Electronic cigarettes are becoming more popular with today’s youth. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, high school students’ use of e-cigarettes grew 2.8 percent in 2012. Arizona legislators, law enforcement officials and anti e-cigarette advocates recently worked to pass legislation limiting sales of the surrogate smokes to ages 18 and over. They’re hoping the Arizona law might become a national model.
Dr. Sara Bode, a member of Arizona’s chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics, said the law that took effect in Arizona in September sends an important message that e-cigarettes still deliver nicotine that impairs memory and can lead to cigarette smoking and other addictions.
Is this one case where what’s good for Arizona is good for the rest of the country?
In September, Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne and 39 other attorneys general sent a letter asking the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to expand to e-cigarettes the current prohibition on advertising and marketing tobacco products to youth.
And where once it was easy for minors to buy these tasty non-tobacco products, the law is showing its teeth.
The Arizona Attorney General’s Office’s Counter Strike program, which uses youth volunteers to identify stores selling tobacco products to minors, has expanded its efforts to include e-cigarettes, said Erika Mansur, an assistant attorney general.
So far, 12 retailers have been fined for selling e-cigarettes to the minors, while another eight have been fined for selling minors e-hookah, another device that vaporizes nicotine, Mansur said.
We’d like to think that parent’s are doing their part and explaining the potential harm that these e-cigs can do, but that involves talking to their children. I guess kids can argue that the peach and strawberry flavors are so addicting, and it’s too late to quit. Do they make children’s e-cigarette patches or flavored bubble gum?
(via Cronkite News Service)
This article appears in Nov 21-27, 2013.
And why can’t kids get e-cigarettes that don’t have nicotine in them? Kids have pretend drinks all the time, like Shirley Temples, Roy Rodgers and Ginger Beer and play pretend with adult beverages. Kids pretend to drive in toy cars and they play with toy guns. How is flavored water vapor any different? Yes, nicotine should be regulated, but e-cigarettes? really?
They are probably more concerned with the e-cigs that have nicotine, which is most of them.
Anyone can get e-cig juice with zero mg nicotine, at least at Freedom Smoke. But how do you regulate that? The two are a little harder to tell apart than water & vodka. Freedom Smoke at least self-regulates: nobody under 18 is allowed in the store, nor to my knowledge have they ever been. I know many “vapers” but only a few choose nicotine-free; there’s one non-smoker who wants to vape socially for novelty (300+ flavors), and ex-smokers who’ve used an e-cig to successfully taper nicotine use down to nothing but have yet to kick the vaping habit entirely. I doubt e-cigs were invented to give minors an alternative to candy (although propylene glycol may well be better for their teeth), but as William Gibson so elegantly put it, “the street finds its own uses for things.”