Tag Archives: vaping

Jealous’s Latest Float Vaporizes

Ben Jealous had invited speculation that he’d run for mayor of Baltimore but pulled out as the race picked up. In the wake of Rep. Elijah Cummings’s sad passing, history has repeated itself at a faster pace around the open seat:

Jealous said in a text that his attention is “on running the kids to baseball and rowing practices, keeping door open to run for governor.”

Weird how the kids don’t need to attend practice in gubernatorial election years. Of course, it’s no stranger than the Democrat who got blown away with just 43.5% in a stellar Democratic year thinking that he should run again. That’s a lower share than received by any Democratic nominee in the last 50 years.

Regardless, Jealous would have been an odd successor to Cummings. While Jealous is a Juul consultant , Cummings broke ground in the fight against big tobacco:

In the Maryland House of Delegates, where Mr. Cummings served from 1983 to 1996, he championed a ban on alcohol and tobacco ads on inner-city billboards in Baltimore — the first prohibition of its kind in a major U.S. city.

The 1980s were the glory days when you could still smoke on airplanes and Joe Camel marketed smoking as cool to kids. Ben Jealous’s client, Juul, has been accused of similarly targeting teenagers.

The sales campaigns for Juuls — now hugely popular with teenagers across the nation — are at the heart of a federal investigation into whether the company intentionally marketed its devices to youth. The attorney general of Massachusetts, also investigating the company, contends that Juul has been luring teenagers to try the product and has introduced many to nicotine.

“From our perspective, this is not about getting adults to stop smoking,” the Massachusetts attorney general, Maura Healey, said in an interview. “This is about getting kids to start vaping, and make money and have them as customers for life.”

Elijah Cummings took the battle for kids against big tobacco to Annapolis. “Progressive” Ben Jealous just took the money.

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Air In, Vaping Out in MoCo

On Tuesday, the Montgomery County Council looks set to pass Council Vice President Nancy Floreen’s bill to ban the sale of e-cigarettes to minors. The bill would also prohibit their use where smoking is already not allowed and mandate child-resistant packaging.

Here is Councilmember Floreen’s argument for the bill:

It is hard to keep up with the mounting evidence that electronic cigarettes pose more risks than their marketers would like us to believe, especially for children and teens.

Although electronic cigarettes do not produce tobacco smoke, they do contain nicotine and other dangerous chemicals. That’s why I introduced a bill in the Montgomery County Council to prohibit the use of electronic cigarettes in public spaces where traditional cigarette smoking is banned, including in public buildings and restaurants. The bill also would prohibit use of electronic cigarettes by minors and would require child-resistant packaging for them.

The use of electronic cigarettes, commonly called “vaping,” has grown dramatically since the product’s introduction in 2007. The practice has become so commonplace that the Oxford Dictionary selected the word “vape” as its 2014 “Word of the Year.”

Perhaps swayed by the belief that electronic cigarettes are safe, or emboldened by the fact that e-cigs have little odor that parents could detect, teens who have never tried traditional cigarettes are using e-cigs. In fact, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that e-cig use has tripled among teens in just two years. These young people are unwittingly putting themselves at risk for nicotine addiction and nicotine poisoning, as well as potentially graduating to harmful tobacco products.

What exactly is in an electronic cigarette? It is hard to say. In addition to the most common ingredients — propylene glycol, nicotine and flavorings — studies have revealed a lot of unsavory things, like carcinogens, heavy metals and even silicon fibers in some e-cigs. But with 90 percent of electronic cigarettes being manufactured in China, where production lacks even the most basic of regulations, they could contain just about anything.

Many states, including Maryland, prohibit the sale of electronic cigarettes to minors. Municipalities including New York City, Los Angeles, Boston and Chicago, also have enacted restrictions on their use.

While the Food and Drug Administration is currently considering regulations to address electronic cigarettes, it is not clear when those regulations would be finalized or take effect. In the meantime, I’m not willing to gamble with the health of our current generation of young people. We must put some protections in place, and we must do it now.

Councilmember Floreen makes a good case. It seems very odd that someone can buy vaping materials at a mall kiosk but that cigarettes must be sold behind the counter. If adults want to use these materials, that’s their business. But we shouldn’t facilitate the addiction and the poisoning of people who are not yet legal adults.

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