“
“Though it will be widely celebrated, business
owners and vaping advocates need to be aware
that legalisation of vapourised marijuana will only
be the beginning of its troubles.”
frontier of expansion for the vape trade will see new legal and
oppositional cans of worms opened.
In this business, it’s never over. Even in countries where vaping
has been legal for a while and the industry is thriving, it is constantly
besieged by both well-meaning but misguided action, and outright
sabotage.
A lot of friction has come from the cut and paste approach tobacco
control initiatives and groups apply to vaping. The most common
line of attack lazily conflates nicotine with tobacco in a simplified
pipeline or “gateway effect,” with tobacco control groups accusing
the industry of getting children hooked first on its own products
and later on smoking.
For years, marijuana was the defining face of the gateway effect,
with decades of propaganda telling us outright that it would lead
to harder, lethal drugs.
Vapourisers being used for marijuana use will attach additional
baggage – namely, the baggage of moralising and panics we’ve
seen hurled at the drug for decades.
This has an overseas knock-on-effect to consider. Vapers in less
marijuana-friendly countries will also need to brace themselves
for a slew of new, unpleasant accusations about the activity.
For example, in parts of the US, where the drug remains heavily
demonized, we should expect the charge of vaping as an “enabler
of pot use” to be raised at some point.
Packaging restrictions will be another hurdle. The European Market is
still recovering from the TPD and will undoubtedly see new regulation
as CBD steps up and experts begin to mull treating mods as
medical products.
In such a market, it’s only a matter of time before certain THC
concentrates are marketed using rhetoric and branding styles
associated with vaping. The Cannabis Act 2018 will prohibit the
kind of flash and flair that made e-liquid and mod packaging what
it is today; outlawing fluorescent and metallic colours, keeping
label and packaging backgrounds the same colour, and limiting
artwork to one brand name and one additional “brand element”
such as a slogan or logo, with limitations on size.
But by far the biggest potential headache lies in the redefinition of
vaping’s purpose and function, its mission.
Unlike smoking or alcohol, vaping comes to us in the wake of a
huge shift in consciousness concerning public health. The mid
to late twentieth century saw a tremendous uptick in lung cancer
cases and an indisputable rush of evidence linking it to cigarette
smoking. It’s difficult to imagine smoking reaching its lofty heights
in business and popular culture had we known the full extent of
its effects at the time.
For these reasons, in order to gain traction in the eyes of the public,
any product facilitating nicotine consumption has to ingratiate
itself to