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If this is a medical device for ending addiction, do we really need to have fruit/candy flavors lining the shelf in colorful bottles with cartoon mascots?
People weren't smoking fruit/candy cigarettes. Those were banned and nowadays only barely exist. No reason to have vape flavors beyond cigarette flavors, if they are a medical tool.
Just looking at vape products on a store shelf is proof that the producers do NOT think about their product as a medical device. That entire argument, that it is primarily a tool for breaking a smoking habit, should be categorically dismissed. If it were a BTC or prescription-only product for breaking a smoking habit, no reasonable person would have negative opinions about it.
The reality is, vaping's primary purpose is as a drug. An addictive drug that makes the user feel good to use and has certain provable short- and long-term side-effects.
I think people should be able to buy and use drugs. But only with informed consent. So long as the information is so poor around vaping, the consent isn't informed and we need regulations. And if this is a drug, it should be getting sold in an appropriate dispensary by trained, knowledgeable staff and not from corner stores, bodegas, and sketchy website that don't even properly screen out teen buyers.
Oh give over. Nice flavors are one of the things that get people off of cigarettes. If it stank of tobacco one of the big benefits for switching (not stinking all the time) would be gone. Adults like fruits too.
I agree the advertising needs to be cut back to a similar level as cigarettes. Plain white boxes with brand and flavors for example. But to outright ban flavors is a knee jerk reaction that sounds good but would cause more harm than good. I don't think it needs to be licensed dispensaries either. Vaping is way less harmful than alcohol yet we sell that in corner shops.
Cutting down on selling to kids needs to be done for sure. How exactly that can be done effectively is tricky. It was very illegal to buy cigarettes when I was at school yet hundreds of kids managed to pull it off anyway. Short of requiring ID at point of sale and unique barcodes to identify which products were sold to whom by whom I reckon kids will find a way to get alcohol, drugs, vapes, and all the other shit we wish they didn't have.
Putting in measures that mean fewer adults switch is guaranteed to lead to more deaths from smoking related illnesses. Harm reduction should be at the core of any policies around smoking and vaping. We don't want to lose the gains we've made in cutting down on tobacco use because of some moral panic about strawberry flavours.
You've applied an argument I didn't make to what I said.
If these are medical devices used to ween off cigarettes, they don't need to be flavored. The alternative is cigarettes. People aren't grabbing the next cigarette because they love the strawberry daiquiri flavor. The fact that they are basically all flavored is proof that anti-addiction is not their primary purpose.
I didn't say they shouldn't be flavored. I said the flavors are proof of what they are.
What if the outcome of that analysis is that the people being brought off cigarettes are not being outweighed by the people being brought into vaping? That vapes should be prescription medical devices for people who need them and not OTC feelgood drugs? Would you still make the same argument that harm reduction is foremost? I have a feeling you won't.
There's a perfectly coherent argument that tobacco trends were heading towards extinction until vaping reignited things. All the trends were heading that way. It was largely dying out as a habit among young people. Vaping completely changed that. It's now a growing sector that has the potential to last for a long time and damage a lot of people. And we are still only in the early days of seeing how harmful it is -- but just like with cigarettes, there's a huge apparatus pushing out an information campaign that they're Good Actually and Not Unsafe At All (TM).
I don't think you and I really disagree on any particular policy prescriptions here. I bet we want the same things, and want the same level of honesty brought to the debate. I just think we need to be very clear that the "vapes as useful medical devices" argument does not justify the "vapes being sold abso-fucking-lutely everywhere" result we're currently getting. They are not popular because they are medical devices. Their usefulness as medical devices isn't a significant part of the business model.