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hat’s happening in nicotine policy isn’t particularly well covered by the mainstream media. We don’t mean that as an insult to the mainstream media: there’s a lot going on in the world and there’s only so much headspace a journalist can devote to what is – if we’re being honest – a niche within a niche.
The problem is, if you do want to follow it closely, especially if, like us, you believe harm reduction can save millions of lives, there isn’t really anywhere to go. That’s the gap Clearing the Air is here to fill.
We're Peter and Neil
and we’ve worked together in the safer nicotine products world for over a decade; Peter focused on lobbying and regulation, and Neil on business and marketing. When we saw this information gap we wanted to fill, we asked for – and somehow managed to get – financial support from the Consumer Choice Center. Some of you will groan at that, and that’s your right, but it lets us do what we do and we make no apology for it.
And yes, we are biased in favour of harm reduction and keeping safer nicotine products of all shapes and sizes on the market. We both got into this as former smokers who quit unexpectedly with vaping, so what would you expect? We ran E-cigarette Forum and vaping.com together, which was at the time the largest vaping community on the planet. Peter also spent some time working at JUUL – a large vape manufacturer in the US. We don’t claim to be impartial.
Clearing the Air is editorially independent: no-one approves our journalism other than us before it gets released to the world. We’ve been lucky enough to see quite a lot of growth since inception. We aren’t a consumer organisation, we don’t have members and we don’t try to meet politicians. We just want to help nicotine users who appreciate safer products know what’s going on in their world.
AI Policy
We sometimes use AI tools to help us work more efficiently – things like digging through research or checking grammar – but everything you read here is written and edited by real people. The words, opinions and arguments are entirely our own.