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- Category: December 2019
I don’t much like Los Angeles. [...] But there is one thing about LA that I like a lot: legal marijuana. So when my cousin asked me to buy him some cannabis vaping cartridges during my trip there in October, I was happy to oblige. Tim* lives in Massachusetts. He has been legally using cannabis to manage depression for two years, and it’s helped him enormously. He asked for three 500mg THC cartridges. In LA it seems there’s a cannabis store on every corner. I like that. There was one three doors down from my scrappy Super 8 hotel in North Hollywood.
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- Category: December 2019
Vaping has been one of the biggest health stories of 2019. The meteoric rise in popularity of e-cigarettes, combined with growing concern about their addictive nature, has preoccupied parents and regulators alike.
The craze took off largely because of one company, Juul, which reimagined the cigarette and cornered the vaping industry. In the process, it put a new generation at risk of nicotine addiction. This is a look at how we got here.
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- Category: December 2019
In a recent study, children exposed to smoking in the first 4 years of life were more likely to exhibit symptoms of hyperactivity and conduct problems. The study, which is published in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, found that the association remained even after controlling for family poverty level, parental education, parental history of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, hostility, depression, caregiver IQ, and obstetric complications.
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- Category: December 2019
In light of the booming popularity of e-cigarettes and the rising number of deaths from vaping, a team of researchers from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette set out to determine whether e-cigarettes might boost the risk of pneumonia. "S. pneumonia is the most frequent cause of pneumonia in children five years and under, as well as adults older than 65, and immune-compromised individuals," according to the report. Exposure to smoke from conventional cigarettes is a critical risk factor for pneumonia.
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- Category: December 2019
Canada took a big step as a world leader in tobacco control when strict plain-and-standardized packaging rules for tobacco came into effect on Nov. 9. Unfortunately, and potentially tragically, we are falling far behind in another vital area of nicotine consumption and addiction – vaping.
Other countries and jurisdictions are either already way ahead of us or will be soon.
Canada's Tobacco and Vaping Products Act, which legalized vaping products with nicotine, was passed in May 2018, but the regulations put forth were not sufficient to protect youth from vaping.
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- Category: December 2019
Two Midwestern states are breaking into the recreational marijuana market, and dispensaries are expecting huge crowds.
Legal weed sales began Sunday in Michigan, where a handful of dispensaries in Ann Arbor planned to be open for business. The landmark moment in the state's cannabis industry comes amid a temporary ban on the sale of vaping devices in Michigan as health officials investigate the causes of vaping-related lung illnesses nationwide.
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- Category: December 2019
Two months ago, with his wife seated beside him, President Trump vowed to ban flavored e-cigarettes that appeal to kids because “innocent children (are) coming home and saying, ‘Mom, I want to vape.’”
Since then, the death toll related to vaping has soared from 6 to 47, and nearly 3,000 others (their median age: 24) have suffered vape-related lung damage. This would seem to be another break-glass moment, but all indications are that this is no longer a presidential priority — even with NJ Rep. Frank Pallone (D-6th Dist.) moving pioneering legislation, [...]
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- Category: December 2019
The Department of Finance (DOF) is pushing for a ban on flavored electronic cigarettes (e-cigarettes) or vapes to discourage the youth from buying these products.
“Our original position has always been to make sure that the flavors appealing to the youth are not allowed,” Finance Undersecretary Karl Kendrick Chua said. [...] Chua said the DOF was still awaiting an executive order clarifying the scope of the President’s ban on e-cigarettes.
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- Category: December 2019
Vaping has been getting something of a bad press of late. Countries worldwide are considering restrictions and bans. Some 39 deaths have been reported in the US and a possible culprit is something called vitamin E acetate. But how dangerous is vaping and if it is banned won't that keep more people on the much more dangerous cigarettes? And why is Donald Trump back-tracking on a ban of flavoured e-cigarettes?
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- Category: December 2019
Bangladesh plans to prohibit the sale and use of electronic cigarettes and vaporisers, a health official said on Sunday, as countries around the world move to ban devices that have been linked to health risks and teen addiction.
"We are actively working to impose a ban on the production, import and sale of e-cigarettes and all vaping tobaccos to prevent health risks," Shaikh Yusuf Harun, Secretary at the health education and family welfare division of the Ministry of Health and Family welfare, told Reuters.
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- Category: December 2019
Sharon Levy, director of the adolescent substance use and addiction programme at the children’s hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, is quick to recall the first time a teenager with vaping-induced nicotine poisoning arrived at her clinic.
“This was about a year and a half ago,” she says. “I remember sitting, talking with him about his experiences using [the e-cigarette] Juul, and it became quite clear to me that the symptoms he had were basically nicotine toxicity. Nicotine is sometimes used as a pesticide in very high levels, [...]
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- Category: December 2019
Most Canadians don't smoke.
Yet Canada has chosen to implement a nationwide smoking-cessation strategy to make nicotine vaping devices as accessible as possible.
It was an unusual public health decision for regulators to deliberately craft a law to encourage the sale of an addictive product.
The federal government's goal was "to strike a balance between protecting youth from inducement to nicotine and tobacco use, while allowing adult smokers to legally access vaping products," Health Minister Jane Philpott told a Senate committee on April 12, 2017, [...]
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- Category: December 2019
Joanna Cohen, professor of disease prevention at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, discusses the regulation of e-cigarettes with Bloomberg's Vonnie Quinn on "Bloomberg Markets." [...]
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- Category: December 2019
Earlier this year vaping hit the headlines with reports of deaths in the United States linked to the use of e-cigarettes. Vaping was the common factor, but a toxicologist from Imperial College London suggests the deaths could have been caused by oils or other unlicensed substances being added to the e-cigarette, rather than the approved contents of e-liquids. While the jury is still out on the long-term health impacts of vaping, the evidence suggests that in the short to mid-term at least, switching from tobacco cigarettes to e-cigarettes could reduce the harm to smokers by as much as 95 percent.
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- Category: December 2019
Online e-cigarette sales looked like a promising industry for Edwin Wong when he started his venture a year ago. The 34-year-old had studied Shenzhen’s businesses and products since 2012, and saw a sure bet. Soon, he had developed a loyal base of more than 600 repeat customers and business was steady.
But suddenly, everything changed. Overnight his 2.2m yuan (£240,000) investment in a startup, called KiwiPod, disappeared.
“A lot of people have gone into this business who never knew anything about the business before, they just threw money into it. [...]
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- Category: December 2019
The latest communique released by the intergovernmental Ministerial Drug and Alcohol Forum notes that Health Ministers discussed the growing evidence from both Australia and overseas implicating e-cigarettes in a range of harms to population health.
“Broadly, this evidence concerns the direct harms e-cigarettes pose to human health, their impact on smoking initiation and cessation, uptake among youth and dual use with conventional tobacco products,” the communique states.
The Ministers agreed to monitor evidence as it emerges.
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- Category: December 2019
Parliament on Monday passed a bill which seeks to prohibit the production, trade, transport, storage and advertisement of electronic cigarettes in the country. "We have done it with very pious intention. There is no vested interest," Health Minister Harsh Vardhan told the House in his reply on the bill.
During the debate on the bill, some members expressed apprehensions that the government had brought this bill under pressure from tobacco lobby and demanded the ban be extended to raw tobacco and conventional cigarettes.