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are e-cigarettes saving smokers or creating new addicts?
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The great vape debate: are e-cigarettes saving smokers or creating new addicts? Gone With the Smoke is already no more than a distant whiff of bubblegum-flavoured vapour. The vape shop and lounge, one of many in San Francisco, has been forced to close. So have Vapor Den (“eclectic lounge & hipster go-to”) and Happy Vape. From late January, it became illegal to sell e-cigarettes and e-liquids in San Francisco. Even online sales to addresses within the city limits have been stopped. Stores outside the city that dispatch e-cigarettes to an SF postcode will face prosecution.To get more news about Cheap Vape Deals, you can visit urvapin official website.
While vaping is banned, sales of legal marijuana and tobacco will continue as usual. San Francisco has often been considered more progressive than the rest of the US in its approach to drugs and unorthodox lifestyles: marijuana was legalised in California for medical use in 1996, after a campaign by Aids activists from the city, and for recreational use in 2016.
Vaping, on the other hand, has crossed a line. Behind the outright ban on sales of e-cigarettes in San Francisco is a panic about teenagers vaping. More than one in four American teens have tried vaping, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine reported that 12% of 16- and 17-year-olds were addicted to nicotine, and raised the alarm about the effect of nicotine on the adolescent brain. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently described the use of e-cigarettes as a “crisis among America’s youth”. “San Francisco has never been afraid to lead. That will always be the case when the health of our children is on the line,” announced the San Francisco city attorney Dennis Herrera in a statement after the ban was passed by the the city legislature last June. He was scathing about the FDA’s failure to control e-cigarette sales.
“Now, youth vaping is an epidemic. If the federal government is not going to act to protect our kids, San Francisco will,” he said. In the UK, meanwhile, the medical establishment is endorsing vaping as an aid to giving up smoking. My local vape shop in London is colourful, thriving, offers a panoply of flavours and displays a banner the length of its storefront proclaiming: “Vaping is 97% safer than smoking, according to NHS and Cancer Research UK.” (The correct figure is 95%, according to a report in August 2015 by Public Health England, PHE, the government executive agency and watchdog that offers guidelines on health protection issues.) A transatlantic schism has opened up over vaping and health. In the US, the war on vaping is being pursued by activists, politicians and scientists who believe that tobacco companies are cynically promoting e-cigarettes as a means to get people addicted to nicotine, which will – sooner or later – lead them to cigarettes.
In the UK, anti-smoking campaigners and health experts counter that for many adult smokers, vaping offers the best hope of avoiding a premature death. The two sides periodically break into open hostilities. The claim by PHE that vaping is 95% safer than smoking tobacco, frequently quoted by e-cigarette manufacturers and sellers, has been criticised as misleading by anti-smoking campaigners in the US. Matt Myers, who heads the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids in Washington DC, the biggest anti-smoking organisation in the world, has called the 95%-safer figure “mere fiction”. Prof Ann McNeill of King’s College London, a tobacco and addiction expert who advises PHE, defends its position. “We are battling against misinformation on a massive scale,” she says. McNeill acknowledges there has been a rise in vaping among kids in the US and Canada, but does not see it as a reason for panic. “I don’t think it merits discussion of an ‘epidemic’. That word is overblown,” she said.