Governments shouldn’t let e-cigarettes be targeted at kids

By Medicine Hat News Opinon on November 20, 2018.

Tobacco manufacturers have long known the recipe for luring kids into smoking cigarettes: add fruit or candy flavours to the products, then spend a fortune on “cool” advertising.

So it’s no surprise that as the cigarette market was tanking because of vigorous anti-smoking campaigns, bans and taxes, the tobacco giants aimed their marketing guns on e-cigarettes. After all, there’s billions to be made on the devices and — bonus! — e-cigarettes are a gateway to tobacco use.

The U.S. is restricting the sale of flavoured e-cigarettes to kids, and Hong Kong plans to ban their sale completely.

The surprise is how long it’s taken governments to respond to the threat of an entire new generation becoming hooked on a highly addictive substance.

Now, at last, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has sensibly lit a bomb under e-cigarette manufacturers, restricting the sale of the most flavoured e-cigarettes to stores that prohibit minors altogether or that include sections that bar them. That means most convenience stores can’t sell them.

Contrast that with the approach of the Ford government, which has made it easier, not harder, for Big Tobacco to target kids.

It did so last July when it postponed implementation of a regulation that would have banned the promotion of vaping products in Ontario convenience stores, even though seven other provinces already do that.

The government should reverse its stance, before it’s too late. Statistics for teen vaping on both sides of the border are trending alarmingly upwards — by an alarming 78 per cent in the last year in the U.S. — as is tobacco use.

Health Canada should step up to the bar, too, and ban all flavoured e-cigarettes, as the FDA had threatened to do (in the end, it stopped short of that).

Targeting kids for a life of addiction should not be allowed. Ontario should catch up with the U.S. and other provinces.