By Makenna Hall, Managing Editor of Content
If you have been receiving four news notifications every day about the deaths and injuries related to vaping, you might be slightly concerned, or maybe you ignored it and continued to hit your Juul pod.
Either way, ever since the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) implemented a ban on certain vape products, I have noticed a significant increase in media coverage of the health and safety of vaping products.
These ashy headlines that clump all types of vape products together, omit the main finding by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The center reported that there is not a specific product or substance that has been linked to these injuries and deaths, but of the reported cases, ‘most’ of the patients have used THC products.
The lack of specific data being posted on the CDC’s website and reported by news outlets makes me question how exactly they have found this information. For example, the website reports that as of Oct. 1 there have been 1,080 lung injury cases associated with using vaping products. Which of course is a devastating fact, but how are these cases directly related to vaping? It makes me speculative when there is an issue as large as vaping safety has become in the past few years, but the public is not met with a set of complete facts and evidence.
And while the situations of the CDC’s findings and the ban may seem mutually exclusive they should not be.
The CDC is suggesting that products containing THC may be responsible for some of these deaths, but where the FDA ban is in effect, their main goal is to prevent the sale of flavored non-tobacco vape juice. The ban would not include any THC vapes or carts because these products are not sold in stores. They can either be bought from dispensaries in states where marijuana is legal or from drug dealers and thus cannot be regulated.
The CDC reported that of the 1,080 cases 16 percent of the patients were under the age of 18. If this is true, then the youth are not merely vaping these fun- flavored juices that the ban is talking about but are also using products with THC and nicotine.
If the FDA was really concerned about the youth’s health and safety they would consider a broader scope, including its roots. The youth’s use of nicotine products is not a new issue. Kids have stealing their parents’ cigarettes as long as parents have been smoking. In most states 18-year-olds can even buy their own tobacco products which are a known carcinogen. So why is vaping a bigger concern?
The Juul lab chief executive just recently stepped down from his position only to be replaced by an executive from Altria Group, the tobacco company that bought a 35 percent share in Juul last year.
So if these executives are interchangeable, how different are the two products on a larger scale? Why is a cancer-causing product more desirable than an mystery illness?
Not to say that I condone children smoking or vaping, but merely pre- venting their access to non-nicotine flavored vape juice, by preventing everyone from buying it, is not going to solve the situation.