Get the Military Out of Venezuela’s Business Ban E-cigarette Ads Everywhere

The country’s generals run huge parts of the economy. The opposition needs to focus on that Europe has done the right thing. The U.S. has to follow suit for the sake of American teens

In 1993, Venezuela had fewer than 50 generals; today it has more than 4,000. This kind of runaway inflation is every bit as pernicious as the economic variety that also afflicts the country. And the military is increasingly involved and invested in that economy.

In February, President Nicolás Maduro put the generals in charge of a new state oil-and-mining- services company, one of almost a dozen military enterprises started under his administration. Active or former officers head some one-third of Venezuela’s ministries and govern about half its 23 states. Service members have gotten big raises; preferential access to housing, cars, and food; and promotions. Officers have won lucrative contracts, exploiting currency controls and subsidies—selling cheap gasoline to Venezuela’s neighbors at enormous profit, for instance.

Maduro’s opponents should be uniting around a coherent plan to fix Venezuela’s imploding, military-controlled economy. Instead, the opposition is hellbent on removing the president from power, collecting some 2 million signatures on a recall petition. Maduro still has significant political support, and he’ll use his control of the executive and judicial branches to frustrate and delay that effort, which is unlikely to succeed this year. The opposition’s credibility has already been hurt by its rash boast that it would throw out Maduro within six months after taking over the legislature in January. It would be far better for the opposition to focus on winning votes for the election in 2019, when Maduro’s term ends.

One way to put the military back in the box is to make clear that misdeeds will face consequences. The U.S. is building cases against officers implicated in Venezuela’s burgeoning drug trade. It’s also targeted a handful of officials with asset freezes and visa bans for engaging in political violence and acts of public corruption. However, if the U.S. leads the charge, it would only validate Maduro’s anti- Yanqui narrative. So the U.S. Within a few weeks, ads for electronic cigarettes will go dark on European TV, radio, and websites and will disappear from most print publications. Europe’s highest court has approved new regulations on such ads—in contrast with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which declined on May 5 to impose the same ban, even as it declared its authority to regulate vaping products. Cigarette ads have been banned on U.S. TV and radio since the Nixon administration, but e-cigarette ads are allowed everywhere—and they’re often aimed at teenagers.

This helps explain why more and more American adolescents are taking up e- cigarettes. In the past four years, the number has risen more than 900 percent, to 3 million, including about 1 in 6 high school students.

Even experts who believe (on incomplete evidence) that e-cigarettes may have the potential to help tobacco users quit see the danger in allowing vapes to be promoted to young people and other nonsmokers. While e-cigarettes don’t deliver the smoke and tar that traditional cigarettes do, their vapor contains noxious substances such as formaldehyde, acetaldehyde, heavy metals—and, of course, nicotine, which impairs brain development and causes addiction, ultimately encouraging new users to switch to the combustible kind.

Various studies in the U.S. have found an association between teen use of e-cigarettes and ordinary smokes. One found that kids who tried e-cigarettes were more likely to smoke combustible cigarettes within the next year than those who didn’t. That e-cigarettes come in thousands of flavors, from cherry crush to pomegranate, only increases their appeal to kids.

The FDA is starting a yearslong process to evaluate the ingredients in various e-cigarette brands. It’s at least banning the sale of vaping products to minors, though most states already do that. E-cigarettes are readily available to teens online. <BW>