Lung specialists reopen gateway argument, and other Euro news

Lung specialists in Spain and Portugal have taken aim at e-cigarettes, saying they are being used to attract young people to tobacco.

The Portuguese Pulmonology Society marked European Ex-Smoker Day last week with a stop-smoking campaign aimed at adolescents – and giving special attention to e-cigs and heated tobacco, claiming they served as a gateway to “conventional cigarettes or other recreational drugs”.

It followed a warning from the Spanish Society of Pulmonology and Thoracic Surgery (SEPAR), “that electronic cigarettes, smokeless tobacco or ‘pod mods’ are being used to attract new potential smokers”.

SEPAR expressed concern about tobacco industry campaigns promoting the use of their products through influencers and social media. And it said it regards the recent positive conclusions about vaping made by the UK Parliamentary Science and Technology Committee as “naive and premature”.

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    Meanwhile, in the UK the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) rejected a complaint  against a vapour products company which had been accused of placing an ad targeting young children too close to a school. The ASA concluded that the advert did not breach the advertising code because it considered it unlikely that under-18s made up more than 25% of the ad’s audience.

    These – along with notification of regulatory developments in 19 European countries and at EU level – were among 59 stories published last month by ECigIntelligence to subscribers through our daily European regulatory Live Alerts.

    All the stories from September’s European regulatory Live Alerts can now be found here, on one page, ordered alphabetically by country.

    – ECigIntelligence staff

    Photo: Bildundso

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    ECigIntelligence

    This article was written by one of ECigIntelligence’s international correspondents. We currently employ more than 40 reporters around the world to cover individual vaping markets. For a full list, please see our Who We Are page.

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