Here are just some short tidbits of what’s happening around the world. First, the U.S. territory of Guam has introduced a new bill seeking to expand their current public smoking ban to also include vaping. Benjamin Cruz, The Speaker of Gaum Legislature was quoted as saying “Vaping is a choice,” and that “Breathing isn’t. No one who visits a public place should be forced to inhale potentially dangerous chemicals as the price of admission.”
Derry, a city in Northern Ireland, has enacted a law designed to prevent minors from vaping. The new law makes it illegal to sell nicotine products to people under the age of 18 and also purchasing a nicotine product on behalf of a minor. Some public health experts have expressed concerns about this new law, considering that most teens become full smokers before even turning 18, and now their access to safer products is much harder.
And Dubai is now asking that shopping malls enforce the public smoking ban already in place. They have had a smoking ban in place since 2009, which already includes vaping, but it seems that shopping malls haven’t been enforcing the ban for e-cig users outside of entrances. Government officials have been meeting with mall management to explain complaints and to enforce the law, so this is something that will probably come to an end soon.
So far we’ve only talked about bad news for vaping around the world, but there’s also some good news, for example in New Zealand the Ministry of Health released a press release stating that they believe e-cigarettes have the potential to help New Zealand reach their goal of reducing daily smoking prevalence by 10% by the year 2025. The press release points out that the government is now more focused on harm reduction to help smokers quit, and while e-cigarettes don’t appear to be completely harmless, they are significantly less harmful than smoking.