
Welcome Back, Big Tobacco
Big Tobacco spent decades denying that cigarettes killed anyone, and now the same companies are pouring money into e-cigarettes and marketing them as the safer choice. This episode of the fifth estate, hosted by Mark Kelley, travels to British American Tobacco's research labs, where the company has put roughly 800 million dollars into developing vaping products, and presses a research and development representative on whether a tobacco company can be trusted to regulate a product that threatens its own cigarette sales. Kelley also visits England, which has embraced e-cigarettes as harm reduction, to see what a more permissive regulatory model looks like in practice, and asks whether Canada should follow. Interviews include doctors who see vaping as a public health tool, ex-smokers who credit it with getting them off cigarettes, and Canadian health officials still withholding endorsement while five million Canadians keep smoking. Health Canada's pending regulatory decision, and the current ban keeping Big Tobacco out of the domestic e-cigarette market, frame the stakes running through the film.