Lord Strathcarron (Non-Afl)

My Lords, on the first day of this Committee, there was agreement among all noble Lords that the Bill was about public health. The purpose of these amendments, to which I have added my name, is to show that handmade cigars, pipe tobacco and nasal tobacco pose undetectable threats to public health and that they, through no fault of their own, have been caught up in the net meant for a very different type of tobacco product—mass-produced inhaled cigarettes. Amendment 106 defines what a handmade cigar is. It is an individual, artisanal product, made entirely of specially grown and cured tobacco leaves, and almost exclusively in friendly Caribbean countries, in what could be thought of as cottage industries—in our terms. By contrast, mass-produced cigarettes contain tobacco that has been treated by a moisture controller such as glycerol or sorbitol, a sugar such as sucrose or an invert sugar, preservatives such as sodium benzoate or potassium sorbate, and reconstituted tobacco binders such as guar gum or carboxymethyl cellulose. All these are then wrapped in paper that has been bleached white with hydrogen peroxide and had added to it potassium or sodium nitrate to make the cigarette burn evenly. All these are inhaled through a filter usually made from cellulose acetate fibres. None of these ingredients can be found in a handmade cigar. As with the difference in content between a handmade cigar and a mass-produced cigarette, the same extreme differences can be found in the manufacturing process. Whereas modern cigarette-making machines can make up to 100,000 cigarettes a minute, a torcedor or artisan cigar roller can make only between 25 and 100 cigars a day, depending on the length and gauge of the cigars that he or she is rolling that day. Just as mass-produced cigarettes and handmade cigars are different products made in different ways, so is how they are smoked. The most obvious and significant difference is that mass-produced cigarettes are inhaled, whereas handmade cigars are not inhaled. In fact, the reason cigarettes are so heavily treated with additives and chemicals is to make them inhalable and therefore addictive. That is where and how the damage is done. Again, none of this public health damage applies to handmade cigars.