The European Commission has produced a summary of its public consultation on revising Europe’s nicotine laws, and I suppose I should say something about it. Problem is, it's pretty dry and factual, and there isn’t anything new in it. But what’s really interesting is what they’ve left out.

The consultation was, as Clive Bates put it, “rigged to be impossible to answer for anyone backing tobacco harm reduction as a public health strategy”. And you can see that very clearly in the summary, according to which “22,964 respondents (55.1% of 41,693) disagreed or partly disagreed that measures and policies aimed at protecting people from the effects of tobacco and nicotine consumption and from second-hand smoke and aerosols are beneficial for society”.

Speaking as one of those 22,964 respondents, I do actually think public health measures aimed at protecting people from tobacco smoking are beneficial for society. I’ve said as much on this website more than once. I support measures like plain packaging and advertising bans for cigarettes. But I’m not willing to let the Commission use my answer to help them justify banning the safer nicotine products that got me off cigarettes, so I told them so. And as a result, my view is incorrectly recorded and reported because the Commission made a design choice that makes it impossible to express.

There was another consultation, known as a call for evidence, where people could, and did, express themselves as they wished. The Commission has, inexplicably, chosen to ignore that exercise entirely in its summary. It’s not difficult to see why.

That exercise got double the number of responses - 82,087 (with 89% coming from citizens) compared to the consultation’s 41,694. Its format - a free text box - made it far less fiddly and time consuming for consumers to use (despite the laborious signup process the Commission makes you go through to file anything). And use it they did.

Our analysis of those showed that most respondents didn’t support bans or restrictions on safer nicotine products. But only 20% would oppose restrictions on combustible cigarettes. Like me, they would like to make a distinction between the products that kill you and the products that do not; which is presumably why the Commission very intentionally stopped respondents to the longer consultation from doing so.

Perhaps harm reduction advocates and tobacco control can and should team up against the cigarette trade? I’ve often suggested this, but it’s never worked.

Between the inability of many in the self-professed “public health” space to collaborate with former smokers and the appalling questionnaire design, the consultation itself (where differentiating between reduced risk products and cigarettes is impossible), the picture we see is almost entirely adversarial, and the Commission is keen to paint it as such.

“Citizens believe this” is almost always contrasted with “public authorities and NGOs believe the opposite”. Public authorities and NGOs tend to think tobacco control measure benefit people and society, citizens do not (although many probably would agree that such policies applied to cigarettes are a good idea, but weren’t given the opportunity to say so). Public authorities and NGOs preferred the bans and restrictions than citizens, which does rather make you wonder who these authorities and NGOs think it is they are supposed to represent.

But to me the most interesting was the description of the 954 attachments that were uploaded as part of the consultation. Apparently, the academic community aren’t toeing the Commission’s line that all nicotine products are just as harmful.

While NGOs wanted “a broad revision aligned with the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, encompassing tobacco, nicotine and associated products…[and…more stringent rules on flavours, packaging and advertising”, academics stuck to the science, and “submitted contributions referring to scientific evidence that identified combustion as the primary source of harm and supported risk-proportionate regulation combined with youth-protection measures”.

Consumers, meanwhile, submitted “many short personal statements and letters [which] most frequently described e-cigarettes and other alternatives as products that the contributor considered less harmful and that had helped them stop smoking”.

A disconnect this big between the governed and the governing classes, particularly when those who study nicotine issues for a living stand in opposition to the governing classes, cannot hold. The Commission is at pains to find a reason to ignore the governed, but reality seems to be making that harder.