Vaping could save lives — if feds butt out

It’s important to safeguard Canadians’ health, right? The use of e-cigarettes, otherwise known as vaping, must be regulated to protect people — particularly young people — from the dangers of inhaling a vapour that contains chemicals, and in some cases nicotine, and that serves as a gateway to smoking the cancer sticks we call regular combustible cigarettes, which themselves can lead to smoking God knows what. Real lives will be lost if there isn’t a crackdown on vaping.

The trouble is, we don’t actually have much proof that any of the above is true (except that cancer stick part — regular cigarettes are indeed a health disaster). It’s quite possible that from a public health standpoint, cracking down on vaping will cost more health care dollars and lives than would taking a more laissez faire approach.

In new report called Vaping and the Law, the nonprofit Canadian Constitution Foundation (CCF) makes a convincing case for rights — and evidence-based vaping laws — which is to say, regulating e-cigarettes moderately, and with full recognition of the positive harmreduction role e-cigs can play for addicted smokers who’ve struggled unsuccessfully to kick the deadly habit.

But surely we’re not going to deem vaping completely harmless and allow minors unfettered access to e-cigarettes, are we? The CCF report doesn’t endorse doing either of these things; however, it does cite evidence that vaping is far less harmful than regular cigarette smoking, and it recommends that minors be allowed to buy and use e-cigarettes if they have the explicit permission of a parent, guardian or doctor to do so.

As the report points out, studies conducted by Public Health England show that in that country, “Among youth, e-cigarette use is almost exclusively confined to those who already smoke.”

Which is especially interesting when combined with licensed marriage and family therapist Damon Jacobs’s observation in a recent blog post for the R Street Institute that U.S. “teen rates of tobacco use have been declining consistently ever since vaping became available.” And again in the United Kingdom, where the government has generally accepted e-cigarettes as a less harmful alternative to smoking, and regulated vaping accordingly, smoking by children has fallen by two thirds since the year 2000.

Instead of following the U.K.’s lead by creating laws, policies, and strategies that give smokers accurate information about e-cigarettes and encourage vaping rather than smoking if abstaining completely is not going to happen, Canada is busy creating and passing laws that limit the dissemination of facts about, and access, to ecigarettes, treating them like tobacco or medicine when they are neither one.

What you may not realize is that restrictive regulation of e-cigarettes could be not only a poor policy choice, but also a violation of Canadians’ Charter-protected right to make decisions about their own bodies that will benefit their own health, as Courts have ruled is guaranteed by the Charter’s Section 7. One of the CCF’s points is that the Supreme Court of Canada has already shown itself willing to back the idea that an individual’s right to “life, liberty and security of the person” includes harm reduction. Back in 2011, in a case called Canada vs. PHS Community Services Society, the high court ordered that the government couldn’t close down supervised drug-injection sites (which offered illicit drug users clean needles, clean facilities, and supervising health care workers) for this very reason. Believe what you will about whether the court overreached in Canada vs. PHS, but the CCF and its report authors are not wrong in pointing to the case as a clear and relevant precedent that could render strict vaping laws ripe for constitutional challenge on the grounds that they block access to a proven harm reduction choice.

Here’s a brief summary of what the report found about current vaping laws in Canadian jurisdictions at various levels of government:

British Columbia’s e-cigarette regulation, while far from a rights- and evidencedbased ideal, is the least problematic in the country since it at least allows flavoured e-juices (key to e-cigarettes’ palatability and therefore viability as products), and Health Link B.C. acknowledges vaping as a potentially useful method for quitting smoking.

The federal government’s proposed vaping legislation (Government Bill S-5) is the worst. If passed, it would put a blanket ban on communications and ads that claim that vaping is less harmful than smoking combustible cigarettes, or that vaping is a viable harm reduction alternative.

In a perfect world, there might no smoking or vaping at all, but we all know this is far from a perfect world; so why not make it the best one we can by offering smokers a chance to save their own lives with a better — if not flawless — alternative?