Students, doctors push for strict regulation of e-cigarettes
A group of Calgary students is seeking strict regulation of vaping products in response to concerns over increased e-cigarette use among youth.
The Calgary group, called Stop Addicting Adolescents to Vaping and E-cigarettes, or SAAVE, includes university students, high school students and doctors.
University of Calgary graduate student Asha Hollis said vaping rates have risen dramatically in recent years.
“In Canada, we see that now one in four high school-aged students have tried an e-cigarette, and the numbers just keep rising,” Hollis said in Parkdale on Tuesday. “This is a real public health concern and something that we as university students are very concerned about.”
Among a list of requests, the group is asking the governments of Canada and Alberta to: require e-cigarettes to be sold from behind a pharmacy counter and only to people 18 and older; ban online sales of the products; ban all e-cigarette flavours except tobacco; ban advertising of vaping devices; regulate e-liquids to reduce toxins and ensure the contents are clearly labelled; and control the manufacture of the devices to ensure safety.
Second-year University of Calgary health sciences student Devin Aggarwal said youth vaping has been linked to higher smoking rates of tobacco cigarettes. While teen smoking rates have been declining since 1999, Aggarwal said the emergence of vaping “threatens to erase the gains we have made through addicting adolescents to nicotine, which may eventually lead them to smoke.”
The recent emergence of small, trendy vaping devices has made the issue more widespread, Aggarwal said.
“When I graduated from high school, that was only two years ago and I didn’t see the problem ... now it’s so prevalent,” he said.
High school students who attended the media event Tuesday said their peers are frequently vaping in school bathroom stalls, in locker-rooms and in their vehicles.
“We see children who suffer from many conditions that are not preventable,” Hollis said. “However, nicotine addiction is preventable. So it just seems right that we do what we can to stand up for them and protect them. And the evidence that we study as students is very compelling and tells us that nicotine addiction is serious, and these products can cause that and put the children at risk.”
Dr. Eddy Lang, who leads the department of emergency medicine at the Cumming School of Medicine, said he is “concerned and disturbed” to see the rapid increase in nicotine and e-cigarette use among teens.
“I’ve heard really good evidence that this is going to translate into tobacco consumption, because it’s ultimately more affordable, and that this will bring on the disease — whether it be cardiac, respiratory, cancer — that our society can ill-afford to support, let alone how devastating it’ll be on lives and families,” Lang said.
Dr. Aravind Ganesh, a senior resident in the University of Calgary department of clinical neuroscience, said decades of research on tobacco addiction have shown that nicotine “is a highly addictive substance.”
“This is an important chance for us to save future generations and we should be working collectively on that front,” he said.