regulering smaakjes e-sigaret

Reactie

Vraag1

I used to smoke since I was a teenager, now I'm 39. After decades of smoking and several unsuccessful attempts to quit via patches, gums, lozenges, or cold turkey, I found vaping in 2019 and it finally helped me to quit smoking for good.
I used to smoke menthols only but now that I vape I absolutely do not touch menthol liquids. Rather, I go for other flavours like fruits or desserts because they help me forget about smoking.
Flavours are necessary to keep us ex smokers in the right path. If you ban flavours other than those resembling cigarettes, you will just be:
1. making it more difficult for smokers to quit because vaping tobacco or menthols will never be the same as smoking- vaping these flavours will never be superior than smoking them. Vaping is not harm free but it's harm is significantly less than smoking. Therefore whatever decrease in smoking trend you are seeing now will slow down or even be negated.
2. Fostering a black market for flavours. So vape liquids will be manufactured without regulation, quality check, taxation.
3. And because vaping menthols or tobacco will always be inferior to smoking the same flavours, you will inevitably have people go back to smoking. See my first point

I understand that regulations are required and in fact I am mostly OK with the 2015/16 TPD rules. If implementation of the regulations is the issue, then addressing this will bring you the solutions you seek. Banning flavours just make no sense at all and will be a net negative for society as a whole for the reasons I have summarised above.