Do we want to ban vape?

In October 2018, Hong Kong, China announced that it was preparing to completely ban vape sales, but did not completely ban the sale of ordinary cigarettes. Although the final proposal was not passed in the parliament, it also caused major disturbances in the country. This behavior made it difficult for people who don’t know much about it. It is even more considered that the harm of vape is bigger than that of cigarettes. Many people even think that the country is in the future. Vape will also be banned, so do we really need to ban vape?

The reason why the Hong Kong government wants to ban vape may be related to the use of vape by teenagers. Tobacco control in Hong Kong is relatively successful. The smoking rate for children over 15 years old is only about 10%, and that for middle school students is only 2.7%. The number of smokers in Hong Kong is not large, so perhaps this decision was made because of concerns about the more complex tobacco control environment that vape brings.

Come back and look at mainland China. The overall tobacco control results in mainland China are very worrying. China has the largest smoking population in the world. According to data from the China Adult Tobacco Survey Report of the China Center for Disease Control and Prevention in 2015, the smoking rate among Chinese adults aged 15 and over was 27.7%, and 52.1% of men were smokers (2.7% for women). There are 316 million people who smoke in China 15 years and older.

When I was a junior high school student, there were a lot of students smoking cigarettes. According to the surrounding situation, more than 10% of the boys were smoking cigarettes, and the girls who smoked were basically invisible. From a recent point of view, we can see from the Internet that many girls have started smoking. From their skilled smoking postures, they are not playing at all. Even we can see that some girls in primary schools are also smoking cigarettes.

It can be seen that smoking in young people in China is very serious. If vapes are banned because of the proliferation of vapes in China, then these young people can only use cigarettes. They cannot use the purpose of smoking bans. The harm is more serious than vape, which makes the health of teenagers suffer more.

Vape is a product that is much less harmful than cigarettes but is still harmful. If the policy favors the promotion of vape is less harmful than cigarettes, then the smoking population may turn to vape higher, the harm caused by cigarettes Less; however, the problem of smoking among adolescents may not be solved. Once I heard that vape is low-risk, it may suck vape again; it may even increase the smoking population as a whole, which is counterproductive.

So, is it important to emphasize that “vape is 95% less harmful than cigarettes”, or should it emphasize “vape is harmful”?

In fact, the two can be promoted together, because propaganda vape is 95% less harmful than cigarettes. It is aimed at smokers. It chooses a 95% lower risk. I believe many smokers are willing to accept it; but emphasize that vape has The hazard is aimed at ordinary people who do not smoke, so that they will not easily touch vape, the two are not contradictory.

For the declaration of vape, we don't want to emphasize one-sided hazard or low harm, which will make users misunderstand vape. In 2013, only 7% of British people mistakenly believe that vape is as harmful as cigarettes. In 2018, 25% of people think so. The British Ministry of Public Health pointed out that some of the remarks overemphasized the vape hazard, but ignored the comparison with cigarettes, affecting the public's correct perception of the harmfulness of vape and cigarettes.

Do we need to ban vape?

What needs to be determined is that in public we need to ban vape, because vape is as harmful as it is, and the taste it produces may also affect the crowd next to it, and the resulting smoke may falsely trigger the alarm system.

The problem of adolescents using vape needs to be controlled, rather than simply vape, because they have no threshold for cigarettes, and they can smoke cigarettes without vape. It is obviously unreasonable to ban a relatively healthy product and let the cigarette continue to flood.

Vape's smoking cessation or smoke replacement effect is obvious. It keeps many smokers away from the harm of cigarettes. It is a product that shares the health of smokers. We need to correctly promote such products and let everyone Have a correct understanding of vape, so that more smokers can stay away from the dangers of cigarettes. It is not forbidden to use a vape because of the use of vape, and the need for adolescents to use vape is not prohibited.