From: The Daily Vaper
Carl V. Phillips | Contributor
While much of the world has realized the wisdom of harm reduction for illicit (and, increasingly, decriminalized) drugs, tobacco control is pushing in the opposite direction. Tobacco control opposes the promotion of low-risk substitutes for smoking, primarily because these are a bigger threat than smoking to their real agenda, which is not about consumer welfare or even health. The first principle of harm reduction is to not create additional harm. Among other things, this means not criminalizing people who use a product or forcing them to use potentially poor quality black-market products. This month, the U.S. FDA released two proposed rules — banning flavors in e-liquid and possibly other products and removing the nicotine from cigarettes (which might include a side-effect of banning refill e-liquid altogether) — that would set us on the course to exactly such criminalization and harms from black markets.