GREG BEAULIEU
Not only does Jim Vibert seem to conflate smoking with vaping in his Nov. 16 column, “E-cigs create new generation of addicts,” but the hyperbole that he attributes to the World Health Organization’s opinions on the tobacco industry meets its match in some of the other statements he makes.
While containing the usual sobriquets like “Big Tobacco” — I always assume that a writer using “Big” anything has simply run out of actual reasoned arguments — and the usual dire predictions by the activist groups whose continued existence depends upon having smoking dragons to slay, this column is woefully short on actual facts.
Make no mistake — like him, I feel that smoking is something that we would all be better off without. Its harms have been well documented. But vaping is not that, nor have harms related to it been well studied or reported clinically to any extent.
The reality is that there have been very few such reports, and we don’t typically call for strident action on something that has no proof of harm attached to it. Saying that “it hasn’t been proven safe” is an argument not made against many other things for good reason. If that is the new bar that needs to be cleared, good luck seeing very many new products of any sort.
The elephant in the room is of course the THC vaping crisis reported in the U.S., which resulted in a lot of hysteria and breathless coverage in the media for a while, until the facts around it began to come out.
But let’s be clear: those were related to a completely different product — one obtained on the black market and not manufactured commercially, not what people using nicotine e-cigs are using.
It seems, though, that the anti-smoking groups that testified at Province House before the standing committee on health are using the U.S. incidents to try to scare legislators into taking some ill-advised action here.
To that point, Mr. Vibert goes off the rails early on when he reports “Studies show that, at a minimum, one in five youthful e-cigarette users will graduate to old-fashioned combustible, carcinogenic smokes.”
Now, he doesn’t say what studies make this rather astonishing claim considering that this is still a fairly new activity, nor what it is based on.
But with even a moment’s thought, this should raise some serious doubts. This isn’t the 1970s when cigarettes were cheap and smoking was accepted just about everywhere. Smoking is now at record-low levels. This generation has been indoctrinated from an early age that cigarettes are bad if not outright evil — not necessarily an incorrect thing. They are also fiendishly expensive, along with having all the negatives they have always had relating to stink, fire risk, health, and doing harm to those around them.
Given all that, does anyone seriously think that any significant percentage of vapers is going to move on from what they are using now to that? I would think not, nor would most people, except for those who are employed by organizations that exist to slay smoking dragons. The claim fails the reasonableness test.
Many of the other statements in the column also fail that test. Of course the percentage increase in those using the devices has increased “at an alarming rate” (though we don’t know what that actually means) when you are starting from near-zero.
Saying that youth in this province vape at twice the national average is preposterous on its face, but again, we do not have any credible figures to back up that statement.
Suggesting raising the legal age to 21 from 19 simply baffles me, given that alcohol and marijuana, both not only harmful when used to excess but also intoxicating and leading to impaired functioning even in lower doses, are deemed OK for 19-year-olds.
Also, given that these types of organizations all use the same basic playbook, it is not surprising that they point to flavours as being an issue, given how public health’s anti-alcohol troops used the same argument. Both ignore the fact that flavours that may appeal to an 18-year-old also appeal to a 21-year-old, or for that matter, to a 60 year-old. Finally, he closes with the predictable argument that we need to “protect kids” and that government needs to step up to do that.
There is little question that the product and those who sell it need regulations, which is why those already exist. Maybe they need some loopholes tightened, or another look at how the products are marketed.
But good luck trying to prevent kids from doing something dumb, illicit or illegal if they collectively deem it a cool activity. Look at the examples of underage drinking, or weed, or for that matter, eating Tide pods. This “crisis” strikes me more as opportunism by those in the anti-smoking business to expand their reach and keep the grant money flowing by equating e-cigs to the real thing and creating a new dragon to slay, in the absence of precious little evidence of actual problems.
Hopefully, government will resist the urge to make things worse by enacting ill-advised measures on what is actually a beneficial thing for smokers who are trying to quit those evil cigarettes. Sometimes the best thing for governments to do in the face of activists is just to move on to the next issue. I urge them not to mess this up.
Greg Beaulieu lives in Dartmouth.
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