Anti-tobacco crusaders are doing a great job of promoting e-cigarettes and vape products to America’s youth, using cartoons, hip images, photos of kids vaping, and attractive illustrations of vape flavors.
Now we have a five-minute Austin, Texas, Fox 7 TV interview (here) with Laurie Rubiner, Executive Vice President of Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. The clip is titled, “Advocates offer tips to parents on spotting e-cigarettes,” but “Teen Vaping Guide” would be more accurate.
Right off the bat, Rubiner displays a JUUL device (at 0:50), followed by a Puff Bar (1:02), in case any teens needed educating. She slipped up by observing that JUUL “looks like a Zip drive.” That was a 3.5-inch floppy drive introduced in 1994 and largely out of use when today’s high schoolers were born. She meant a USB flash drive.
Rubiner notes that JUULs “are designed to be easily hidden,” and it’s “so easy for kids to put [Puff Bars] in their backpacks and hide them away.” Puff Bars, she says (1:10) “come in 15,000 kid-friendly flavors.” The video offers helpful flavor images at 1:20, then again at 3:15 and 4:32.
The real focus of the video are images of teens vaping. While Rubiner was clearly targeting JUUL, there were only two clips of JUUL users. All other vaping scenes show kids emitting large white clouds, primarily from oversized non-JUUL devices.
How many vaping scenes can air in under five minutes? I counted 42.
This is a powerful, clearly misguided, vaping promotion for a teen audience. Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids continues down its rabbit hole of offering tips to teens.
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