of Public Health , said : “ Correcting misperceptions in medicine should be a priority given the FDA ’ s proposed nicotine-centered framework that includes reducing nicotine content in cigarettes to non-addictive levels while encouraging safer forms of nicotine like NRT , to help with smoking cessation or non-combustible tobacco , like smokeless tobacco for harm reduction .” However , Delnevo stopped short of suggesting that physicians should encourage smokers to consider e-cigarettes as a form of harm reduction despite this approach being commonplace in the UK . This is perhaps unsurprising , given the bad press vaping has attracted in the US over the past few years . The youth vaping narrative , the EVALI outbreak and the fact that the FDA classes nicotine vape products as ‘ tobacco ’ have all poisoned the well . In contrast , the UK public health community views nicotine delivery systems on a sliding scale of harm ,
“ Correcting misperceptions in medicine should be a priority ”
with patches and gum at one end , combustible tobacco at the other and vaping somewhere in between . While UK doctors may be more clued up on the relative harms of nicotine products , the same cannot be said about the public . A 2015 report by the Royal Society for Public Health found that nine out of 10 people believed that nicotine itself was harmful despite it being ‘ no more dangerous than caffeine .’ Then-chief executive Shirley Cramer said at the time : " Getting people on to nicotine rather than using tobacco would make a big difference to the public ' s health . " Clearly there are issues in terms of having smokers addicted to nicotine but this would move us on from having a serious and costly public health issue from smokingrelated disease to instead address the issue of addiction to a substance which in and of itself is not too dissimilar to caffeine addiction ."
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