Profile in Courage: Dr. Colin Mendelsohn 

For most of the 1.2 billion cigarette smokers around the world, quitting is no easy feat. Even relatively effective quit-smoking aids such as nicotine patches have a 6-month success rate of less than 20 percent. Studies have repeatedly found that e-cigarettes are far more effective than traditional therapies in getting smokers to quit, all while being more than 95 percent safer than cigarettes. Yet, critics (including taxpayer-funded organizations) have been busy pedaling misinformation on vaping in an effort to stymie availability. 

Fortunately, a cadre of brave advocates have stepped into the fray to advocate for harm reduction.  However, from the media to academics to policymakers, these tobacco harm reduction advocates are subjected to brutal attacks. For some odd reason, those who have dedicated their time to helping adults transition to less harmful alternatives to cigarettes are unworthy of praise that those who promote other live-saving technologies receive. This is especially true in countries such as Australia, which imposes steep tobacco taxes and has essentially banned tobacco harm reduction products from the commercial market.

Dr. Colin Mendelsohn is uniquely aware of this. For more than two decades, as a general practitioner, Dr. Mendelsohn helped many adults quit smoking. First, through traditional tobacco control practices and products, then utilizing modern tobacco harm reduction innovations, including e-cigarettes. And for that work alone, he is a Profile in Courage. 

From the start, Dr. Mendelsohn knew he wanted to help people. After graduating as a doctor from the University of Sydney in 1976 with honors, he went to work serving as a physician with a special interest in smoking cessation. Dr. Mendelsohn started his career long before e-cigarettes hit the shelves. While there were some highly experimental patented prototypes, the first commercially-successful vaping device wasn’t invented until the early 2000s. In this pre-vaping era, only holistic behavioral interventions would prove successful in getting smokers to kick their deadly habit. As Dr. Mendelsohn noted in a 1990 letter to the editor published in The Medical Journal of Australia, “there is no evidence that minimal interventions will be widely adopted…a [non-intensive] programme with a very modest success rate of 4.3% is unlikely to inspire widespread confidence.” 

The advent of vaping would shake up the status-quo by making it far easier for cigarette smokers to quit. Years before this mainstream recognition, Dr. Mendelsohn was telling anyone who would listen about the relative health benefits of vaping. In a 2015 peer-reviewed article in Medicine Today, he and co-author Dr. Coral Gartner noted, “Increasing numbers of tobacco smokers in Australia are using ECs [e-cigarettes] to quit or reduce smoking…The limited evidence so far suggests that ECs may be effective smoking cessation aids; their use appears substantially safer than smoking, although there are no long-term safety data at present.” 

As Dr. Mendelsohn remarked in June 2024, he gets called “lots of interesting names.” From Tweedledum to the “Energizer Bunny of vaping promotion,” Dr. Mendelsohn has taken the personal attacks in stride. Retiring multiple times, Dr. Mendelsohn announced his final retirement from tobacco harm reduction advocacy, which he has proudly done for 10 years. Noting that his “two previous attempts at retirement were not successful,” Dr. Mendelsohn is “finally mak[ing] the break this time!” 

His retirement is bittersweet for tobacco harm reduction proponents, and the 1 billion adults who smoke globally, as it is well-known how draconian policies create utter chaos in what could be a well-regulated and controlled tobacco and harm reduction marketplace. 

As noted by Dr. Mendelsohn, “Australia policy has been an extraordinary failure, driven by a moral panic about youth vaping, widespread misinformation and denial of the scientific evidence.” Australia is a perfect example of what other countries should not do. Excessive excise taxes on combustible cigarettes have led to a massive illegal market, sparking modern tobacco wars, including reoccurring fire bombings of tobacco retail shops. The prescription-only model for obtaining e-cigarettes is also providing “another significant stream of revenue” for organized crime groups in the island country. 

Things have hardly been better in the U.S. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has received tobacco product applications for more than 26 million deemed tobacco products, largely e-cigarette and vapor devices. The agency has claimed to have made determinations on more than 99 percent of those 26 million applications. These decisions have almost all been rejections. The Taxpayers Protection Alliance recently filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court urging changes to the FDA’s system for evaluating vaping products, but the outcome remains to be seen.

While Dr. Mendelsohn may not be as active in tobacco harm reduction advocacy, his work has left an imprint that has helped many adults understand tobacco harm reduction, as well as the process of making the switch to safer alternatives to smoking. In 2021, he authored Stop Smoking Start Vaping: The Healthy Truth About Vaping. Using simple terms and language, Stop Smoking, Start Vaping… “outlines the scientific evidence” about vaping in language that can be understood in an effort for adults to “make an informed decision” about whether vaping could work for them.

But, with a new generation of advocates inspired by leaders such as Dr. Mendelsohn, the future for harm reduction can only be bright. TPA thanks this Profile in Courage for his service to the 1 billion adults around the world who smoke.