‘Smoke-free’ schools not getting easier

TUESDAY MORNING EDITORIAL — They call it “e-juice”— the nicotine cartridges that go into the new e-cigarettes.

If you’re still catching up, e-cigarettes are the tube things that you put a cartridge into and have your choice of various flavours or good old nicotine in place of the old-fashioned tobacco ciggies we grew up with.

The Kamloops-Thompson school board dealt with the issue last night, and it’s no doubt one that many other school boards will be dealing with soon if they haven’t already.

Cigarettes and schools have never been a good match. Back in the day, the biggest problem was convenience stores that insisted on selling tobacco products to students. The Kamloops board tried to get at it by urging City council not to zone for convenience stores near schools, but it fell on deaf ears.

Trying to keep cigarettes out of the hands of students has long been a lost cause; the best schools can do is try to control it, while standing on the principle that school yards should be tobacco-free.

But these new electronic cigarette gizmos don’t use tobacco, and they’re described as generating vapour rather than smoke, which means school boards have to alter their anti-smoking policies to include them. As reported in The Armchair Mayor News two weeks ago, authorities can ban e-cigarettes from school buildings, buses and grounds, and punish students caught selling the products.

But there’s fuzziness around the fact that e-cigarette users can use nicotine in them, or not. Health Canada opposes using the nicotine cartridges and, as far as we can tell, they are, technically, illegal in Canada. (The non-nicotine ones aren’t.)

That hasn’t stopped them from coming across the border from the U.S., and they’re bound to start showing up in smoking pits at schools.

Whether these modern-aged cigarettes are used with nicotine or not, one has to wonder what the attraction is to sucking something into your lungs. School officials are right to want “a society that is smoke-free” whatever the device, but making it so isn’t getting any easier.