GFN is the only international conference to focus on the role of safer nicotine products that help people switch from smoking. Safer nicotine products include e-cigarettes, oral tobaccos such as Swedish snus, and ‘heat-not-burn’ tobacco products. This is a rapidly evolving area with many new non-combustible products emerging. The rapid development and use of safer nicotine products raises a number of challenging scientific questions about their safety, who uses them and why, and the impact on smoking. These products also raise challenges for governments who seek to understand what kind of policy and regulation is appropriate. The meeting will examine the rapidly developing science in relation to nicotine and its use, including policy and regulatory responses.

This is the only global event that welcomes all stakeholders involved with new and safer nicotine products, including consumers and consumer advocates, policy analysts, public health experts, parliamentarians, academics, media, and manufacturers and distributors. We aim to get together the many people who might otherwise not have the opportunity to speak with each other. Unique among conferences on nicotine and smoking we ensure that consumer and consumer advocacy organisations participate as well as manufactures. These groups are often excluded from international meetings and events.

Smoking tobacco is the most harmful way of using nicotine. It is the tars and gasses in cigarette smoke that are harmful to health. Many people find it hard to stop smoking because they find it hard to go without nicotine. Making available power risk products helps people switch from smoking and this avoid the risk of smoking – this in known as ‘tobacco harm reduction’.

Many different groups are involved in or affected by these developments including consumers - people who have switched to these products or are thinking of doing so - academics and researchers, who are faced with new research questions about the safety and use of these products, parliamentarians and government officials, who need to consider what kind of regulation is appropriate, manufactures, involved in developing and marketing new products, and public health experts who need to advise populations about smoking and safer nicotine products.

The theme for the conference is ‘Rethinking Nicotine’. The organisers believe that this reflects the appetite that now exists to examine the changing patterns of use and the emerging science relating to nicotine.

The first conference was held in 2014 and this year we see the fourth annual renewal. All the conferences to date have been in Warsaw.

The conference is funded by registration fees and does not receive any sponsorship from manufacturers, distributors or retailers of nicotine products, including pharmaceutical, electronic cigarette and tobacco companies.