Sent today
Subject: NZ aspiring to be top vapers in the world.. guineas pigs. Ugly class action?
Dear Messrs Luxon, Seymour, Peters, Dr Reti and Ms Willis
Chris, David and Winston, NZ will have the delightful notoriety of having the highest rate of vaping in the world, a behaviour deemed by the FDA so hazardous they have refused to approve vapes, even to stop smoking the highly toxic tobacco.
A destructive vaping epidemic is embedded in New Zealand. Any regulation of it is absent from the first 100 day plan, and any stated intention by each party to address it clearly hollow.
Tobacco/vape companies are running the country here. They benefit hugely from your primary revenue stream to pay for tax cuts, negative gearing etc. They aren't paying for ensuing damage. Government gets some money upfront from each deal, but then pays, and pays, with the surge in lung, cardiovascular and other diseases and impaired brain development from nicotine, all of which we have been warned about, along with loss of earnings and community problems. You've heard all the secondary principals, the parents, the clinicians.
Tobacco smokers and vapers, the latter including children, who may due to their nicotine addiction start smoking tobacco as research has shown, will pay twice, for the purchase, then with their health.
It has been proposed that vapers keep receipts and vape items so they can be produced for a class action against the suppliers and the government when the health risks, as stated by lung.org et al, FDA et al, manifest in our health departments. Ditto for tobacco. Precedents are there for such action.
Given the risks, any such preparation for class action should start now, if the Coalition keep selling vapes almost like lollies as Labour did, don't get them out of public view, and don't tell vapers what the risks are, or establish quitting programmes for nicotine and vaping as well as tobacco.
The billion or so admitted by Ms Willis to be revenue, needed to pay tax cuts, from profits of selling a known toxin, at current rates of sales instead of reducing these! Mmm.
It would be great if grounds for litigation weren't a possibility, and everyone just did their job, making NZ healthy and productive.
I want to be on your side.
Kind regards
Mary MacGibbon
(contact details supplied)
Photo from Wikipedia