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??
You may be shocked to learn that teens also sometimes drink beer, use cannabis, and occasionally have sex.
Teens have sex!? When did this start? Must have missed this trend 😞
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What’s even more outrageous is the amount of one-time-use battery vapes that are being sold and are obviously not recycled properly but end up in nature or, at best, in landfills. I don’t get how this is still allowed…
I feel bad when I throw away my empty carts. I wish there was a way to recycle them, maybe bring them to a dispensary that does so, or make a new thing for them at the recycle yard.
Edit: I didn’t know there were reusable ones. It’s not like they’re advertised everywhere. At least I’ve never seen any at any dispo I’ve gone to. 🤷♂️
Man, it’d be great if capitalists didn’t try to capitalize on everything and make everything single use so you have to buy more.
Buy a reusable one
Reusable cartridge? I didn’t know they made those, because no one talks about them ever. Except here, apparently.
I have a battery that I reuse all the time, if that’s what you’re talking about.
I thought you were talking about disposable vapes, if not, apologies.
All good. I call those little all-in-one things “vapes” and just the cartridges “carts” so I can see where it gets confusing.
That said, I really wish there was a way to properly recycle those spent/empty cartridges.
In Australia our tobacco strategy was to effectively ban vapes and price cigarettes out of existence.
The impact to date has created two totally new black markets: one for vapes after people realised anyone could just hop on AliExpress to buy them in bulk and resell for a 2000% markup. They are banned for import, but nicotine is a colourless odourless liquid and there are no rapid tests for it, no capacity to do expensive GCMS testing on all the random freight entering the country from China (our biggest trading partner by far).
The other new black market is for “chop chop”, the colloquial name for unprocessed tobacco illegally grown and sold by gangs for cheaper than regular cigarettes / RYO tobacco.
There’s also been a big increase in violent robberies at tobacco outlets and even gang turf wars over sales of illegally imported or stolen cigarettes. The excise tax is so high that the gangs can extract enormous sales margin and still undercut the market.
Predictably (and contrary to the rest of the western world) tobacco use has gone up nationally over the past couple of years following a significant downtrend lasting several decades. I’m confident that this strategy, which has been bipartisan amongst our 2 major political parties, will be used as a future case study in why prohibition is fucking moronic. It has continuously demonstrated to be a net detriment to public health, in this case related to a totally preventable yet leading cause of premature death and public health spend.
There is literally no logic to it beyond Lovejoy’s Law, except for some false manufactured statistics parroted by our leaders which blatantly ignore scientific consensus.
Vapes are as tightly controlled as cigarettes (at least here in Canada).
The issue is that cigarettes aren’t as tightly regulated as you’d think. Pretty much every town has that one spot where local teens know they won’t get carded for nicotine products.
As far as kids go, at least in my area most teens just sell it to each other through word of mouth and Snapchat
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
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.
no teen i know vapes because of their mental health. right now, Here in germany, every teen I know smokes and occasionally (when having the money) vapes.Its the standard.
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.
I’m a teen myself and so I hang around a lot of them, in my groups everyone smokes usually they started because of their friends and so on. its literally the standard in my field of people, and yes that’s a field with a lot more mentally ill people compared to other groups. So I guess you are sort of right.
people were selling them on the tiktok shop as battery banks.
It is controlled, in most places it’s restricted for people under 18 or 21 depending. It isn’t just liquid tobacco, it’s the nicotine extracted from tobacco (or sweet potatoes) suspended in a solution with food grade vegetable glycerine or food grade propylene glycol. Tobacco has tar and is worse.
Some of it isn’t even that either, some of it is weed (that idk how they process).
Sometimes people can get things illegally. I enjoy weed which is illegal in my state and drank alcohol before I was 21. Other friends I know have done heroin in the past which is certainly illegal.
It’s popular for the same reason other drugs are, people like drugs.
