What I don’t understand is how these e cigarettes are accessible to youngsters compared to disallowing cigarettes.
I live in the UK, and I see young teens and people my age in 20s smoking these metal pipe cigarettes, isn’t it just tobacco in liquid form? Shouldn’t this be tightly controlled like regular cigarettes?
How the hell is this drug popular and marketable??
I think that technically the vape solution is nicotine, but not tobacco. They’re “better” in that they don’t have all the side products you get from burning leaves, but it’s still nicotine and there’s now the new mix of vape chemicals that weren’t present in cigarettes. Healthier? Doubtful, but it’s less studied.
As far as teens getting their hands on them, I think this just shows how hilariously ineffective age restrictions are in preventing access to children. If vapes weren’t available, those kids would be smoking cigarettes. If cigarettes weren’t available, they would vape. If both are available (which they are, because there’s no shortage of adults who will sell these things to minors), they’ll use whatever they prefer.
Vaping is winning the popularity war with cigarettes among teenagers. I think that’s all you’re seeing.
In Canada, it’s very illegal to sell cigarettes and vaping products to minors, but it’s not illegal for them to possess or use them. That kind of brain dead gap in legislation makes it easy for politicians to say they did everything they can, and lets police say there’s nothing they can do.
Any doctor will tell you that breathing anything other than air is harmful. Vaping is far and away less harmful than cigarettes, and when used for their intended purpose (smoking cessation), they are absolutely the “healthier” option.
my problem with this argument is always that it neglects the mental, social, and emotional effects of raising nicotine content
physically safer for your airways? sure, but definitely not mentally healthier
*Citation needed
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/e-cigarettes-around-95-less-harmful-than-tobacco-estimates-landmark-review
I would however argue that the barrier of entry is smaller with vapes in a way that it is less of a turn off. Many people don‘t smoke because they think it smells disgusting or they start coughing the first time they smoke. Vapes however smell like fucking strawberry or melon and aren‘t as hard on your throat the first time.
Yeah, it’s definitely more enticing.
“You’re telling me if I inhale this, it tastes like donuts!?”
😂
Another issue is how much easier it is to up your nicotine content. When my little brother started vaping, he went up to the equivalent of a pack of smoke’s worth of nicotine per day within a couple of months.
Whereas I, who got addicted to nicotine the old fashioned way, took a couple years before I was smoking a pack a day, because otherwise I would have been coughing my lungs out.
Kids vaping is often a mental health problem, not a criminal problem. Nicotine is used by people with untreated mental illness to self medicate, and as long as you have kids without adequate access to mental health care you’re going to have kids vaping. From what I can find something like 1/3rd of people who need mental health services in Canada haven’t got the care they needed in the past year. That’s a lot of kids.
Criminalizing selling but not possession is a very basic way of preventing the criminalization of addiction. Throwing a kid with untreated or badly controlled ADHD into juvie, or fining them, or whatever punishment you’re imagining here, is basically the worst way to deal with addiction.
Because I’m sure someone will misconstrue this as me saying it’s okay for kids to vape: it’s not, that’s why they need mental health services, even if it’s ‘only’ for addiction. Criminalizing them doesn’t help them.
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You aren’t in their heads and you have no idea why they’re vaping. If every teen in Germany smokes (doubtful), proportionally teens who have a mental illness will smoke more and be more likely to become addicted, not only because they’re smoking more but because of the brain chemistry at work leading them to smoke to begin with. Self medication isn’t an exaggeration, nicotine acts similarly to MAOIs. It’s a shitty medication substitute.
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Trends like this is like trickle down economics. If the adults find fun in using it the teens will use it, and then the children will catch on. I would argue it being illegal also encourages minors to get it; so even If they enforced it better, there would be people willing to take risks.