Legislation in Rhode Island would give smokers access to e-cigarettes as a tool to quit smoking while ensuring youth are prohibited from purchasing vaping products.
For a time in 2019, the U.S. media was flooded with reports suggesting people were suffering vaping-related lung injuries. But there were reasons to doubt these claims. Although e-cigarettes had already been on the market for over a decade, never before had there been an outbreak of injuries and deaths resulting from the use of these devices. Additionally, there weren’t claims of similar outbreaks in other countries where e-cigarettes were also widely used, such as the United Kingdom.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) set up a special unit to investigate the issue and termed the condition EVALI (E-cigarette or Vaping Product Use-Associated Lung Injury). Several governors quickly responded to the alleged crisis, using executive orders to ban the sale of flavored e-cigarettes, which were already under fire for allegedly fueling a rise in youth vaping. At the federal level, non-tobacco and menthol flavors in pod-based vaping systems such as Juul were banned until approved by the Food and Drug Administration.
Guy Bentley – Reason – 2021-04-27.
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