Is ireland moving towards a ban on e cigs?

craiclad

It seems as if many governments are moving towards a ban on e cigs. A quick Google search on the subject showed a few articles about the 'potentially harmful chemicals' in e cigs and a complete lack of rational thinking. So I was wondering, is there any movement by government or anti smoking groups towards banning electronic cigarettes in Ireland? And if so, what can we do to try and keep them legal?

DirtyBollox

nothing been discussed yet by our government that were aware of, but the eu was talking about it a while ago. the WHO I think published an article on it a few weeks ago saying further study was needed before anything was done.

eeloe

There's too many items to bring out a blanket ban, what are they gonna do, ban stainless steel tubes, batteries, wire?

If they ban PG and VG, a LOT of things are going to very difficult to produce, like handwash, asthma inhalers for example

krissovo

I have been looking into this and there will be some form of ban IMO, either:

1 Complete, no cigs sold in Ireland
2 Same bans a real cigarettes i.e. public places
3 A single element ban either juice or delivery

Personally I think/hope its 2

giant_midget

Unfortunately what it all boils down to is revenue for the government...They just want to see if they can get more out of this on top of the 23% vat rate.

My guess is that they will try to put them into the same tax bracket as regular cigarettes, Not too sure if this will work out for them or not. It's nothing to do with health , It's to do with more finances on the governments balance sheet...w@nkers

stevenmu

All they'd have to do is impose some type of testing or licensing regime for nicotine containing products.

Another option would be to declare them to be medicinal products and put them under the control of the IMB. I'm not sure exactly what the legislation says about that, but AFAIK they have pretty wide ranging powers to basically decide that anything they want can be declared a medicine, and at the point the IMB have complete control over if and/or how it can be sold.


On the one hand we are lucky, our government generally isn't proactive about these things, and ecigs are under the radar enough that there's no real need for them to do anything.

On the other hand, they are generally pretty pliable to lobbying, if the pro-tobacco or anti-smoking lobby decide to push for them to be banned, the government is likely to roll over pretty easily unless we can make a lot of noise about it.

I have been wondering for a while if we should pre-emptively make a lot of noise, or if that would just be drawing unwelcome attention, and I'm still not sure. It could go either way.

eeloe

But which part of it are they going to bring under the tax bracket as tobacco? the juice, the batteries, the attys?

Too many variables for them to look at.

jtsuited

they could make nicotine subject to a higher level of control and licensing. Easily. And I reckon it's coming. Here's the thing.....every drug that comes into this country or is made here is controlled (for fairly good reasons but we won't get into that). You either need a license to sell it or it's outright illegal.
Nicotine's a drug so they could merely tighten the regulation of it to make it completely illegal to sell without a license. Ever wonder why only pharmacies can sell nicotine replacement therapy products? It's a legal thing.

They will probably not put a ban on anything other than nicotine containing products being sold by anybody who isn't a pharmacist. So if worst comes to worst (even if it was EU based), they'll have to go through every package from china to test if there's nicotine in the juice. this seems like a pretty unfeasible strategy as coarse detection methods (sniffer dogs etc) can't afaik detect nicotine if it's in a vg/pg suspension at very very very low concentrations - 10ml of juice will have 240 milligrams of nicotine max (haven't seen strengths higher than 24mg/ml).

Unless some absolute tool inadvertantly dies from drinking juice (or IVing it or whatever), they'd find it very very difficult to justify the expense a ban like this would cost.

I've asked a few doctors (i'm a medical student) what their thoughts are on the health effects of e-cigs and they're pretty much the same as mine.....so far, there has been no research that suggests that it is any worse for your health than standard nicotine replacement therapy (gum,patches,etc). So, not entirely harmless (nicotine alone has some fairly minor adverse effects) but in comparison to smoking, any risk is extraordinarily negligible.

That's where the evidence stands. For now. We have no idea what the long term effects could be. None. On that basis they could put in some fairly awful legislation, but I doubt a minister for health who was a GP is going to push for that considering he will have seen many of his patients die because of cigarettes.

Anyone

Theres absoloutley no way that Governments, Tobacco Companies and Pharmacitical Companies are going to sit by and let all that revenue dissapear.

As to what will happen, I have no idea. But as others have said, they cant ban everyday products, so it might be a case that retailers will have to repackage their goods in some other format.

jtsuited

the loss of profit by tobacco companies to e-cigs will only become even slightly significant when ecigs are not some extraordinarily niche thing.

kiffy

It's looking like from what I have read in articles, that Ireland will follow whatever recommendations the EU decide in it's policy on Nicotine delivery systems, so that way they won't have to act alone and be the big bad wolf, it will be a common EU directive, where as I can see the UK deciding to avoid any banning of Nic delivery thingies as it is so popular now there and would severely harm any party in power in future elections, they seem likely to not accept any EU directive.

Here it's not so popular yet still getting funny looks wherever I go, so I think our vaping habit is in the hands of the EU rather than the Irish government, don't know if that's a good or bad thing, but it won't take long as the EU are already working on their decision/directive on e cigs as a part of nic del systems.

Some dopey Greek researcher (who probably hadn't paid any tax) made claims about it affecting lung functions or something similar and every anti e cig lobby is hanging on it's every word

tommy2bad

I don't think the Irish Gov will do anything but EU level is where things will be moved forward. The prohibitionists have failed already at regional level in Germany and Holland so the next move for them is European wide legislation.
We have seen the EU health guy canned because of corruption but it was his intention to ban all ecigs and while he may be gone, I doubt the ban is anything more than postponed.
This isn't a health issue anymore, it's about ideology and money. Ideology on the part of anti smoking campaigners and money on the part of pharma companies who up to now have a monopoly on NRT (and the drugs for smoking related illness, but they wouldn't be that cynical )
As to The WHO, they talk the talk but never mention banning cigarettes, funny that.

One thing is sure the longer ecigs stay available the harder a ban will be, in the last 2 years the tide of opinion is turning and worst case will be some form of licensed egig and the elimination of all liquid sales.
I can definitely see diy being baned. Remember it's nic they hate not batterys.

kiffy

tommy2bad wrote: »

worst case will be some form of licensed egig and the elimination of all liquid sales.
I can definitely see diy being baned. Remember it's nic they hate not batterys.

Got dozens of batteries but wouldn't be much use without liquid I can see sales of VG liquid at my SuperValue market going through the roof
Also had better give wick building another bash :eek:

tommy2bad

Indeed Kiffy, but if like me it's nic you love, trouble ahead.
Now to google tobacco growing and steeping

kiffy

tommy2bad wrote: »

Indeed Kiffy, but if like me it's nic you love, trouble ahead.
Now to google tobacco growing and steeping

Try this link Tommy
http://theoldfirm.hubpages.com/hub/Tobacco-Growing-and-Curing-at-Home

You grow it and I'll give 60% of the costs (for growing and curing it an extra 10% for your troubles) for 50% of the harvest.

Sir Digby Chicken Caesar

you'll have to get onto the houseofliquid guys and pay them for their filtering secrets.. anyone who's tried the original virginia prime or guevara will know just how horrible tobacco steeped liquids will be on a coil unless they've been put through a serious filtering

Green Hornet

If you got stuck, I suppose you could always get a nicorette microtab and dissolve it in nic free juice.........those tabs, lozenges have a fixed amount per tab. You know how many mgs per tab so you could make up the required mg/ml that way.

Lot of work though.......but if the worst came to the worst.....

grindle

Just worked it out Green Hornet, you'd need 270 microtabs per 30ml bottle of 18mg juice.
€90.97 cost on top of the bottle of eliquid.
Apart from becoming an impractical slurry of nicotine, juice and tab filler, it brings the average cost per day up to about €8-€10.

Too much time on hands.

Green Hornet

Ha ha........I should have put a bit more time into it before throwing it out there. I didn't know how much was in a tab even!