Thursday 19th June 2025
Michael Russell Oration
Arielle Selya, senior scientist at Pinney Associates, said, ‘There’s a lot of hostility to industry. There are many places I can no longer publish, and there’s criticisms that I’ve seen of industry-adjacent authors, authors who write papers that are cited by industry, or even authors who just make the same arguments as industry.’
‘I want to focus on how academia got this way. From this, I’m going to pull on my decade within academia. My research was on adolescent smoking behaviour, studying things like trajectories, development of dependence and risk factors. When e-cigarettes started to become a big story, around 2014, I initially bought the anti-THR view. I bought the idea that e-cigarettes are gateway products, and that they attract youth, and might lead to smoking. But I changed my mind.’
‘I once wrote what I thought was a pretty neutral and balanced grant, proposing to look at the gateway versus diversion scenarios for youth e-cigarette use. The comment that I got back was that “it would appear inadvisable to encourage a teen to use e-cigarettes because they’re better than traditional cigarettes”. I did not get the grant, obviously, but it goes to show that going against the grain can really work against you when it comes to obtaining this sort of funding.’
‘What drives funding agency priorities? I think a lot of it is honestly naive with good intentions. This aligns with the misperceptions of risk featured in so many sessions at this conference. I think some people genuinely believe that e-cigarettes are harmful, and from that perspective, what they’re doing makes sense to them. There’s also distrust of the profit motive, especially considering the past bad behaviour of the tobacco industry. There’s an emotional objection to recreational nicotine use. And Dr Mike Siegel, I think, was the first to talk about the “not invented here” phenomenon, whereby if e-cigarettes had come from the public health establishment, then they would be touted as a successful solution. Because they came from outside of public health, outside of academia and from industry, they are opposed.’
‘There are other funders of academic research, but at the moment, the major ones all have the same stance on THR – the American Cancer Society, American Lung Association, and, of course, Bloomberg. So the current alternatives to NIH funding would not improve the state of the science. Ultimately, what we need is a range of funders with diversity of thought. I don’t know what to do about this, but possibly it’s a role for grants or contracts from industry. Speaking very optimistically, if this were to become normalised for academic researchers to start relying on grants or contracts from industry, this could help the issue of ostracisation.’
‘One of the biggest challenges for me going into industry was learning how to communicate with lay audiences. Academic journals have almost their own language, and it’s hard to break out of that. I’m still trying to improve my language – and I think that’s a good practice that more academics should have… I think this could even cut down on some of the alarmist media coverage of research.’
‘Lastly, there needs to be more understanding of how someone’s research affects people and consumer voices are invaluable. You have been saying “nothing about us, without us”. In other academic fields that’s been accepted and embraced by the researchers.’
‘For those producing science, keep publishing good science. For those consuming it, keep spreading good science. It’s a quote from Arthur Schopenhauer that “all truth passes through three stages. First, it’s ridiculed. Second, it’s violently opposed, and third, it’s accepted as self-evident”. I think I do see some signs that we’re entering the third stage of truth.’
Workshop
Low and Middle Income Countries: communicating the scientific rationale of tobacco harm reduction
Satenik Muradyan, head of the scientific improvement department at BIL Armenia, said, ‘In many low and middle-income countries, doctors remain very trusted figures to the population. But when it comes to how doctors are approaching the fight against smoking, we have learned that a lot of them only know one way, which is quit or die.’
‘I think it’s very important to educate doctors on the science behind tobacco harm reduction so that they know from root to top what tobacco harm reduction stands for.’
‘Trust me, as a geneticist, it doesn’t matter if you’re Armenian, or French or Chinese, tobacco kills people, nicotine doesn’t and that’s the conclusion that we will always have. If we spend one or two years on researching this topic instead of focusing on making safer nicotine products available, then during that time, thousands of people will be dying because of tobacco. We should focus on countries like Turkey and Iran where these products are banned and make them accessible. Research is important, but if we spend time on research that will only give us the information that we already have, we are losing time and losing people’s lives.’
Hugo Tan, global medical safety officer at BAT, said, ‘There are 1.3 billion smokers, and annually, there are 8 million deaths due to complications related to smoking. COVID amounted to about 7 million deaths. If COVID was a pandemic, if it was a public health crisis, then what about the 8 million deaths from smoking?’
‘Not too long ago, when I was in medical school, we were taught about the harmful effects of smoking, but we learned nothing about the science about alternative nicotine products. How we teach medical students needs to change.’
Sharifa Ezat Wan Puteh, chair of the Malaysia Society for Harm Reduction, said, ‘In Malaysia, as well as in many other low and middle-income countries, tobacco control is very traditional. It’s basically a prohibitionist approach which tries to ban everything under the sun, not only tobacco, but now also alternative nicotine products.’
‘Coming from an NGO, the Malaysian Society for Harm Reduction, we try to educate and advocate, but most of this falls on deaf ears. We are seen as arms of big tobacco, even though the research we produce is not funded by tobacco companies.’
‘I think there’s a lot of failure stories, but there are a lot of success stories as well on the use of alternative nicotine products all over the world that low and middle-income countries can actually emulate, success stories like Japan, the UK or New Zealand.’
Emmanuel Mbenza Rocha, a harm reduction advocate from the Democratic Republic of Congo, said, ‘One of the biggest challenges we have in the Democratic Republic of Congo in particular, and in Africa in general, is the issue of data collection about tobacco use. The information is not really accurate compared to the reality down in different communities.’
‘In the Democratic Republic of Congo, there are 120 million people, but only 25% of them have access to electricity. That means 75% of the Congolese are in darkness, so it’s not really possible to inform them, or campaign to raise awareness about tobacco harm reduction in many parts of the country.’
‘A big challenge we have in terms of introducing the Congolese people to safer alternatives, is the lack of the products we need to show them that there is hope, to show them that there is a way to transition to cessation.’
Watch the day’s proceedings here: