【Guardian】警惕电子烟
2022-11-04 13:00
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【U君导读】换上华丽包装的电子烟正以惊人的速度在年轻人中普及.今天的外刊阅读材料来自《卫报》,介绍电子烟正引诱着英国年...
换上华丽包装的电子烟正以惊人的速度在年轻人中普及。今天的外刊阅读材料来自《卫报》,介绍电子烟正引诱着英国年轻人成瘾,以及该如何解决电子烟问题。Smoking is back in
candy-coloured disguise - and a whole new generation is addictedTobacco companies are pouring money into
e-cigarettes and making them attractive to teens. Why is nobody stopping them?The modern sweet shop has long removed
from its window the screw-top glass jars full of gobstoppers and lemon sherbets
that used to tempt kids to spend their pocket money on the way home from
school. Instead, there is an array of slim boxes in a rainbow of bright
colours. “Banana ice”, “pink lemonade”, “blueberry sour raspberry”, “cotton
candy ice”, they are labelled.The jewelled boxes contain Elf bars:
disposable e-cigarettes. The rules say they are for adults only. Under-18s are
not allowed to buy them, even if they wander in to look at the confectionery
that is also for sale in some of these shops. But everyone knows the pretty
toys also end up in the hands of children, who may even have learned how to use
them from influencers on TikTok.It’s hugely alarming for the parents of
teenage kids who catch a whiff of strawberry in the bedroom. They might in the
past not have known that their child was experimenting with a scrounged fag
behind the bike sheds after school. Smoking was once so widespread
that it would be a rare child who didn’t take a puff at some point, hopefully
choking on the fumes and never touching a cigarette again.Overall, smoking rates in the UK have
come down massively: fewer than 15% of adults today say they smoke,
down from a peak of more than 45% during the 1970s. This is thanks to the long
and hard-fought war on tobacco. But in recent years, many experts in the UK
argue that e-cigarettes have played a part in that victory, providing the
addict with the nicotine hit without the deadly tar.Others, especially in the United States,
say they are the devil’s handiwork, hooking kids on nicotine, exposing them to
harmful chemicals and potentially routeing them back to tobacco in the long
term. The eagerness with which the Big Tobacco companies have moved into
e-cigarette manufacture, as their markets in rich countries stall, only supports
that belief.The transatlantic schism over vaping and
health, sparked by the arrival of the first overtly teen-friendly e-cigarettes
from the San Francisco startup Juul, still exists. The US government,
through the Food and Drug Administration, and some states, such as California,
have been hurling every legal and financial penalty they can find at Juul,
whose USB stick-sized e-cigarettes, launched in 2015, have taken off among
young people.There have been stories of high school
epidemics, with waves of flavoured vapour emanating from bags in the back row
of class. Juul agreed in September to pay $440m to 33 US states
following two years of investigations into its marketing practices. The company
was accused of deliberately targeting young people with launch parties and
social media advertising. At the time, it had already removed fruit and candy
flavours from its range.In the UK, however, the government
broadly accepts the advice from Public Health England, now the Office
for Health Improvement and Disparities, that vaping is very much less harmful
than smoking – famously it said 95% less – and is a useful tool for those who
want to quit. The NHS encourages smokers to try vaping instead, wherever it
can, though it is handicapped by the absence of a medically licensed
e-cigarette.These health experts want to focus on
the large numbers of middle-aged people with a smoking habit that is likely to
kill them, many of them in deprived areas of the country. Almost 6 million
people in England still smoke. A quarter of all deaths from cancer are
smoking-related. In June, Dr Javed Khan, former Barnardo’s head, published
a review commissioned by the (then) health secretary, Sajid Javid, into
what should be done to make smoking obsolete. His third recommendation was
“promote vaping”. More than half – 57% – of adult vapers in the UK are
ex-smokers, says campaign group ASH (Action on Smoking and Health).But the underage kids using disposable
vapes from Elf Bar and Geek Bar, made in Shenzhen, China, and available online
as well as in the stores, present a distressing problem – because nobody wants
kids to get addicted to nicotine – and also a diversion of energy and resources
from the vital battle against tobacco. ASH’s data says 83% of 11-17s
have never tried an e-cigarette, but this year 7% said they were currently
vaping, which is up from 4% in 2020. Recent analysis of data from the
US by researchers from San Francisco and Massachusetts general hospital suggests
kids first try e-cigarettes on average at the age of 13 and one in 10 of those
who vape puff on it just after waking up.How to solve this? It’s hugely
difficult, not helped by entrenched positions on the use and misuse of vapes.
What we surely need, though, is a clampdown on the advertising and marketing of
e-cigarettes that are attractive to young people. We have cigarettes in plain
packages – why not extend that to all nicotine products? Bin the pretty boxes
and sweet flavours. We also need the existing rules on sales and marketing to
children to be policed. Local authorities have too much to do with too little
money. They are too cash-strapped to ensure shops don’t sell to under-18s. It
is time, as campaigners such as Action on Smoking and Health and Cancer
Research UK have been saying, and Khan recommended to the government, for a
windfall tax on the tobacco companies. The polluter must pay.
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