Tobacco companies have lessons to learn from the PPI scandal

10 Sep 2019 Tobacco companies have lessons to learn from the PPI scandal

Posted at 18:31h in Tobacco by Daniela Carosio

“The bill for the UK’s payment protection insurance scandal has climbed past £50bn”says Financial Times. And this, as written in the article, makes it one of biggest consumer mis-selling scandals of all time.

The scandal involved mortgage and credit card customers’ shadowy insurances that were enormously profitable for banks and enormously misleading for customers. The ending of this long scandal, that dates back to 1998 but is coming to an end today, comes as another consumer scandal might be about to emerge.

US health regulators, in fact, are starting to link unexplained lung diseases to vaping, but tobacco industry has always been reluctant to admit its alleged faults. More than 450 people across 33 states have recently reported lung illnesses tied to vaping and at least 5 people have died. But information on this topic is still vague, as previously mentioned, so it was not possible to identify the exact element that causes diseases, nor blaming someone in particular.

In fact, information and advertising on vapes claim them to be safer than common cigarettes. Electronic cigarettes has become incredibly popular, especially with young adults. Nowadays, more teenagers use e-cigarettes than regular cigarettes, experts say. But e-cigarettes contains nicotine, which causes addiction (both to cigarettes and drugs) and brain underdevelopment; besides nicotine, vapes contain many other harmful substances that are dangerous for health, especially during young age.

Something else that is important to remark, moreover, is that FDA is acting slowly in regulating e-cigarettes and to warn companies to be less misleading in describing those products as safe: if the regulator does not protect consumer from companies and “companies from themselves”, another PPI scandal might be just around the corner.