That's a tough question—
Evidence of meeting #43 for Health in the 41st Parliament, 2nd Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was products.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Evidence of meeting #43 for Health in the 41st Parliament, 2nd Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was products.
A recording is available from Parliament.
11:55 a.m.
Conservative
Terence Young Conservative Oakville, ON
Thank you. I'll go to Mr. David.
Mr. David, we have very serious problems with addictions in Canada. We hear about them in this committee all the time.
Health issues related to alcohol cost billions in health care, unemployment, accidents, vehicular accidents, social service costs, and a lot of human misery. It's the same with marijuana. About 7% of marijuana users will become addicted. They suffer from memory loss, apathy, and a whole range of medical problems like psychosis and lung damage, and diabetes, as well as vehicular accidents and unemployment. Thousands of opioid addicts have died in Canada, and many more have had their lives ruined.
Addiction to nicotine diminishes lives as well. What I mean is that no matter what you're doing—you could be operating a crane with great weights over the city, or you could be a surgeon, a nurse doing critical work for others, a teacher, anyone—you have this nagging voice inside your head, like a bad angel on your shoulder saying throughout the whole day “come on, take a break, you'll feel better after a cigarette, it's not that bad for you”. Some people have it even at night.
Yet your product creates new addicts. Bear with me.
But you don't have the good angel. When people smoke cigarettes they have a good angel that says “this is bad for you, don't do it, you can stop”. Your good angel is telling you that you shouldn't smoke, that it's bad, that you might die early and that you might have lung disease. You guys have removed the good angel.
You have this marketing dream. People think it's good for them or it doesn't hurt them at all, so they can become addicted to nicotine. Your products do create new addicts. I'm not saying that's your goal, but they do. We've heard at this committee that they do. You have a marketer's dream. You can get people addicted to a new product.
But I think there should be a third option, especially for our young people: that we don't make anything that's addictive, that has unlimited, open, easy access, to create new addicts in our society. My question for you is, shouldn't e-cigarettes be sold only when the benefits exceed the risks, which would be for people who are already regular smokers? In other words, shouldn't they only be prescription...?
11:55 a.m.
Chair of the Board, Electronic Cigarette Trade Association of Canada
The problem with prescription regulation is that it is prohibitively restrictive. It makes the product less accessible. It makes the product, in the view of vapers—
11:55 a.m.
Conservative
Terence Young Conservative Oakville, ON
How hard is it to get? You go to your doctor and you get a prescription.
11:55 a.m.
Chair of the Board, Electronic Cigarette Trade Association of Canada
Well, let's look at how effective smoking cessation therapies have been. You know, there we're looking at a 4% to 7% success rate, whereas when you look at electronic cigarettes, you see that they are growing so rapidly because they work.
11:55 a.m.
Conservative
Terence Young Conservative Oakville, ON
They take somebody who's addicted to tobacco and then they just give them—
11:55 a.m.
A voice
To a less harmful—
11:55 a.m.
A voice
That's right—
11:55 a.m.
Conservative
Terence Young Conservative Oakville, ON
—to be addicted to nicotine, but I'm thinking that there should be a third option.
If I may, let me go to Mr. Graham. Thank you.
Mr. Graham, you've stated that your company is a for-profit company, right?
11:55 a.m.
Conservative
Terence Young Conservative Oakville, ON
Your stated goal is to help people get off nicotine. You even talked about eventually eliminating tobacco as a long-term goal. Is that correct?
11:55 a.m.
Senior Vice-President, Global Regulatory Affairs, NJOY
Our mission is to obsolete combustion cigarettes.
11:55 a.m.
Conservative
Terence Young Conservative Oakville, ON
Are you aware of the insidious marketing, which is called stealth marketing, that some tobacco companies are doing, whereby they co-brand an e-cigarette—Marlboro is doing it—with a regular tobacco cigarette? They create new addicts, which they can easily do, and then also the possibility, which I think they will do, of later going back to them and saying, “Now that you've tried the nicotine, now that you've tried vaping, try the tobacco that has the full flavour.” Are you aware of that kind of marketing?
11:55 a.m.
Senior Vice-President, Global Regulatory Affairs, NJOY
There's a potential for that, sir, and I think in the regulations it should be very clear that questions and restrictions applied to tobacco companies that sell combustion cigarettes should restrict such behaviour. We do not support co-branding of e-cigarettes and combustion cigarettes.
11:55 a.m.
Conservative
Terence Young Conservative Oakville, ON
Do you think that with regulations we can protect Canadians from predatory marketing practices like that?
11:55 a.m.
Senior Vice-President, Global Regulatory Affairs, NJOY
Depending on the nature of the regulation, yes.
Noon
Conservative
Terence Young Conservative Oakville, ON
Thank you.
Given your stated corporate goal of reducing or eliminating the use of tobacco, wouldn't you agree that e-cigarettes should be authorized for use by prescription only, or in other words, only when the potential benefits exceed the potential risks?
Noon
Senior Vice-President, Global Regulatory Affairs, NJOY
I disagree that e-cigarettes should be sold only on prescription. I do support the view that they should be sold where the benefits outweigh the risks.
Sir, the comparison between electronic cigarettes and combustion cigarettes is unavoidable. If combustion cigarettes are limited to access only by prescription, then perhaps it may be appropriate to think about similar restrictions on e-cigarettes. But it's perverse in the extreme to believe that a product that is so harmful, that kills half of its long-term users, is widely available and that a product that is a magnitude of difference in risk would be more highly restricted. It's an upside-down logic, sir.
Noon
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Ben Lobb
We're at the end of our discussion.
Thank you very much, Mr. Graham, Mr. David, and Mr. Wells, for appearing at committee. You made a great panel today, and we've had a great discussion.
We'll now suspend for probably around three minutes. We have more technical stuff to hook up for our next group.
Thank you very much.
Noon
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Ben Lobb
Welcome back. I'm sorry for the delay. We're working on a technical presentation for one of our guests here. We're set up. We're going to have an abbreviated session to try to get everything in.
We'll start with our people who are here via video conference. Thank you very much.
It's Smoke NV, with Mr. Mohamedali and Mr. Rai, I believe.
You go first. You have 10 minutes to present. Thank you very much.
Noon
Dr. Inderpreet Rai Medical Director, Smoke NV Inc.
We thought we'd just give a brief history of our company and where we come from.
I'm Dr. Rai. I'm a family physician who practises in Edmonton, Alberta, and I'm here with Mr. Mohamedali, who is the CEO of Smoke NV. I act as the medical director for the company. We have been in the industry since about 2006.
As a company, our goal has always been one of harm reduction. We've always focused on that.
Three things that we've always looked at from the conception of the company were issues that we felt existed within the industry as a whole. One was the manufacturing process. The second was pharmacokinetics and whether nicotine should be placed in the product. The third was how this product should be placed within the marketplace and what regulations we should impose as a company to ensure that minors or young 18-year-olds aren't becoming normalized to the product and using it as a gateway to smoking. Essentially, that's where we started off as a company, and we've answered or tried to answer some of those questions as time has gone on.
As far as the nicotine goes, we as a company have always chosen not to sell the product with nicotine in it. We sell in marketplaces such as the United Kingdom and Australia, without nicotine in our product. We felt at the time of the conception of our company that there wasn't enough data to answer the questions that needed to be answered in regard to nicotine, questions around absorption and potential harm. Really, a lot of the clinical studies just weren't there at that time.
On manufacturing, Shanu can speak to that as to the issues that have come up in manufacturing, the ones that we probably know about and maybe the questions that you might have in regard to the industry. We have filed for a patent on a manufacturing process that can be done within Canada. We've moved forward on that.
On regulation as to how we sell our product within Canada, we have made sure that our product cannot be sold to minors. We have imposed systems on the retailers that sell our product in order to do that.