behind the evolution of the industry, which may continue to sell these products for years while regulations are established, refined or enforced. Policies that anticipate commercial tobacco, nicotine and related product and marketing changes and that are broad enough to cover these product developments are needed.

Global tobacco advertising, promotion and sponsorship regulation: what’s old, what’s new and where to next?

“…A number of these key policies are outlined below and a brief discussion of the next steps in TAPS regulation concludes the paper. Policy issues surrounding non-combustible tobacco and nicotine devices are not included in this paper, but are explored in depth in another anniversary issue paper by Ling et al 7…”

“…A number of these key policies are outlined below and a brief discussion of the next steps in TAPS regulation concludes the paper. Policy issues surrounding non-combustible tobacco and nicotine devices are not included in this paper, but are explored in depth in another anniversary issue paper by Ling et al 7. Of importance to note here is that the exclusion of non-combustible tobacco and nicotine devices from TAPS laws means that the promotion of these products can also serve to promote tobacco brands and tobacco companies.…”

Smoking cessation among people with mental illness: A South African perspective

“…), undermining of tobacco control policies, a lack of evidence that they are harmless, side effects, harms of passive e-cigarette smoking, false claims that they are harmless and a lack of robust prospective clinical trials proving their efficacy. 63 , 66 , 67 …”

Electronic Cigarette Portrayal in Indonesia: A Content Analysis of News Media

“…Instead of being a solution, e-cigarette use among youth has increased dramatically [2] [5]. The products have been reported to be available in various avors and packaging and also take advantage of new media to do promotional activities [6,7,8]. E-cigarette promotional content on Instagram in Indonesia is the second largest in the world [9], and it was designed to attract youth attention [10].…”