England has become the first country in the world that approves e-cigarette prescription.
In the wake of an updated guidance published by the UK’s Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), the country now allows doctors to prescribe e-cigarettes as medicines to help smokers quit.
Vape manufacturers can now submit their products to the NHS, the country’s public healthcare system, to go through the same approval process as all medicinal products. After an e-cigarette passes the NHS review, it’ll fall into the category of licensed medicine. Then doctors can decide whether to use it in their prescriptions based on their case-by-case diagnosis.
Background
MHRA updated the guidance following an in-depth discussion with the E-Cigarette Expert Working Group, which consists of a group of experts with insights into the correlation between vape products and public health.
Deborah Arnott, member of the working group and Chief Executive of AHS, pointed that “consumer e-cigarettes bought over the counter are proven to be the most successful quitting aid, but nearly a third of smokers have never tried them, and a similar proportion believe, wrongly, that e-cigarettes are as, or more harmful, than smoking.”
Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) is a campaigning public health charity that works to eliminate the harm caused by tobacco.
Smoking remains to rank high in all the preventable causes of premature death. Although the smoking prevalence has continued to drop off in recent years in Britain, as many as 6.1 million people are still smoking. The health agency hopes to persuade more smokers into quitting with the help of vapes, by providing them with the reassurance that e-cigarette is licensed medicine.
Benefits of MHRA’s New Move
The updated guidance could also play a positive role in shaping a more standardized vape market in the UK. Even before e-cigarette is available on prescription, the product has already become the most widely used aid in smoking cessation. The past nine years have witnessed a sharp increase in the number of UK e-cigarette users, from roughly 700,000 in 2012 to 3.6 million in 2021.
According to the Department of Health and Social Care, “a medicinally licensed e-cigarette will have to pass even more rigorous safety checks.” To receive the license from healthcare regulators, vaping products must meet all the standards they set. Accordingly, as consumers will have higher tendency to buy licensed products, those below-standard products will end up being erased from the market owing to a decreasing demand over time.
Just as Sajid Javid, the British Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, said, “Opening the door to a licensed e-cigarette prescribed on the NHS has the potential to tackle the stark disparities in smoking rates across the country, helping people stop smoking wherever they live and whatever their background.”
