Opinion: B.C.’s voodoo vaping legislation

Vaping is not a public health problem. It is the solution to a public health problem, a serious one, the damage done by tobacco, writes Ian Irvine. Photo by Francis Georgian/Postmedia files

Article content

The public health vanguard in British Columbia is again showing the world how not to legislate on vaping. Attorney General Niki Sharma has just introduced Bill 24, which will enable her government to recover health damages attributable to vaping by both fining and suing vendors.

Article content

Vaping is not a public health problem. It is the solution to a public health problem, a serious one, the damage done by tobacco. This dreadful bill stigmatizes and frustrates the solution. Its main effect will be to drive more of the industry underground.

Article content

Article content

Article content

People who break laws obviously should be punished. The challenge in writing laws about vaping is to strike a balance between the interests of adults — especially adults who smoke — and the interests of kids. We should put vaping out of reach of kids and punish people who sell to them. Nicotine is dependence-forming and we do not want children to acquire dependencies. Adults can make their own judgments.

Article content

Article content

But it is smoke and tar that kill smokers, not nicotine vapour. Nicotine is not a carcinogen. Public Health England and the U.K.’s Royal College of Physicians have been telling us for a decade that e-cigarettes have at most five per cent of the toxins in cigarettes — a fact nine in 10 Canadians are unaware of. Research in countless studies reports that e-cigs are the most powerful off-ramp from smoking there is. If only smokers knew!

Article content

But back to British Columbia and its angelic government. Everyone in the nicotine trade knows that illegal products are ubiquitous and dirt-cheap, especially in Vancouver. Regular combustible cigarettes are extraordinarily easy to procure and vapes and oral pouches are becoming equally plentiful. In theory, B.C. and Ottawa have all the tools they need to pursue illegal vendors, whether in brick-and-mortar stores or online. On the other hand, most illegal cigarettes sold in B.C. are produced by gangs in First Nations communities. So enforcement may be tricky. All the more reason to go after the illegal market by making life easier for legal producers and sellers, not harder, as the government’s bill would do.

Article content

Article content

Alas, the vaping industry is not a neatly defined group of licensed producers dutifully submitting monthly reports to Health Canada or the Canada Revenue Agency who can be sued if they step out of line and commit a “vaping-related wrong.” If only it were that easy to get the bad guy: B.C. could rake in some revenue and make the world a better place.

Article content

Article content

But it is not that easy.

Article content

Consider disposable e-cigarettes, which are used for a week or so and then thrown out. Accounting for more than half of today’s market, they are all imported from China. Many carry false claims on their packaging — for example, “tastes like a 40-milligram nicotine concentration, but is in fact a 20-milligram concentration.” A check determines it really is a 40-mg concentration and is thus illegal. Then there are the knock-offs that imitate a legal brand, all brought in outside the legal sector by importers with business connections to China.

Article content

Vaping liquid is also in play, most of it produced legally at prescribed strengths. But in some First Nations’ communities you can find any strength in any flavour you want and products containing no or inappropriate excise stamps.