RCPCH Calls For Ban
The Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health has called on the Scottish government to restrict the advertising and promotion of vaping products as smoking cessation tools
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by Dave Cross
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The Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health (RCPCH) says it “is responsible for training and examining paediatricians. The College has over 19,500 members in the UK and internationally and sets standards for professional and postgraduate education. We work to transform child health through knowledge, research and expertise, to improve the health and wellbeing of infants, children and young people across the world.”
The RCPCH says it believes the government should be seeking to limit use of vape products as a cessation aid – an incredible opinion given the success witnessed across the UK with smokers successfully switching to vaping.
They go on to say: “It is important that nicotine containing products, particularly inhalational products which are designed to maximise rapid delivery of the drug to the brain, should be highly restricted and should face the same restrictions as tobacco containing products – there should be no advertising, no sponsorship and plain packaging.”
Moreover, the RCPCH calls for adults not to be educated by vendors: “As the harms of vaping are significant, it is important that we extend the same restrictions to vaping products that we do to cigarettes, thereby using plain packaging and removing instore promotional displays.
“In-store promotional displays designed to promote the products may be particularly appealing to young people and thereby lead them to take up vaping.”
In evidencing its recommendations, the RCPCH fails to provide any evidence – boiling down to a should/could wish list of hopeful outcomes.
It says: “Restrictions imposed on the advertising of vaping products should hopefully help to reduce uptake in vaping in children and young people. The impacts of the proposals should be closely monitored as more may need to be done to reduce the numbers of children and young people using vaping products.”
So, if pretending vapes don’t exist doesn’t work, which it won’t, maybe banning them or something? It’s a ludicrous position to take.
When asked about how their suggested measures will impact people living with socio-economic disadvantage, the RCPCH fail to detail that the likely impact is people. It ignores the documented impact of bans and restriction driving increased smoking rates, and thereby costing people living with socio-economic disadvantage from a health and financial perspective.
Instead, it calls for the reintroduction of “smoking reduction targets for pregnant women” and “helping mothers to understand the negative effects of smoking and vaping”.
The RCPCH genuinely believes its proposals “are a great start to tackling the issue of vaping
among children and young people in Scotland”.
Dave Cross
Journalist at POTVDave is a freelance writer; with articles on music, motorbikes, football, pop-science, vaping and tobacco harm reduction in Sounds, Melody Maker, UBG, AWoL, Bike, When Saturday Comes, Vape News Magazine, and syndicated across the Johnston Press group. He was published in an anthology of “Greatest Football Writing”, but still believes this was a mistake. Dave contributes sketches to comedy shows and used to co-host a radio sketch show. He’s worked with numerous start-ups to develop content for their websites.
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