‘New generation of addicts’

A109 Light Utility Helicopter flight with mayor Gisborne City from the air in November 2023.

Opinion

Political decisions, or indecisions, can have very serious consequences.

Consider the present vaping epidemic, which has come into focus recently. The justification for vaping is that it provides assistance for smokers to quit. It is challenging logic to replace an addictive chemical with the same chemical in a different format.

The rationale is that vaping is ‘safer’, but this deliberately ignores the addictive properties and health consequences of nicotine. There has clearly been little time to determine how safe vaping is, but reports to date are very concerning. What we can determine is that we are creating a new generation of addicts who face serious consequences and challenges.

Recent messages from the not for profit (USA) Children’s Health Defense (CHD) include:

Among the estimated 5.66 million adults who currently vape, 23 percent didn’t smoke previously, and most were younger than 35 — according to the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) and the article The Enormous Amount of Nicotine in E-cigarettes Can Addict Kids in a Matter of Days.

Vaping is already an $8.2 billion industry in the US, which increased the amount of nicotine in e-cigarettes by 76 percent over five years.

Vaping is not dealing with the nicotine addiction — it is manipulating it for profit. The conclusion I’ve come to is that money speaks much louder than words or common sense.

Australia is stepping in the right direction: vapes will only be available with a prescription.

I had an association with the Great NZ Smoke-Free Week of 1986. The co-ordinator told me a year later that there were still over 60,000 who had quit as a result of that one week.

Quitting can be done very successfully without vapes and without perpetuating addiction.

The “political” question is not, “What were they thinking?”, but “Why weren’t they thinking?”

Marcus Williams