Ill-informed bureaucrats have decided that offering vapers a range of flavours, when they purchase the vapes is aimed at attracting young people to smoking.
If Irish legislators want to stop young people vaping, then they should take Respect Vapers advice and ban the sale of vaping products to anybody under 18 years of age.
Let’s get this right. Vaping has helped almost 200,000 people quit smoking. It is 95% less harmful than smoking and it works.
The majority of 200,000 vapers in Ireland vape to quit smoking. Young people do NOT use vaping as a gateway to smoking. Independent research shows that over the past 15 years the number of young people smoking has reduced. (Vaping came to Ireland around that time).
So why do we need flavours. Respect Vapers members will tell you that once you switch to vaping to quit smoking, you start to get your sense of taste and smell back again. You also begin to reject the smell and taste of tobacco, so you opt of other flavours.
The anti-smoking organisation ASH in the UK asked vapers if flavours were gone, what would they do?
25% would get them on the black market
20% would revert to smoking
20% do not know what they would do
15% would use non flavours
10% would make their own
10% would stop vaping
It is frightening to see that four in ten respondents said they would go to the black market. This would lead to unregulated liquids on the market, with unknown ingredients that could cause huge damage to users.
Revert to smoking rather than using vape products with no flavours or stopping vaping will only increase the tobacco harm problems in our country. So, if flavours were banned, Ireland could have 125,000 people go back to smoking.