This is the best summary I could come up with:
The London-based tobacco company BAT has called for “more stringent” regulations on vaping, including a licensing regime similar to alcohol and cigarettes.
It sells Rothmans and Lucky Strike cigarettes, and is the most successful of the big western tobacco companies when it comes to the UK’s booming market for disposable vapes, thought to be worth at least £3bn a year.
The company also wants a ban on soft drink, sweet or dessert flavours such as gummy bear or cotton candy, which it says appeal “uniquely” to the young.
The Local Government Association has called for single-use vapes to be banned, as they cause a litter problem and a fire risk in bin lorries, and appeal too strongly to children.
However, it does not support a ban on colourful packaging, nor on advertising or sports sponsorship – as it argues that these are still an important way to convince smokers to switch.
If you are reading this page and can’t see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or comment or you can email us at HaveYourSay@bbc.co.uk.
The original article contains 474 words, the summary contains 187 words. Saved 61%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
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.
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.
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.
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.
