It seems like over in the States, anti-vaping politicians are showing no signs of letting up in their fight against e-liquid flavour regulation. In June, e-liquid flavours were banned in San Francisco after residents voted in favour of the ruling.
Senators have now announced plans to introduce a bill to restrict eliquid flavours. Sntr. Dick Durbin, alongside Sntr. Lisa Murkowski are responsible for the bill, named the SAFE Kids Act. The bill proposes that e-liquid manufacturers must prove their flavours meet the following criteria.
(1) Help adults quit smoking cigarettes;
(2) Do not increase youth initiation of nicotine or tobacco products; and
(3) Do not increase the risk of harm to the person using the flavor.
They have a year to provide evidence to the FDA that their product meets all three criteria if. Failure to do so and the products will supposedly not remain on the market.
Based on unreliable research
According to Durbin “e-cigarettes represent the ‘re-invention of smoking,’ cooked up by Big Tobacco to hook a new generation.” He went on to say that e-cigarettes “can lead to a lifetime of tobacco addiction” and claimed they are “doing more harm than good”.
The bill then cited a particularly unreliable piece of research from Dartmouth University. “A recent study out of Dartmouth found that e-cigarette use leads to 81 times more new smokers than quitters”.
According to the study “scientists were able to estimate that about 2,070 cigarette-smoking adults in America quit in 2015 with the help of the electronic devices”. Here’s what researchers of the study class as a quitter… ‘Adult current smokers who quit for at least 7 years after using e-cigarettes’. Yes, 7 years!
I’m not sure how the ‘scientists’ came up with 7 years without a cigarette as an appropriate figure to class someone as a quitter. It also seems concerning that a US Senator would deem this research reliable enough to use in support of a legislative bill.
Perhaps surprisingly, the senator did mention smoking rates in the bill. Referring to youth rates he explained that “smoking rates for traditional cigarettes are decreasing—from 28 percent in 2000 to 8 percent in 2017”. This hardly supports his earlier theory that e-cigarettes are “doing more harm than good”.
The senators not only chose to dismiss the growing evidence from the UK, they also discounted a recent Gallup study from the US. The study dismissed the gateway theory stating that “respondents who had never smoked prior to using the devices, only 2% had proceeded to start smoking.”
What are your thoughts on e-liquid flavour regulation?