OPINION: Vaping - it's the latest thing to try to screw our society.
Advertised as cool, hip and modern, I find it clunky and uncool. It kind of looks like you're sucking your thumb. Just much more deadly.
And increasingly, it's not the kids from the wrong side of the tracks taking up vaping. It's too expensive for them. It's the middle-class kids who never smoked - but now they vape.
So, here's your AM Show wake up call guys.
In the USA, 33 people died in just six months from a mysterious lung disease linked to vaping. Compared to deaths associated with smoking, it's very few, but this should serve as a warning.
In my view, vaping has one role and one role only. It is a great way to quit smoking.
The more I learn and read about it, the more I think absolutely, yes it works.
So I can't sit here and say 'ban it', because it certainly helps those quitting smoking. Undeniably. It can change lives for the better.
So as a 'quit smoking' tool, and a quit smoking tool only - why don't we simply hand them out to those people wanting to ditch the durries for good?
A chemist or doctor could surely hand them out via prescription for free, using the tax collected from smokers.
Why have a mass retail market to help tobacco companies with a second coming? A mass retail market and advertising only increases the chances of non-smokers picking it up.
Sucking toxins of any kind into your lungs has a price eventually. Here's what I especially don't get - like synthetic cannabis before it, which killed dozens in this country, why do we allow vaping products to hit the shelves in a totally unregulated way before any sort of law is passed?
We are guinea pigs - and our lawmakers are nincompoops.
Why are we so damn benign as a people to allow this crap to take hold as Parliament sleeps?
Incredibly, it has slipped down Parliament's order paper to number 24 on the priority list, and Parliament is now in a two-week recess.
I can't see the law passing before the election, which is a real shame. We are failing our kids.
Duncan Garner is the host of The AM Show.
