Sure, we are seeing a deluge of seemingly coordinated news about vapes and the harms they are causing. But I will say that I've come to the conclusion that the government was right when they warned us about how this can be a gateway to drugs and when they said that the harms of vaping may not be lesser than your normal ciggies when people did not believe them. 'This can't be taxed', they say, 'so the govt is banning it'. 'Vapes are safer' than traditional cigs. In fact, what we can conclude, today, is that the academic evidence is mixed at best - there is no clear evidence showing vaping is less harmful than cigarettes. Initially, we saw some push back from folks that are, let's say, not exactly establishment figure. I recall Donald Low pushing very hard saying that vaping is less harmful and can help people kick their addiction from tradition cigarettes. I recall a former WP MP saying something similar and Kirsten Han (till this day) touting the virtues of vaping. What's telling is the silence from many of the original defenders. With the mounting negative news, most of the folks who once championed vaping (or criticised the G's stance) have gone quiet. This shift makes me conclude that the initial government warnings, which we were so quick to dismiss, were more prescient than we gave them credit for which is, a very reddit thing to do. That is all.
"'This can't be taxed', they say, 'so the govt is banning it'. 'Vapes are safer' than traditional cigs." Seriously, who really thinks it cannot be taxed and regulated if the government wants to?
I’ve seen this comment about the govt not knowing how to tax vapes repeated a few times here tbh, and it always stood out to me as being incredibly dumb - like ffs we managed to tax something like road usage, why’d they think that taxing a physical product would be harder?
A form of regulation on the types of vapes/electronic cigarettes in its early days would have helped to separate one from the other. IQOS, for example, could have been an acceptable e-cig alternative to conventional cigarettes. There would then have been a clear segregation of legal and illegal vapes/e-cigs, like how the packaging creates a clear visual identification of legal and illegal cigarettes. The blanket ban with ineffective enforcement hurt everyone, as there is now a huge number of vapes in Singapore with no effective way to differentiate between the nicotine types and the drug laced types.
It was never whether they were right or wrong, its about choosing a path and committing to it. A ban is only as effective as the enforcement. They chose the path to ban it they should have committed to it right from the very beginning. SO MANY personal and visual accounts of people openly vaping from the start of the ban for years, yet there was no major action until the last few months. So what if you have the foresight but dont act on it, it still results in the same consequence.
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