There's a very strong drive to make an equivalency with tobacco and e-cigarettes, and I think it's extremely irresponsible.
"We don't know the long-term effects" is usually put forward as an argument. However, preliminary evidence is pretty strong that they're orders of magnitude less harmful.
Putting e-cigarettes, (which look like they might save hundreds of thousands to millions of lives if all smokers switched to them) in line with cigarettes is potentially a public health catastrophe.
Six people have died so far from what seems to be a vaping-related lung condition. This may be several orders of magnitude lower than the number killed by smoking cigarettes an equivalent amount of time, but it's not something to be ignored. Strangling a baby in its crib is easier than taking out the full-grown adult later.
All of which appear to be related to black market pods. I don't think that empowering the black market by banning the pods people want to buy is going to fix that.
> Six people have died so far from what seems to be a vaping-related lung condition.
Vaping what, exactly?
This whole situation is like if the government allowed (and profited in the billions on sales of) heroin, and a small industry sprang up selling methadone pills. A few people who took some unknown kind of pill got sick or died, and the government then makes moves to shut down the methadone industry.
Oh, I think banning flavored pods is dumb, but then I also think vaping is dumb. My point was that it's unrealistic to expect reason on the subject, because "an order of magnitude less" is hard for most people to reason about when you can list the name of people who have died.
People want action now because the numbers are low now, and if a couple of years from now we find out things aren't so bad, presumably deep-pocketed companies will push for rescinding the laws.
It's not great, but it's hardly realistic to expect politicians to make laws based on science, even in administrations that aren't anti-science on the record.
Vaping is dumb, smoking tobacco is dumb, smoking weed is dumb, drinking alcohol is dumb, eating meat is dumb, driving above the speed limit is dumb.
The difference with speeding, drinking alcohol, and eating meat is that the government has active measures to make them safer. With smoking weed (specifically vaping) the regulatory environment forbids reputable labs from performing quality control, and the FDA isn't helping whatsoever with regulating the purity of the products.
What I'm getting at is that it's government policy, specifically the lack of FDA regulation/testing of THC vaping products, that is killing people.
The voting public overwhelmingly supports legalization, and the politicians' refusal to enact public policy that fulfills this wish and reduces harm is the problem. Congress has the blood of these victims of tainted product on their own hands.
No one knows what they died from, these are all recent tragedies and vaping has been around for many years. It is definitely not a reason to ban vaping.
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