As we continue our exciting transformational journey, one of Imperial’s most important ambitions is building a healthier future for our consumers.
How do we intend going about accomplishing this?
By focusing on improving their health outcomes through our commitment to making a meaningful contribution to harm reduction.
As a passionate challenger business committed to consumer choice, we’re offering increasing numbers of our adult smokers a wide portfolio of Next Generation Products, or NGP .
Both our own - and independent - scientific evidence suggests they’re all potentially significantly harm reduced compared to continuing to smoke cigarettes.
To better set the scene though, it’s helpful to unpick the differences between tobacco, nicotine and smoking as there continues to be a lot of confusion - and misinformation - around these topics.
Nicotine is a naturally occurring product of the tobacco plant. It’s also found in, among others, potatoes, tomatoes and aubergines (albeit at lower levels).
Nicotine’s also a stimulant, much like caffeine - which comes from the coffee plant.
Public health experts, including the US FDA and Public Health England, have concluded nicotine is addictive.
However, they also agree it’s the smoke created by tobacco combustion that contains most of the hundred-plus harmful chemicals responsible for smoking-related disease.
This is a crucial distinction.
While our NGP all contain nicotine, advances in science and technology mean they don’t have to combust (burn) tobacco to deliver it to users anymore.
Our scientific research has demonstrated our NGP therefore produce substantially fewer and lower levels of the harmful chemicals in cigarette smoke.
This evaluation - what we call product characterisation - essentially marks the beginning of each NGP’s journey across our rigorous scientific assessment framework to substantiate their harm reduction potential.
To help better communicate the harm reduction potential of each NGP relative to cigarettes, we’ve created an illustrative representation of the current scientific evidence - the relative risk scale.
It explains that our portfolio of NGP possess many different characteristics. For instance, some contain tobacco, others don’t. Some deliver nicotine via lung inhalation; others deliver it via the gum linings.
These characteristics determine their respective positions on the scale.
Crucially, though, no NGP involves tobacco combustion and the generation of harmful smoke. This means they’re all potentially significantly harm reduced, relative to continuing to smoke cigarettes.
We’re firm in saying that the best course of action adult smokers can take to improve their health is not to use any tobacco or nicotine product .
However, millions of adult smokers are either uninterested or unwilling to do this.
Therefore, offering our adult smoker consumers the choice to switch to potentially harm reduced NGP is the next best option.
Interact with the relative risk scale below, or explore in more detail on our dedicated science website.
I would then embed the interactive relative risk scale from the science website (here: Our NGPs - Imperial Brands Science)
