How vapes and pouches have become the tobacco industry’s great smokeless hope

When France swatted aside Sweden 3-0 in their World Cup match on Tuesday night, Les Bleus winger Michael Olise was one of the best players on the pitch.

His two assists helped make the difference in the game. Yet he is also emblematic of another yawning gap between the French and Swedish nations that has sparked a political and commercial row: their starkly different approaches to nicotine control.

Olise appears to like nicotine pouches, small tobacco-free sacs that are placed on the gum, absorbing addictive nicotine into the bloodstream. They are popular with footballers, who claim nicotine helps them focus. Like vapes, pouches are also part of the smokeless nicotine market that has become the great hope of the big tobacco companies.

Various estimates put the value of the global smokeless market above €25 billion, but it is growing even faster than, probably, the fear of France’s next World Cup opponents.

A recent photo of Olise’s World Cup locker on social media showed – just in shot behind a sports bag – a small tin of Velo. It is a Swedish-inspired nicotine pouch brand owned by British American Tobacco (BAT), the world’s second-biggest tobacco company and whose cigarette brands include Dunhill, Lucky Strike, Rothmans and, in Ireland, Carrolls.

[ Why is the tobacco industry celebrating Sweden’s anti-smoking success? ]

Sweden, which has Europe’s lowest smoking rates, has pioneered the use of products such as Velo as an alternative to puffing tobacco – burning it is what makes tobacco toxic and lethal.

Nicotine in pouches is also a part of Swedish culture. They’ve been slipping tobacco snus (now also sold in pouches) on to their gums for about 400 years.

Yet France, which has about five times as many smokers as its Nordic football rival, and the lung cancer rates to match, recently banned the sale or possession of even tobacco-free nicotine pouches (tobacco snus is banned in all of Europe except Sweden).

Sweden’s government has queried if the French pouch ban was legal under European Union single market rules and has criticised the move as an “attack on the Swedish way of life”.

“It’s as if we would prohibit French baguettes or French wine in Sweden,” the country’s trade minister, Benjamin Dousa, has said.

If the French team goes on to win the World Cup, Olise had better ditch his tin of Velo at the airport before Les Bleus return to celebrate on the Champs Élysées. As of this April, nicotine pouch possession could theoretically land you in prison in France.

Meanwhile, Ireland is also bringing in tough regulations around smokeless nicotine products, via a new public health Bill making its way through the Oireachtas. There is no French-style nicotine pouch ban, but shops will have to hide them behind the counter. The State is also banning disposable vapes and restricting vape flavours.

It appears, then, that the Irish may be a little more French than Swedish when it comes to nicotine product control. Meanwhile, the tobacco industry wants everybody to be more like the permissive Nordics. It stands to make billions of euros more in profits.

Tobacco firms insist Sweden’s lower level of smoking deaths is linked to its more lenient regime for smokeless products. Yet some health advocates disagree – more on that later. For BAT, the ultimate supplier of Olise’s Velo pouches, the financial opportunity is huge.

The company is a giant of the London Stock Exchange’s FTSE 100 index. Its market capitalisation this week was £101 billion (€118 billion). Its revenues last year were about £25.6 billion, with profits of £11.3 billion. It has about 45,000 staff, although this week it announced plans to cut about one fifth of those in a £600 million cost savings drive.

About a fifth of BAT’s business is in smokeless products such as oral pouches, vapes and heated (but not combusted) tobacco dispensers. Yet while global cigarette sales are falling at about 2.5 per cent annually, BAT’s most recent trading update showed smokeless sales were growing by a “mid-teen” percentage and “accelerating”.

The Irish Times was recently given access to BAT’s research labs in Southampton, southern England, where its scientists invent smokeless products. They also test them to mine for data to buttress the company’s argument that the Swedes have it right.

BAT’s director of science and research is Belfast man James Murphy. He is no Michael Olise, but Murphy, who also sits on BAT’s most senior management board, did previously play inter-county Gaelic football for Antrim.

“We don’t need to reinvent the wheel,” Murphy says as we chat in a back room at the research and development complex. “We just need to do what the Swedes did.”

And what was that?

“Make tobacco harm reduction (THR) a part of public policymaking. Regulate and tax according to risk. We’re not disputing that nicotine is addictive. But nicotine in a pouch is very different from nicotine in a cigarette. Almost all the toxins are removed,” he says.

THR is the new mantra of big tobacco companies such as BAT. Murphy argues that it means adopting strategies to ensure easy adult access to vapes and pouches to stop addicted smokers from lighting up, which will wreck their health – half will die from it.

Yet there’s another interpretation of THR, preferred by the industry’s critics who lament its adoption of the term: “Let us sell more of our very profitable, much-less-lethal but still highly addictive new nicotine products.”

Living customers are more lucrative than dead ones.

Also, it isn’t only smokers wanting to quit who buy smokeless nicotine products. Official health data cited by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, for example, suggests 13 per cent of Swedish ninth graders (14 year olds) and 23 per cent of older adolescents use nicotine pouches.

The charge levelled at the tobacco industry by the antismoking lobby is that it isn’t simply trying to help smokers to quit by giving them smokeless nicotine alternatives, it is trying to create a new base, a fresh generation of addicted customers.

Murphy agrees there is a “trust deficit” between policymakers and tobacco companies who spent decades denying that cigarettes were killing their consumers with cancer – BAT, for example, is said to have been secretly aware of the cancer link as early as 1951.

So why should anyone trust anything that a tobacco company says now?

“Trust has to be earned,” Murphy says. He says the once-secretive BAT began opening up its Southampton R&D complex to outsiders a decade ago when it realised it had “a story to tell” on the safety of smokeless products and their use in helping smokers quit.

Murphy and I, and a small crew of other handlers and observers, don white coats for a whirlwind tour of the lab facility. This isn’t Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and Murphy is no Willy Wonka, but BAT’s flavours lab has the whiff of a zany alchemy hub.

The air of the lab is pungent with the sweet smell of vape flavours. Murphy explains that, since flavours cannot be patented, this is one of the most sensitive and best-protected parts of BAT’s Southampton site.

Many of the “flavourists” who come up with BAT’s recipes here are trained chemists. “Inventing flavours is a mixture of science and art,” he says. “Trained flavourists are hard to find. They’re as rare as astronauts.”

Dotted around the lab are about 1,600 bottles of various chemicals, the base ingredients for all its vape flavours. The scientists then mix and splice them in different quantities to produce the flavoured blends that vapers find on shop shelves.

None of the ingredients is bought in – BAT makes them all in-house to prevent leaks of its recipes to its rivals.

We are given smell sticks dipped in condensed liquid and asked to identify the flavours. The first one just smells of citrus. “It’s coconut and lime,” one of the flavourists says. Then we are invited to try one of the pouches, which we briefly slip on to our gums.

A flavourist explains that the pouches are the same coconut and lime flavour, but the “creaminess” of the coconut is designed to come out with the pouch. Strangely enough, it does.

Why do the flavours have to be so appealing? A stock criticism of vaping products is that young people are tempted to try their dessert-like flavours.

“The products have to be appealing to adults, as well as satisfying, or smokers won’t switch to them,” says Murphy, who insists BAT never targets children with its products.

[ European market ‘flooded’ with unsafe vapes, EU anti-fraud chief says ]

There are more than 300 scientists working across the entire Southampton site, including about 80 PhD graduates. Upstairs in another building is another lab, where BAT’s scientists test their products health claims and compare them with cigarettes.

The lift shaft up to the lab is part covered with the photocopied front pages of scientific papers that, Murphy says, are derived from his team’s academic research. Yet most medical and science journals refuse to publish them, due to their authors’ connection to the industry. Murphy says he wants the lift shaft covered all the way up to the top.

Before we go upstairs, BAT shows me a blizzard of bar charts and data analyses, which it claims proves that its smokeless products are far less harmful and are correlated with the lower smoking and cancer rates in the countries where such products are prevalent.

They show me graphs claiming a correlation between reductions in coronary hospitalisations in Japan and the spread of smokeless products. Others refer to Sweden, where the number of smokers is down to about 5 per cent of adults.

In Ireland, the corresponding number is 18.2 per cent, while in the UK (where smokeless rules are slightly looser) it is 12.8 per cent.

“We may sell our last cigarette in Sweden by the end of the decade,” it says on one of the BAT slides. Another concludes that, regarding exposure to toxicants and medical outcomes, “ONP [oral nicotine pouch] exposure is comparable to quitting [smoking]”.

These are the type of claims that are originated and tested in the lab upstairs. A BAT scientist, Chris Junker, shows me a machine in the lab that can “smoke” 25 cigarettes (or suck 25 vapes) at a time, pulling the contents on to material pads for analysis.

Downstairs, other BAT scientists show me more of the company’s smokeless products, such as Vuse vapes, Virto heated tobacco devices (“big in Japan”) and Granit tobacco snus (sold only in Sweden).

Afterwards, we retire to a room near Murphy’s office, where he stakes his claim for why countries such as Ireland should embrace THR – code for a more relaxed regime for smokeless nicotine products.

“The US, Japan, New Zealand: wherever governments embrace THR policies, your prevalence of smoking reduces much faster,” he says.

“Nicotine is not the problem from a health and risk perspective. It’s combustion that produces the toxicants. There will always be people who want to use stimulants, whether that be nicotine, caffeine or alcohol.”

Murphy says it “pains” him that the Irish Government rejects the industry’s arguments about THR. He complains that nobody will look at the industry’s research: “I struggle to think of a single scientific body in Ireland that we could go to, to talk about this on a scientific basis. The tobacco control lobby is very entrenched.”

Later, I ask the Irish Heart Foundation to respond to some of the tobacco industry’s claims around THR. The foundation’s interim director of advocacy, Mark Murphy, says the industry “should have no reason to be involved in the public health” agenda. “Their interest lies in their bottom line, not in the sake of what is good public health policy,” he says.

“The concept of tobacco harm reduction [THR] is a term that has been hijacked by the industry to push their novel nicotine products as ‘smoking-cessation devices’, when in fact we know that many novel nicotine products such as ecigarettes actually act as a gateway to smoking for young people.”

He cites State research showing that adolescents who vape are up to five times more likely to start smoking tobacco than those who don’t. He also rejects the industry’s Sweden arguments, insisting there is “no evidence” that its lower smoking rates are down to a more permissive regime around smokeless nicotine products.

Here, the Department of Health says that under international health frameworks, public health policies should be protected from the “vested interests” of the tobacco industry.

“This is due to the fundamental and irreconcilable conflict between tobacco industry interests and public health interests, and the long history of tobacco industry interference in policymaking,” the department said.

[ Irish diplomats were warned about ‘approaches’ from Big Tobacco ]

This, it said, made it “inappropriate” for it to engage further with a series of questions about the industry’s claims on smokeless products.

Meanwhile, Sweden continues to enjoy lower smoking and cancer rates than the rest of Europe, it is argued.

At BAT, James Murphy is adamant that, despite its vested interest, the company’s claims on the link with Sweden’s permissive smokeless regime hold up to scrutiny.

On the way out, I notice a mission statement painted on the BAT facility’s wall, promising “a better tomorrow, achieved via stakeholder acceptance of THR”.

The industry keeps pushing its claims, while its critics keep pushing back.

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