Highly dangerous tobacco

Re: Proposed ban on flavoured tobacco is wrong-headed, Nov. 19.

It is unfortunate that Tyler Dawson did his undergraduate thesis on the history of Canadian tobacco control policy and not on the much more impressive and tragic historical marketing of tobacco to Canadians.

Dawson refrains from mentioning the Youth Smoking Survey (Health Canada) which reported that more than 50 per cent of children using tobacco in the previous 30 days had used flavoured products.

The tobacco industry made a loophole in regulations by increasing the weight of their product by one gram, allowing the addition of watermelon, strawberry, and chocolate to their smokes. The study showed that, in the previous 30 days, 14 per cent of high-school students had smoked cigarettes, 20 per cent had used a tobacco product, and 10 per cent had used a flavoured tobacco product, a long way from the five per cent used in Dawson’s opinion piece. The probability of becoming nicotine addicted for life with these early smokes is extremely high.

Dawson would call 16-year olds adults (“decidedly not children”) but they are children in their risk taking, their lack of seeing the big picture and their lack of knowledge of the history of successful marketing to children of the international tobacco marketing lobby.

We do need to help smokers quit. We do need to protect non-smokers from second-hand smoke.

But, more than any other effort, we absolutely need to protect our children from these tempting and highly dangerous products and those who promote them.

DAVID S. ESDAILE, Vice-President, Physicians for a Smoke Free Canada