MacPherson: Ban-happy health authorities smoked by e-cigarettes
By Les MacPherson, The Starphoenix February 12, 2015
Vaping Ape store owner Debbie Berryman uses an e-cigarette.
Photograph by: Richard Marjan, The Starphoenix , The Starphoenix
Like an overturned anthill, the discomfiture of health authorities over electronic cigarettes makes a compelling spectacle.
They don't know what to do with e-cigarettes. Their instinctive reaction is to ban the devices. Banning things is what authorities do. If they had a free hand, everything would be banned. In this case, however, a ban would appear to be counterproductive. Those vaping on e-cigarettes are mostly smokers trying to quit or at least to cut back. Unlike anything Health Canada has to offer, it seems to be working. E-cigarettes could be a breakthrough in smoking cessation. A breakthrough is what Gaétan Barrette and his colleagues are calling it. Barrette is Quebec's minister of health and also a medical doctor. His specialty is radiology, so he would know better than most about the value of an alternative to smoking.
"It really works," he said in an interview with the CBC. "If you speak with doctors in the field, it's what we can call a breakthrough."
Meanwhile, health bureaucrats are threatening to ban e-cigarettes or regulate them into oblivion. The devices are not approved, Health Canada keeps saying. Not approved! NOT APPROVED! WARNING! WARNING! Never mind that the approved supports for smoking cessation - the wretched nicotine gum, the miserable patch, the drugs with the suicide warnings on the label - mostly don't work. Never mind, too, that governments have shaken down smokers for untold billions of dollars in tobacco taxes while doing precisely nothing to help anyone quit, unless you count systematic persecution as help. Then along comes the e-cigarette, which, for the first time, shows real promise, and Health Canada wants to stamp it out.
What I would rather see is a legislated limit on banning things. Before any level of government imposes a new ban, it should have to lift an existing, equivalent ban on something else. This would reduce if not arrest the erosion of our remaining personal freedoms. For instance, if e-cigarettes are banned, we should get beer in grocery stores. If riding a bike without a stupid-looking helmet is banned, smoking should be allowed again in bars. Otherwise, if we keep imposing new bans all the time while hanging on like hoarders to all of the old bans, too, we must eventually come to a time when nothing is allowed. What scares me are the people who want this, some of them in positions of power and authority. They must be stopped. As usual with lame-o bans, the children get dragged into it. It's always for the children when adult things are banned. In this case, the warning is that children will be gulled into smoking by e-cigarettes, which they shouldn't be fooling with in the first place. Health Canada just released a survey showing that, horrors, 20 per cent of Canadian teenagers have tried vaping. How many have sampled nicotine gum, no one asked. The number would have been similar, I am guessing, but no one is going after nicotine gum, because it doesn't look like smoking.
This e-cigarette survey, we are told, "will add to the growing body of knowledge Health Canada is gathering to determine next steps in regulating this product." Next steps. Oh oh. What's revealing is that Health Canada begins with the presumption, before the evidence is in, that the next steps will be taken. There always are next steps with these people. And then the steps after next steps. It never stops. Leaving people alone for once is not on the table.
Kids won't take up e-cigarettes anyway because e-cigarettes are not cool. Smoking, for all its well-known liabilities, still is cool, at least at the start. Sorry, but it can't be wished away. In spite of every effort from the smoking-is-the-devil brigade, the rebel with the dangling smoke remains an appealing image. Perversely, the smoking-is-the-devil brigade probably adds to that appeal. These are not exactly funsters whose preoccupation is with others doing something that's bad for them.
What makes e-cigarettes not cool is their size. They're huge. Someone who is vaping looks like he's playing the flutophone, perhaps the second-least cool of all musical instruments, right after the alpenhorn.
A cigarette can be elegant, with the allure of combustion. An e-cigarette is clunky, with a big, heavy battery. You cannot casually gesture with an e-cigarette as with a conventional cigarette. Gesture with an e-cigarette and you'll sweep the drinks off the table. For those who don't smoke already, the e-cigarette is a non-starter.
For those who do smoke and want to quit, however, the e-cigarette has helped more than Health Canada ever did. Maybe we should ban Health Canada, and offset it by abolishing the ban on firecrackers.
source: http://www.thestarphoenix.com/healt...orities+smoked+cigarettes/10807362/story.html
