Health Minister
Bans Import and Sale of Nicotine Vape
Breaking Israel News
Latest News Biblical Perspective
By Judy Siegel-Itzkovich August 23, 2018 , 11:03 am
Their venom is like
that of a snake, a deaf viper that stops its ears. Psalms 58:5 (The Israel
Bible™)
JUUL vaping e-cigarette. (Credit: JUUL/screenshot)
Starting September 1, the Israeli government will
prohibit the sale of a small piece of plastic that looks like a disk-on-key
device but is filled with highly concentrated nicotine. This device has been
causing millions of young Americans to become addicted.
The import and sales of JUUL vaping e-cigarette will not
be allowed, Prime Minister (and health minister) Benjamin Netanyahu decided
this week following urgent requests from Health Ministry officials, who said
the product poses “a grave danger to public health.”
The small container’s contents, which is inhaled, is so
inconspicuous that some students even use them during class and charge them by
plugging the devices into their laptop computers.
In each JUUL pod, there are 59 milligrams of nicotine for
every milliliter of liquid, an amount much more potent than the six to 30
milligrams in other e-cigs. Although the US Food and Drug Administration has
not barred its sale and import, the European Union has prohibited it because
its limit of nicotine is 20 milligrams per milliliter.
Pronounced “jewel,” the product comes from San
Francisco’s JUUL Labs, an electronic cigarette
company that spun off from PAX Labs in 2017,
where it was first introduced in 2015. Produced in attractive colors and fruit
such as mango and other flavors including crème brulee and mint, the piece of
plastic is thin and can easily been hidden from adults. One pod, equal in
nicotine to a pack of cigarettes, can be finished in a day by a heavy JUUL
smoker.
Made from nicotine salts that exist in leaf-based
tobacco, it has been marketed intensively in the US and elsewhere via the
social media, especially Instagram.
JUUL is “addictive and dangerous to individual and public
health in Israel,” warned Dr. Hagai Levine, of the Association of Public Health
Physicians and the Medical Society for the Prevention and Smoking earlier this
year. “Experience in the US teaches us that the product is aimed especially at
youngsters, who are especially susceptible to nicotine addiction. There is a
real danger that the massive penetration of this product without any regulatory
limitations will lead to increased use also of conventional cigarettes among
youths and cause addiction, illness and deaths,” he said.
As it is a new product, there hasn’t been time for
reliable research to be conducted on JUUL’s long-term effects, but in the
field, the high-powered nicotine has clearly become addictive among teens and
young adults.
At present, they can be purchased by individuals of any
age, even children, in almost three dozen stores in five cities, including
Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Ramat Gan, and not only at tobacconists but also at
special “vape shops” that are opening and becoming popular. They can also be
smoked anywhere and advertised without limits.
The manufacturers have claimed that their product is “a
safer alternative to cigarettes,” but this has not been proven. JUUL Israel,
which has opened its own store in this country, was outraged after hearing
about the ban. The local company’s CEO, Assaf Snir, said that JUUL is meant for
adult smokers. The company, he said, will go to the High Court of Justice to
appeal the government’s upcoming prohibition of imports and sales.
Snir contended that JUUL was “safer” than conventional
cigarettes because it contains no tobacco and the hundreds of toxic chemicals,
including tar, hydrogen cyanic, formaldehyde, lead, arsenic, ammonia, uranium
and benzene in tobacco products.
The Israel Association of Public Health Physicians, the
Israel Medical Association’s Society for the Prevention of Smoking and for
Smoking Cessation and the Israel Cancer Association welcomed the JUUL ban, but
said government action against smoking is only partial.
“The Israeli market remains vulnerable to the
introduction of new tobacco and nicotine products, and there is no protection
of the public from new products and electronic cigarettes,” they said in a
joint statement. “The Government of Israel, and in particular the health and
finance ministers, must act with determination to fully implement the World
Health Organization’s Framework Tobacco Control Convention that it ratified and
to act in a comprehensive manner to protect public health.”
The organizations also demanded that the government
equalize the taxes on all tobacco products, including cheap rolling tobacco
that many Israelis are now using instead of conventional cigarettes, and to
pass the law banning the advertisement of tobacco products and applying it to
all tobacco and nicotine products.
Meanwhile, studies about the dangerous long-term effects
of exposure to tobacco among non-smokers continue to mount up. Prospective
research and a 20-year followup by the American Cancer Society on 184,000 adult
Americans who never smoked, has found that secondhand exposure to tobacco smoke
by children, as well as non-smoking adults, significantly increase the risk of
death from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and cardiovascular disease in
adults.
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