Mexico will challenge the protection of Philip Morris to sell vapers: “It’s more harmful than cigarettes”

The legal protection that allows the company Philip Morris so that it can market vapers and electronic cigarettes in Mexico “is an attack on (public) health”, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador criticized this Friday, announcing that his government will challenge the decision.

“Yesterday, for example, a magistrate granted an injunction to Philip Morris, because since we banned the vapers, the magistrate decided to grant protection to the company, against health, arguing that the free market is violated. And where is the health?” said the president in the morning at the National Palace.

Judicial protection has been endorsed by the magistrates of the Twenty-second Collegiate Court in administrative matters of the first circuit. With this, the company releases the decision of the federal government that prohibits the sale and marketing of this type of product in Mexico. And it is that a study carried out by the Federal Commission for the Prevention against Health Risks (Cofepris) indicates that the vapers contain over 30 chemicals, many of which are carcinogenic.

“These multinationals spend a lot of money on advertising and what they call lobbying, which is really smuggling, but a lot of money on lobbying, on smuggling, on bribing everyone left behind. Of course, we will challenge this resolution, this decision.

He claimed that there are enough elements to prevent the commercialization of this type of product.

“They say they have about five substances and they are not harmful, but no, an investigation was carried out and about thirty substances were found, very harmful, even carcinogenic. Now, to the specialists of the Cofepris of emphasize that it is more harmful than cigarettes,” he said.