monkey’s paw curls
Okay, nicotine is now a Schedule II drug. You need a prescription to buy anything with nicotine in it.
Australia actually did that a couple years ago, but only for vaping-related nicotine. Cigs were unaffected.
Ohh no our preciouse monopoly on addiction is being undercut. Would someone think of the poor tobaco companies struggling to keep the lights on.
I mean… yeah, their motivations are obviously not pure, but having vape sellers be licensed similar to cigarette sellers and banning flavors that are marketed to kids both sound pretty reasonable IMO.
I do hate when they try and flavor things as “middle school grape” and “minors only strawberry”
Really…?
I get you’re being sarcastic here, but you and I both know that advertising and marketing can be incredibly subtle and insidious. Hell, that exact complaint is half the content posted to Lemmy. Making your product in flavors that appeal primarily to kids is about as blatant as it gets. What makes you think vape manufacturers are so honest?
In case you’re being serious, take a stroll down the candy or cereal aisle at your grocery store and see if you can pick out which ones are marketed to kids vs adults just by the flavors.
How does anyone ever regulate what “flavors marketed to kids” entails? Plenty of adults like sweet, fruity flavors. What about vanilla? Very generic yet it’d attract kids. I do think nicotine is a scourge, and smoking is waaaaaaaay worse than vaping, just wanting to know how this would work
That’s a fair question. My POV is that not being able to buy sweet fruity flavors might be inconvenient to some adults, but it’s hardly something that could be argued to cause an undue burden on vape users.
It would probably be straightforward to commission a study (or leverage existing study data) to identify the flavors that underage users are most likely to use and start there. If data shows that removing or restricting those flavors is not an impediment to underage vaping, then at that point reconsider the regulations.
Even if some manufacturers choose to skirt the regulations (no this isn’t “grape”, it’s “purple berry”!), larger companies with the biggest market share are probably not going to want to get tangled up in high visibility lawsuits, and so the likely outcome is that availability goes down, and therefore so does the access and use rate.
Regulatory capture. Be a big business. Lobby (give money to) politicians to get regulated. Make sure you have the money to implement the regulations. Make sure almost no one else has the money or opportunity to get the money to implement the regulations. Regulations force competitors out of business or make it possible to buy them. Regulations make it impossible for anyone new to compete against you. 3) Profit
This time last year we had Meta burning millions on commercials saying “the laws for the internet were passed on 1996. That’s older than I am. We need new regulations to keep the internet safe.” Aka it’s not enough to buy all our competitors, we need to make sure no startups are even possible. We have the money and we want to make the rules.
I think it’s really important that someone is finally standing up to Big Vape. This is a very brave move by Big Tobacco.
