Sorry for the long delay in providing any sort of update from Camp ECITA, but there's obviously been a lot going on! The consumer activities have been well-reported, and we have nothing useful to add in terms of reporting - apart to declare our pride, joy and delight at the way that this community comported itself in front of the Parliament yesterday. It was a privilege to be there, albeit it in a thoroughly non-professional capacity.
What we can do, hopefully, is to clarify the situation regarding the political process, and what it means for the campaign. Katherine shall be updating everyone with a little more news about the import of Sir Francis Jacob's Opinion in a separate blog in due course, but suffice to say it robustly damns any prospect of medicines regulation succeeding! There is another Counsel Opinion, too, from an Advocate in Frankfurt, for which Katherine is waiting for the translation now. We shall keep you informed on this one as well.
It is really important that everyone understands what Wednesday's vote actually means in practice: very little!
The ENVI committee is just one of several committees of the European Parliament. 6 have voted on this TPD so far, and 4 of those 6 have voted for
measures on ecigs to be more proportionate and/or NOT medicines. However, it is the report from the ENVI Committee that will go forward to Plenary.
The week leading up to the vote in the ENVI Committee saw a number of backhanded moves from our opponents which ultimately lead to our failure to secure a majority for a sensible and proportionate regulation. The most damaging was a report from Corporate Europe Observatory (which we blogged about
here which accused e-cig supporters – both vendors and consumers – of being stooges for big tobacco. That's right, folks: you don't really exist! And if you did, you would be too stupid to be able to write the sort of informed letters the MEPs have been receiving. Therefore, you must all be figments of the imagination of Tobacco Lobbyists!
This allowed MEPs to justify to themselves the dismissal of the genuine consumer activism that they encountered, and disregard the fact that they hold the fate of millions of EU citizens in their hands. Your lives don't need to matter if you're not real people, do they? The actions of the WHO in releasing some appallingly misleading statements were also a contributory factor. (You may have seen our blogs – and the comments thereto – on those, as well:
www.ecita.org.uk/blog/index.php/t...nd-beyond/ and
www.ecita.org.uk/blog/index.php/sorry-who/.
The next stage is Plenary. This is scheduled for September, but there are aggressive moves to try to get it pushed back to October. This is slightly significant, because if Plenary happens in September, this would be very hard on the heels of the summer recess. Absolutely nothing will happen in the EU institutions during August, so if they return in September and immediately go into Plenary, we would have an extraordinarily small window of opportunity to make any progress. October would at least give us a chance to make further representations. It will be interesting to see how that plays out….
Plenary is still far from the end, however. Plenary is simply the part of the process when the whole Parliament, i.e. all the individual committees come together as the complete set of MEPs. They have to agree on a position on the revisions to the TPD which they are collectively prepared to negotiate for with the Council of Ministers. This will be a very tough call, but they will eventually reach an agreed position.
ECITA, together with many others in the community, will be continuing to provide the necessary information to the key parliamentarians who will be able to convince their colleagues that there is no validity in a revised TPD which would treat electronic cigarettes in a disproportionate or discriminatory manner.
The next part of the process is those negotiations between the Parliament and the Council. The Council of Ministers has already had some discussions with the Commission, and has adopted an initial position, which is that they are in favour of medicines regulations. That said, this was from a position of abject ignorance, and it is highly likely that we shall see that re-examined, especially now that we have a new Lithuanian Presidency (replacing the rabidly ‘anti ecig’ Presidency of the Irish Dr Reilly!), and that the Council will recognise that there is no legal validity, and that the reputation of the whole EU Institution would be undermined if they were seen to have acted so stupidly as to introduce a legally unsustainable piece of legislation.
In short, this legislative proposal has a very long way to go, and is unlikely to be able to jump through all the necessary hoops to actually make it onto the statute books. If, Heaven forbid, it did – by some miracle – get that far, then things would get interesting. Very fast.
This is about as hypothetical as a scenario can get, because we at ECITA truly believe it is very unlikely to get this far – and you can all be assured that we shall be trying our damnedest to ensure that it doesn’t, but IF this revised Tobacco Products Directive were to pass into law with an inappropriate set of regulations for ecigs – of any kind – then the next part of the process would be this:
We would NOT be in a position to challenge the EU on it. We would have to wait for one of the Member States to bring in what is called ‘implementing legislation’. As a (hypothetical) example, let’s assume the UK decides to do that. We know that the MHRA wants to, and has already announced that they will do this.
So the EU has introduced the Directive; and the MHRA introduces implementing legislation to apply that Directive in the UK. At that point, but not before, we can request a Judicial Review, questioning the validity of the EU Directive. In cases where an individual Member State is legally challenged on the validity of a piece of EU legislation, that Member State has no choice but to refer the case up to the European Court of Justice.
The only downside is that this would cost us very heavily. We’re talking hundreds of thousands. This is why we are committed to continuing to do everything we can to try to ensure that the EU Institution does not make such a foolish and costly mistake.
Yesterday morning, there was a meeting at the House of Lords, chaired by Lord Hutton, and attended by Professor Gerry Stimson, together with his Harm Reduction colleague, Paddy Costall, Professor Peter Hajek, Jeremy Mean (MHRA), David Dorn (representing ecig consumers), Adrian and Charles from E-lites, with various peers. According to David, this meeting went extremely well, with Jeremy Mean being made to feel extremely self-conscious and embarrassed – literally blushing, while back-peddling and trying to justify his extraordinary position with promises to introduce guidance to support eliquid sales, in the face of consistently raised eyebrows from Lord Hutton at virtually every word he said – and with broad support for ecigs to remain widely available, in the significantly wide variety we enjoy today.
Lord Hutton is committed to getting to the truth of this issue, and said he is “most unconvinced of the need for medicines regulation.”
So the fight goes on – and we live to vape for another day…. And that, I suppose, is the key message from all of this:
Vendors: Build your businesses! Get ecigs into the hands of as many smokers as you possibly can over the next couple of years. Spread the word so that ALL smokers know the truth about the choices they currently have available.
We are a still a long way away from any kind of conclusion to this awful state of limbo. However, if the EU were to come back in a few years and try to take the ecigs AWAY from 5 million or more (voting) vapers? They wouldn’t stand a chance!
United, we are very strong, and I am sure that you would all agree that ALL of us in this community are committed to staying with this for the long game.
Chins up, and best feet forward. We will win in the end – hopefully without needing to get a Court to make that happen.
Happy vaping, one and all!
