This is very, very stupid.
JUUL is about the only nicotine containing E-cigarette that is regulated adequately. Other disposable cartridges, electronic cigarettes etc are of dubious quality, have not been subject to standardized testing etc.
In Australia, e-cigarettes containing nicotine are banned. Importing nicotine containing E-liquid can result in a long jail sentence. As a result every second tobacconist sells unregulated carts under the counter to anyone who can afford them, even if the user is underage.
Hence every three months or so the news will cover sensationalist stories of how a seven year old was huffing on a cartridge, overdosed on nicotine and had a seizure! Clearly vapes are worse than cigarettes despite the wide breadth of literature on our hands indicative electronic cigarettes are harmful, but likely only to a fraction of a degree relative to combustible tobacco products!
There is a moral uproar/panic over these devices because… well… kids are using them, just as kids were smoking cigarettes before vapes phased them out.
These were devices that were marketed to kids using cool flavours like “bubblegum” and “strawberry”. These devices are also stronger while being not quite as harsh as conventional cigarettes. They also remove many of the restrictions places amongst smokers. They are relatively odourless, and the odour doesn’t stick hence they are easier to get away with using in front of people who would otherwise be irritated by the stench of tobacco.
I don’t believe politicians care about vaping, rather they’re pretending to care in order to come across as virtuous. If politicians actually cared they would have swooped in to ban blatantly marketing towards kids the second these products came up on the radar.
In Australia vapes were banned because they undercut profits made from tobacco excise. With a packet of 25 cigarettes costing around 50$, how could you have vapes on the market that contain 20 cigarettes worth of nicotine being sold for 10-20$? Doesn’t matter whether it’s a preferential outcome to people smoking or not, it’s a detriment to the amount of money politicians are making dammit!
Vaping is highly addictive, and detrimental health outcomes are likely associated with long term use. BUT going from the data we have, the comparison between combustible tobacco and vaping is heavily in favour of e-cigarettes.
However unregulated products, of which are contaminated with numerous toxins plausibly not present in brand names like JUUL are leading to a cascade of sensationalist case reports shifting the general onus onto generalized electronic cigarettes.
I don’t think we have an epidemic of vaping related pathology on our hands, this will likely take decades to come to fruition as vaping disproportionately targets an otherwise young and previously in-good health demographic.
You want kids to stop vaping? Remove the fruity flavours and regulate the products as to ascertain kids aren’t getting their hands on them. Restoring the onus back to the black market to produce these products almost ensures kids will be the primary demographics procuring these items.
You can’t out police everything. Australia has tried this with tobacco, and while our smoking rate is relatively low it hasn’t decreased in almost a decade. Australias low smoking rate has to do with bans on where you can/can’t smoke, in North Sydney this has culminated to a blanket rule of “you can’t smoke anywhere”, including rental properties… can’t smoke inside, can’t smoke outside etc. I don’t agree with this practice, but if this is the hill authorities want to die on so be it.
If anyone wants to fool themselves into thinking low smoking rates are a by-product of plain packaging and price hikes, why does America and Australia have a similar rate of smokers despite Australia being infinitesimally stricter over tobacco control?
In Australia, increasing the price of tobacco up into the stratosphere coupled with banning vapes has created a paradigm enabling a black market to flourish. Don’t want to pay 50$ for a pack of 25 or 120$ for a 50 gram pouch? Well every third corner store sells massive ziplock baggies of tobacco grown by local bikie gangs for a fraction of the price. Why pay 50$ for 25 when you could be paying 20$ for 100+ cigarettes? The seller won’t even ask how old you are!
You’d think we’d learn from past practices that were both ineffective and led to worse outcomes.
It’s about reducing harm from an epidemiological perspective, NOT about making sure children can hurt themselves. If one wants to quip back and tell me the ban is about ‘morals’, where is the moral panic about alcohol and cigarettes? The reason people get addicted to vaping and cigarettes are mediated by identical variables. So why are we choosing to shit all over the one that isn’t as bad for you while we leave the other one alone?
Even if you could reduce the prevalence of people vaping, do you think it’d lead to a stagnation of nicotine intake? Or would it lead to a massive uptick in people taking up smoking again?
Vapes are just another source for nicotine intake. Chewing tobacco, snuss, snuff, cigarettes, cigarillos etc. Aside from cigarettes and cigars all of the above have been banned in Australia for decades unless one imports for personal use, but in the USA this isn’t necessarily the case. What is so uniquely terrifying about vaping as opposed to chewing tobacco, which is also marketed towards kids (big league chew anyone?)