Vape flavors banned to protect children but marijuana gummies use packaging that mimic popular candy and cereals. What's wrong with this picture?
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SABOTEUR (
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January 3rd, 2023
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26 Answers
Depends.
“vapes” are directly marketed to children, so the appeal of yummy flavors to kids is intentional.
If minors are not legally allowed to buy and eat edibles, then the appeal is unintentional.
That’s what happened to me this past summer. I was given gummies that were bad and they messed me up, but it was by accident.
@ragingloli That’s what you were taught to believe. Flavors we’re introduced to help smokers convert to vaping. As a long time vaper we’ll just have to agree to disagree.
@Dutchess_III Of course. But there seems to be a double standard regarding regulation. A lot of effort was invested toward convincing the public that the only reason vapes had flavors was because they were marketed to children. If that’s so why is marijuana edibles, marketed to look like candy, fruit and cereal not raising the “protect the children” alarm?
Are teens getting addicted to marijuana gummies in the same way that they are getting addicted to vaping?
The stories I heard about children and gummies were that young children were accidentally ingesting them, thinking they were candy. Those aren’t the same circumstances as teens vaping (I did read that 80% of teens who vape started with flavored tobacco products).
@Locke I guess my problem is the justification for banning flavors is flawed. It’s well established that smoking burning tobacco contributes to cancer. Yet cigarettes have not been banned. Automobile accidents kill daily. Nobody is banning driving because some people drive irresponsibly.
The truth is cigarettes, cars and now marijuana generate income in the form of taxes. People converting from smoking to vaping threatens tobacco tax revenue and cancer research money. They could care less about teenagers vaping. If they DID cigarettes would have been banned a long time ago. The “vape flavor campaign” was an easy way for politicians to appear like they were contributing to society.
Yes, the gummy report cautioned parents to keep the little ones away from edibles but if those edibles are marketed in a manner thats appealing to children…like they claimed vapes were…why aren’t they banned?
Because they’re not really concerned with protecting snyones’s children. And even if teenagers WERE becoming addicted to nicotine, NICOTINE DOESN’T KILL…chemicals in burning tobacco does.
^^ They care more about money than people and that is sickening to me!
@SABOTEUR I’m very skeptical of “save the children” campaigns; there’s often something else going on and I know that in the past, marijuana was unfairly targeted for reasons that had nothing to do with its harmfulness. At the same time, I do think teen nicotine addiction is a problem and it has been rising recently, in large part due to the appeal of flavored tobacco products. If there’s another solution out there that doesn’t ban adults from using something they should be allowed to use, I’m all for it.
I hate the tobacco subject with all my heart! I wish it was banned across the whole world. I’ve had family members die from lung cancer and I hate this stuff. All tobacco should be eliminated from the planet.
@Locke Here’s the dilemma….the nicotine in vapes is nowhere near as potent as cigarettes. I was a smoker for many years. I transitioned to vaping to quit cigarettes. Today I vape with no nicotine added.
(I vape Vanilla Custard, by the way.)
How did I quit nicotine from vaping if nicotine is so addictive?
Cigarettes have nicotine and chemicals added that make it very difficult to stop. Vaping is currently a successful alternative to smoking.
So these teenagers are addicted to nicotine, we’re told, and the solution they chose was to ban vapes that they like. WHERE DO YOU THINK THOSE “NICOTINE ADDICTS” WENT TO GET THEIR FIX?
Well @SABOTEUR because at some point you went through the two weeks without nicotine that it takes to get weaned..
I had a realization not that long ago, but nobody starts smoking later in life. Big tobacco has known this since forever. That means there’s a very small window of opportunity to capture a new person as a smoker and they’re probably 13–20 years old. If they can get you, you’ll be worth tens of thousands of dollars to them over your lifetime. Vaping has the same market forces and the same incentives to prey on kids and young adults.
Marijuana on the other hand is different. There are many senior citizens who eat gummies to help with their cancer treatment for example and they started cannabis late in life. I think they should be clearly marketed and labeled as such to prevent accidental ingestion.
@gorillapaws Sorry, I don’t see that. Vaping wasn’t started by big business. The original intent of electronic cigarettes was to assist people to quit smoking. It evolved over the years through the effort of USERS endeavoring to get the damn things to work properly. Equipment modifications and eliquid development were made by USERS in garages and kitchen tables. Flavors we’re introduced by USERS to have something tasty to help transitioning from smoking.
There was little to no advertising at first. Vaping developed through word of mouth. So while big business may have eventually targeted kids with flavors THEY DIDNT COME UP WITH THE IDEA. Papers introduced flavors for their own enjoyment.
All this effort by VAPERS to help themselves grew in popularity because their efforts successfully got people to quit smoking. That success was almost the cause of the demise of vaping. It was inevitable that big business would exploit that success for profit. Vaping is not dangerous because of flavors…vaping is dangerous because it threatens the pay outs big tobacco pays to states because of the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement:
https://youtu.be/oxNM1pUoOn4
So this effort to keep the dollars rolling in threatens the very people they claim to protect by forcing them to feed their addiction by going back to smoking.
This news about children ingesting marijuana gummies looks a hell of a lot like the playbook used to demonize vaping. There’s always going to be irresponsible adults and inquisitive children/adults. There’s always going to be people hurt through irresponsible action. But when preventive action threatens the benefits obtained by people who use things responsibly we should all be alarmed.
I assume it has something to do with the fact that anti tobacco lobbies, like truthinitiative.org after multiple crushing victories, needed a new target since they were becoming obsolete. Enter evil vaping. Instead of them embracing it as a potential tool for harm reduction, they decided that it was really nicotine that was evil all along.
Fighting about marijuana regulation really wasn’t their thing. They like to be one issue type of organizations; it makes them seem committed.
And though I agree with your general argument, it must be pointed out that nicotine is quite a harmful chemical, and is responsible for most of the heart disease people incur by smoking. Also, your assertion that vaping has less or less harmful nicotine is not necessarily accurate. Vape liquids come in many potencies, and unlike a cigarette, many do not offer a natural place to stop a session. A person may be vaping 3mg three puffs a day to control cravings, or they may be in their kitchen, taking down a fill of 9mg every morning with coffee.
Your personal experience with quitting is not likely to be typical in such an unregulated market.
This is false: The original intent of electronic cigarettes was to assist people to quit smoking.
The intent of vapes was to allow people to “smoke” in places where burning tobacco was banned. When vaping became popular, it was used in shopping malls, business offices, movie theaters, always with, “hey, it’s just water vapor, I am not smoking”.
But despite your denial @SABOTEUR there are still negative health consequences from vaping, it just isn’t as bad as smoking.
What’s wrong with the picture is obvious but it’s controversial to say:
Who is responsible for a kid getting access to an edible? Parents.
A teen getting some edibles from their friends is different, but if we’re talking about an actual infant or toddler accessing an edible, cigarette or gun etc. That’s all on the parent.
The other issue is obviously advertising and rich people corrupting society and political leaders, but we all know regular people can’t fight money and power.
@SABOTEUR – Ok, I never said vaping was worse than smoking, I said that vasoconstrictors, like nicotine, pose significant, long term cardiovascular risks. You were asserting that nicotine wasn’t harmful, and I pointed out that you were incorrect. Nothing in your link refutes that.
@SABOTEUR – You do know the difference between corporate propaganda and journalism, right? Woof, talk about an agenda.
Try this one instead
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4958544/
It more or less supports what you’re saying, without the bullshit. Perhaps nicotine isn’t as bad as all that for your heart, but it is certainly psychoactive, addictive and a potential aggravating factor for other health problems.
Once the industry is properly regulated, then we can start talking about using them as medical devices.
I think you’re missing out, just blaming “big business” (like who made these videos? A vaping trade organization, I see). I think big anti-cigarette is the most powerful player in this space.
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Or….parents need to take care of them and not count on society to do it for them.
@zenvelo Just because people began vaping in places they weren’t supposed to doesn’t mean that everyone who vaped used it for that purpose. When I started vaping electronic cigarettes were marketed as a “smoking alternative”.The fact that users could discreetly vape in places that smoking wasn’t allowed (stealth vaping) was a cool by-product.
I’d be remiss if I believed the ability to stealth vape wasn’t also marketed, but that feature wasn’t anyone’s primary concern with the products available at the time I started vaping. The topic was minimally discussed in any electronic cigarette forums active back then. The PRIMARY concern was discovering what users needed to do the get these devices to work properly!
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