My Lords, I want to say just a couple of words about this. First, I do not really have an interest to declare. I have a wife who is a very heavy chain-smoker, but I do not smoke—I let her go on smoking because it keeps her slightly calmer and liveable-with, and it is probably better than her going on to Valium. Personally, I am a chocoholic, which is a different problem altogether.
I think that we should separate out in our minds the difference between the harm done by the burning of substances which we inhale and the harm, or not, from a particular drug within it—nicotine. If you separate those as two different issues, you realise that this is not the right directive, because this is about tobacco, which at the end of the day is a herbaceous substance which we dry and burn. That is what it is meant to be about; it is not about whether or not nicotine is a beneficial drug.
I do not know much about this because I am not a doctor. I read things in the press which say, for instance, that it can help with Alzheimer’s and dementia, and I read other things which say that that is rubbish. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Snape, that nicotine definitely used to be an appetite suppressant. One thing that I predicted when tobacco was cracked down on was that we would have an obesity crisis. It is one of the few things that I have been right about and it happened very quickly. If we wanted to prevent all the problems with people being overweight, we could perhaps recommend smoking—it is a question of which way you go.
The calming effect is well known for people who are quite nervous and tense; again, I think that is from the nicotine rather than the burning part of it. We also now have signs over the motorways saying, “Tiredness kills—take a break”. In the old days, you had a cigarette when you were driving and felt tired. I know that you should take a break but sometimes it is 30 miles to the next place where you can stop or you have a deadline, so a nicotine hit was a perfectly acceptable way of keeping yourself awake. Maybe vaping would do that, but the point I really want to make is that we should not be confusing the two things.
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The point made by the noble Lord, Lord Stoddart of Swindon, was also apt and very good: “What’s in a name?”. They should never have been called e-cigarettes because they are not cigarettes. This goes back to the point of the noble Viscount, Lord Ridley, about having to separate the two issues. He was absolutely right there.
I have two things to finish on. One is that this is a directive which we are trying to implement into UK law, not a regulation, which would mean that it was directly applicable in the UK. You should be able to modify the purpose of a directive slightly, in light of the local circumstances, while still trying to comply with its spirit. I have not read the directive at all, so I do not know whether there should be some room for manoeuvre. If we feel that it would be better for the UK population to write it into our local laws in a different way, I hope that such an amount of latitude exists within the directive—and within the EU—to allow us to do that.
The final thing is that wonderful conspiracy theory: that the Treasury gets huge amounts of tax from the smokers but not from the vapers, so the Treasury may rather see us smoking than see vaping take off, and that the Government have a vested interest in making sure that this directive goes through unchanged to prevent vaping. Maybe they should declare that every time they try to promote the directive.