Death Marketing-1

Vape Groups’ Drive to Derail Amendment

Voice of Vapers Bangladesh (VoV Bangladesh), a local pro-vape platform supported by British American Tobacco (BAT) front group, has recently organized a webinar, titled 'Save Vaping, Save Bangladesh' where so-called experts urged the Health Ministry to withdraw a proposed ban on e-cigarettes and vaping. Participants in the webinar claimed that, many countries in the world have already embraced vaping as a safe alternative to smoking. Such claim is utterly fictitious considering that 32 countries have already banned vaping to tackle addiction among the youth. It should be noted that Delon Human, one of the so-called experts, had previously been removed from position in a UN body for his involvement with tobacco industry and is currently serving BAT as a consultant. Another expert, John Dunne has been serving UK Vaping Industry Association (UKVIA) which has Japan Tobacco International (JTI), Philip Morris International (PMI) and BAT as its members. UKVIA gets at least 13.3 percent of its revenues from vaping business of such tobacco companies. It is of utter shame that none of these experts or organizers mentioned such conflict of interest during the webinar. So, the policymakers should not get misled with such manipulation tactic and ban the production, import, marketing and sale of such products at the earliest.