From tomorrow, it will be a criminal offence to sell vape juice in any container larger than 10ml because, er, something or other. If I want to replace my e-cigarette, I won’t be able to do so in any EU country as its tank can hold more than 2ml of fluid and that presumably poses a threat to somebody somewhere. If I want to buy relatively strong vape juice (over two per cent nicotine), I’ll have to order it from outside the EU because, erm, think of the children or something.
There has never been any coherent explanation for the creation of these seemingly random criminal offences. It was never clear what problem the EU was trying to solve. There was simply an assumption that the vaping scene was an unregulated free-for-all which could only benefit from a good old EU directive. The regulations didn’t have to serve a purpose — any old idea thrown up by anti-vaping lobbyists and ‘public health’ busybodies would do — they only had to exist.
Opponents of vaping like to equate the e-cigarette market with ‘the Wild West’. This ignores the numerous consumer regulations that e-cigarette vendors and manufacturers have to abide by, but it also misses the point. What they call a ‘Wild West’ is — or was — a well-functioning, competitive free market which has resulted in 1.5 million British smokers quitting cigarettes without taxpayers having to pay a penny. If that is the Wild West, let’s have more of it.
Do have a read of that and then watch Prof. Sinclair Davidson explain how plain packaging campaigners made up their own evidence when the policy flopped in Australia...
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