A route by which many tobacco users have been able to quit would be blocked and the black market would expand
By Ian Irvine
Health Canada’s 15-person delegation is now back from the World Health Organization’s recent jamboree on tobacco control, held in Panama, a world tobacco smuggling nexus. The WHO has a vaping problem. Obsessive about tobacco but vehemently opposed to harm reduction, it effectively denies overwhelming scientific evidence that e-cigarettes are the most effective cigarette-quitting device ever invented.
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Energized and ready, the Health Canada team is turning its attention to discouraging e-cigarettes in this country. Not satisfied that high taxes on cigarettes have led to a 30 per cent illegal share in the market for real cigarettes, it appears intent on doing the same for low-risk nicotine products by entertaining a ban on flavoured e-cigarette products.
Visit any premises that sells alcohol products and you will see flavours in abundance, whether this be an LCBO outlet in Ontario or a corner store or supermarket in Quebec. My local corner store in Montreal has more than 300 feet of shelf space devoted to beer, wine and flavoured alcohol products. Yep, that’s a football field length of shelving. If you visit your local cannabis store, you will find an equally varied array of flavoured products in mind-blowing strengths.
But alcohol and cannabis are the preferred drugs of the middle and upper classes. And the elites who rule over us must not be denied their favoured flavoured drugs. Mandarins always exhibit self-control, after all.
The poor, the feckless and the anxious are a different matter. They use nicotine! Such wretches need to be saved from themselves! And who better to save them and prevent enlargement of the class of users than our moral guardians in Ottawa? Even if, it must be stressed, alcohol and smoked cannabis are carcinogens while non-smoked nicotine is not.
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The storyline out of Canada’s health lobbies is that e-cigarettes are a gateway to smoking. Ergo, anything that might entice youth to experiment with nicotine, even in non-combustible form, should be stamped out. In fact, this gateway hypothesis is false. The drop in smoking in Canada has been greatest among those in their early twenties, who are the teens of just a few years ago.
But health lobbies are so strong and the pressure to ban flavours in e-cigarettes so great that Health Canada is now embarking on hearings. But a ban will both harm the nicotine-using community and create an illegal sector.
Adults use flavoured products in about the same proportion as youth and young adults. And there is abundant research showing that most adult quitters who have quit via the e-cigarette route used flavoured products. Smokers need more, not fewer incentives to switch to lower-risk products. They also need more information from an all too reticent Health Canada on relative risks and inducements to change their habits.
As for the marketplace: retailers will make every effort to evade a flavour ban by selling multi-purpose, flavoured liquid that can be safely mixed with neutral e-juice, the active ingredient of vapes. That people do switch to refillable pods in this way has certainly been the experience in Quebec following its ill-advised assault on low-risk products beginning late last year.
But that is only half the story. A ban on flavours almost certainly will cause legal vape shops to close in substantial numbers. Too many vapers will want to continue with flavoured disposables rather than switch to pods. There are 1.8 million vapers in Canada, according to the Canadian Community Health Surveys, and 3.8 million smokers. That is a lot of smokers looking for help switching and vapers happy with their flavoured status quo who will be very angry with our alcohol- and cannabis-consuming legislators. Many vape users will switch to the illegal sector. My local vape-store manager in Montreal tells me vapers who have a car drive to Kahnawake, the local Mohawk community, where flavoured disposables are still available, while those who don’t have a car have mainly switched to refillable “flavourable” pods. Still others just order what they want online.
Make no mistake: Canadians will make every effort to evade a flavour ban, whether through legal or illegal means. Legal businesses will be destroyed, as we have seen in Nova Scotia and Quebec. The illegal sector will thrive, and Health Canada will have made Canadians less healthy by reducing the flow of cigarette-quitters.
Ian Irvine, professor of economics at Concordia University in Montreal, has worked for the federal government as a consultant on alcohol and tobacco. Some of his recent research has been funded by the Foundation for a Smoke Free World.
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Opinion: Banning flavoured vapes would promote harm, not reduce it
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06.03.2024
A route by which many tobacco users have been able to quit would be blocked and the black market would expand
By Ian Irvine
Health Canada’s 15-person delegation is now back from the World Health Organization’s recent jamboree on tobacco control, held in Panama, a world tobacco smuggling nexus. The WHO has a vaping problem. Obsessive about tobacco but vehemently opposed to harm reduction, it effectively denies overwhelming scientific evidence that e-cigarettes are the most effective cigarette-quitting device ever invented.
Subscribe now to read the latest news in your city and across Canada.
Subscribe now to read the latest news in your city and across Canada.
Create an account or sign in to continue with your reading experience.
Energized and ready, the Health Canada team is turning its attention to discouraging e-cigarettes in this country. Not satisfied that high taxes on cigarettes have led to a 30 per cent illegal share in the market for real cigarettes, it appears intent on doing the same for low-risk nicotine products by entertaining a ban on flavoured e-cigarette products.
Visit any premises that sells alcohol products and you will see flavours in abundance, whether this be an LCBO outlet in Ontario or a corner store or supermarket in Quebec. My local corner store in Montreal has more than 300 feet of shelf space devoted to beer, wine and flavoured alcohol products. Yep, that’s a football field length of........
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