The war declared by the India’s Parliament on common sense where they literally declared themselves in direct opposition to the tobacco harm reduction still continues. This is literally standing against the Prohibition of Electronic Cigarette Bill passed in 2019. The fraudulent claims and arguments of Limp have so far achieved even the impossible, which brought out the Indian doctors to speak out against what they see as nonsense.
Doctor Bharat Gopal, who is the director of National Chest Center in Delhi and a senior pulmonologist, after the Parliament’s vote came out to say that there is available data as regards to using e-cigarettes as smoking cessation device from the UK. So the government and health organisations should have also taken up Indian studies regarding this.
He made it known that several smokers come seeking for alternatives that will help them quit smoking. Therefore, the government need to at least let research and studies to be carried out on these alternatives so that they could be an effective tool in the future for smoking cessation.
He said, “Issuing a ban will not solve anything, but will only lead to the development of black market where the government will have little or no control over what happens there. It would have benefited the general public more if the government could just look into regulating e-cigarettes and allow more research and studies on harm reduction tools.”
A researcher at the Tagore Medical College in Chennai, Doctor Sree Sucharitha also stated that the whitepaper issues by the Indian Council for Medical Research which proposed the vape ban was loaded with unscientific and lopsided views.
She said, “There are several ex-smokers in the country who switched to e-cigarettes because they couldn’t make any progress with nicotine gums and patches. And now that there is a ban, these people will be forces to return to smoking. This is indeed a regressive step the government has taken and which is also no mark for new developments at all. In the past, this same thing happened with condoms, vaccines, etc, but the policies ultimately changed. Without any doubt, this bill proposing the ban of e-cigarettes is a defeat for science.”
DrAparajeetKar, a BLK Super Specialty doctor in New Delhi also added that the bill passed to ban e-cigarettes comes as shock in such a country like India where many deaths have been reported to be caused by smoking. He stated that “the government has abandoned the harm reduction benefits of e-cigarettes and has now focused on the biased whitepaper presented by the Indian Council of Medical Research.”
“Individuals who quit smoking with the help of vaping devices will now be more susceptible to diseases such as COPD, lung cancer, bronchitis, etc because they will be forced to move back conventional smoking as a result of the non-availability of e-cigarettes. Just like it has been done in other countries, the government should have also considered regulation instead of thinking banning would be the solution.”
According to the Association of Vapers India’s Jagannath Sarangapani, many vapers who are former smokers now face serious crisis because the ban has forced them to go back to smoking and other forms of tobacco. Rather than looking for a way to help these people, the government has pretended as though they don’t exist, and that is the same reaction they gave to the 110 million current smokers who are currently being denied free access to less harmful alternatives to smoking.”