Candy-like cigarettes. Puffs are invading middle school and high school playgrounds. Those disposable cigarettes, attractive design and sweet tastes were created in the United States in 2019. They quickly crossed the Atlantic to land in France last summer. Yves Martinet, the president of the national committee against smoking is worried about this fashion effect, “devastating” for the youth health and condemn the manufacturer strategy.
For the pneumology professor at the Nancy University Hospital, their “strategy is simple“. First step, they make products at the “seductive design, with scents more attractive than each other“. They organize a very intense marketing which relies mainly on influencers“, he details.
Nicotine is a hard drug
Step two, it relies on nicotine. If some of these playful electronic cigarettes are at 0% nicotine, others may contain up to 2%. Or, “nicotine is a hard drug and once you are addicted to it, you can hardly part with it“, warns the former head of the pulmonology department of the Nancy University Hospital.
“Consuming these puffs means entering nicotine addiction more quickly and moving on to the consumption of even more dangerous products.“, worries Yves Martinet. gateway to smokinginformed by the High Council for Public Health in a report dated January 4, 2022.
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