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Nova Scotia deserves praise for being the first Canadian jurisdiction to ban flavoured vaping products known to cause severe lung illnesses and deaths. They join three American states including New York that banned all flavoured vapes.
To date, 2,000 Americans suffered lung disease as a result of these dangerous inhalants, says the Centre for Disease Control; vaping killed 40 of them.
We would do well to ban smoking outright, not just for young people.
What Canada needs is a strong provincial or national government willing to ban dangerous products for the safety of its people. Not to take the easy way out, as British Columbia has done, by simply taxing the items heavily in the vain attempt to protect young people from accessing them.
Shame on their government for thinking all it takes to prevent teen nicotine addiction is to lower the nicotine content of vaping products and lift the sale tax from seven to 20 per cent. Narcotics, too, are expensive, but youth still access them.
The greater shame is that B.C generates tax revenue from the sale of these deadly items.
Ottawa, too, shares blame in that they created a market for vaping and marijuana products. Marijuana is now known to induce psychosis, even in those otherwise free of mental illness.
Why do we clamor over the obliteration of ecosystems and entire species for profit, but do not clamor enough over addictive substances that kill people? It is not enough to acknowledge the vaping and marijuana epidemic sweeping this country — indeed this continent.
The British Medical Journal says Canada’s teen vaping rate climbed by 74 per cent from 2017-2018. Better to ban it and end the dependency culture it all created.
Sincerely,
Christopher Mansour
Barrie
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