Baroness Finlay of Llandaff (CB)

My Lords, I too support the amendment, and I have a question for those who have tabled it, which relates to proposed new subsection (2)(b), saying the product is “not intended to be inhaled or chewed”. I am afraid that as someone who has been looking at tobacco control measures for many years now, through legislation, I am slightly concerned that, as we get rid of one thing, the nicotine manufacturers will find another way of bringing in a substance that is, in effect, addictive, which is promoted to young people, and is a way to get them started on the inevitable chain of addiction that leads to promotion. When we look at the evidence around nicotine, we see that, yes, it is highly addictive, but the other thing that happens with an addictive substance is that you become tolerant to the effect, to that boost. Therefore, the addict seeks higher and higher doses to get a greater and greater hit. In the long term, as my noble friend Lord Patel pointed out, it is not only blood pressure and so on; there is a problem with platelet stickiness. We do not know what this will do in the microvasculature in the brain in the long term, because these high-dose nicotine products have not been around long enough and we have not had enough brains that have come to post-mortems—I am sorry to put it so bluntly—of people who have been using them for a long time. The hit that they get is greater than they would get from smoking a cigarette.