Thank you very much for the invitation to appear.
For those of you who are not familiar with us, our organization is a small health charity with a 39-year history of providing information and advice on tobacco policy. Our members are all physicians, but I am not. My comments today are based on a policy analysis, not on the clinical use or on the overall implications of this bill for the NHP category. For those more general perspectives, I refer you to the brief submitted by the Canadian Medical Association.
I want to say that Bill C-368 has implications for tobacco control that go beyond the Zonnic or nicotine pouch issue. That's because most stop-smoking medications are licensed as natural health products. There are two categories of drugs, bupropion and varenicline, which are prescription-only drugs, that are licensed under the drug product regime. There are about 100 authorizations for stop-smoking medications under NHPs. The largest category are nicotine replacement products. This can be gums, patches, pouches or inhalers. There's a large category and there are more on the horizon, like nicotine pearls.
Another category is cytisine, which is a drug that's derived from laburnum trees. It has a proven efficacy and is a new drug in Canada with largely an unknown impact in terms of its overall use.
Then there are homeopathic and herbal medicines that are licensed, even though they're not considered to be a particularly effective treatment.
One thing that's important to consider is how the NHP smoking cessation market is changing. There are new products and new players, and these are posing new regulatory challenges. Stop-smoking medications are no longer manufactured and sold by consumer health companies. They're sold by tobacco companies, nicotine companies and even cannabis companies. Zonnic is the most recent entry, but it's certainly not the only one.
This package of Sesh nicotine gum I picked up at a Circle K last week was sitting on the counter right beside Reese's Peanut Butter Cups—