Wake up parents! While you were checking your phone, big tobacco hooked your kids on smoking.
I know, smoking? Who does that any more? Haven’t we all seen the Marlboro man with cancer? Those hip, smart ads telling us that we should stop?
Yep, we have. And, because those ads are now plastered with big warnings, the tobacco companies have been promoting vaping. Why? Because seeing vaping ads makes former smokers more likely to smoke cigarettes.
Oh, wait. You mean this whole vaping thing is a smokescreen for promoting more cigarette sales? That’s right. So go ahead and ban the fruit flavors, Mr. President. There’s a new Marlboro man in town, and he’s a fifth grader with a vape pen.
But aren’t vape pens a better alternative than cigarettes? Really? Who told you that? Was it a vaping spokesperson? If you ask John Hopkins, they say this, “we don’t know.” What they do know is that vaping has not been proven to help people quit smoking, that nicotine is as addictive as heroin, and that young people are getting hooked on vaping.
Let’s just look at the nicotine alone in a vape pen. It can profoundly alter an adolescent brain, affecting decision-making and increasing the risk of cognitive impairment and psychiatric disorders. It affects attention and the growing adolescent brain is profoundly sensitive to rewiring by exposure to nicotine, hooking a person for life.
But that doesn’t even matter, because vaping pens are full of we-don’t-know-what solvents. Anything they want to put in there, completely unregulated. We know that a combination of these solvents causes very serious lung disease, but we don’t know which ones and how much you can safely have. In other words, there is no safe dosage for a vape pen. Read my answer on what causes popcorn lung for more information.
The CDC needs to get with the program. They are still promoting vaping for helping smokers quit. But at the same time, they know vaping does horrible things and we don’t know why. It’s time to ban vaping, not just the fruit flavors. We do it when a vegetable might be causing a problem. (Remember the great romaine lettuce ban?)
If we can do it for lettuce, we can do it for a poorly-disguised run around by big tobacco to hook our kids on nicotine. Come on, this should be a no-brainer. Let’s do it before our kids have no brains.
Click to access OSH-2019-E-Cigarette-Print-Ad-508.pdf
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