On Monday, the Daily Mirror published an article repeating the tired and lazy assumption that heated tobacco devices are being advertised in supermarkets illegally. It quoted Dr Beccy Cooper MP, a Labour party member of the Health and Social Care Select Committee.
"The Government has been clear that it is illegal to advertise any tobacco products in supermarkets and that includes heated tobacco devices”, she said.
The government can say what it likes, but if heated tobacco advertising were clearly illegal under current UK law, there would be no debate. Authorities would be enforcing this “clear” law and stripping shelves of the offending items.
Where's the Legal Clarity?
The legislation banning tobacco adverts was drafted more than two decades ago, long before heated tobacco products existed. The Act defines a tobacco product as something “intended to be smoked, sniffed, sucked or chewed.” Heated tobacco products don’t burn tobacco, and they don’t produce smoke. They heat tobacco to create an aerosol.
That distinction might sound like semantics, but the wording of the law is quite specific. Because heated tobacco is not explicitly referenced and does not fit neatly into the 2002 definition, there is legal ambiguity. That is precisely why ministers have felt the need to “clarify” matters through the proposed Tobacco and Vapes Bill. If the law already clearly prohibited such advertising, no clarification would be necessary.
Retailers such as Sainsbury's and Morrisons insist that their in-store displays of heated tobacco devices are compliant with existing legislation. They are large companies with legal departments which will have closely scrutinised the law. Philip Morris International, which manufactures the IQOS heated tobacco system, has said the same. Whether one likes these companies or not is beside the point. Right now, the law simply does not explicitly outlaw the advertising of heated tobacco.
Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) keeps banging this drum and it is getting tiresome. The anti-smoking organisation continually pretends that the law already prohibits advertising heated tobacco when it does not. Furthermore, ASH twists the truth further by routinely describing heated tobacco as a “harmful product,” as though that were an established, settled scientific conclusion. Their insistence is less about evidence and more about creating a narrative.
What the Science Actually Shows
The most comprehensive independent review of the evidence to date, the Cochrane Review,is more nuanced. It found no trials measuring whether heated tobacco helps people quit smoking. It found limited short-term data on adverse events and concluded that long-term health impacts remain uncertain.
But it also reported moderate-certainty evidence that users of heated tobacco are exposed to lower levels of selected toxicants and carcinogens than cigarette smokers. That mattersbecause combustion is what makes cigarettes uniquely deadly. Burning tobacco generates thousands of chemicals, many of them toxic and dozens carcinogenic. Heating rather than burning appears to reduce exposure to a number of these substances.
Not only that, but the U.S. Federal Drug Administration has seen fit to authorise one brand of heated tobacco as a Modified Risk Tobacco Product (MRTP), meaning it may be marketed as a means of significantly reducing harm and the risk of tobacco-related disease.
None of that makes heated tobacco risk-free. But there is currently no robust scientific basis for confidently declaring heated tobacco a “harmful product” either. The evidence is incomplete and evolving.
Rhetoric Over Evidence
ASH’s insistence on issuing misleading claims has little to do with toxicology and a lot to do with who manufactures these products. For some campaigners, the mere involvement of major tobacco companies is reason enough to treat any new product as suspect. Distrust of the industry is understandable given its history. But public health policy should be driven by data, not by who state-funded activists dislike.
When critics repeatedly label heated tobacco “harmful” without qualification, they are peddling fables to con the public and policymakers into believing that the science is settled when it is not.
If the evidence ultimately shows that heated tobacco meaningfully reduces risk for smokers who would otherwise continue to smoke, then dismissing it outright today could prove a serious mistake. Equally, if future long-term studies reveal substantial harms, a discussion should ensue on responsible regulations. That is how evidence-based policy is supposed to work.
Towards Evidence-Based Policy
It is all a bit sloppy, really. ASH and the UK government confidently assert that advertising heated tobacco is illegal despite clear legal ambiguity in the current law. And they also speak as though there is settled, unequivocal evidence that heated tobacco is a definitively harmful product when the scientific literature remains limited and far from conclusive.
The public surely should expect better from “professionals” who are supposed to be advancing the public interest.
Martin Cullip is International Fellow at The Taxpayers Protection Alliance's Consumer Center and is based in South London, UK.
