Some 10,000 baby boomers turn 65 every day and, with the notable exception of presidential politics, are rapidly exiting the workforce and elected office. What they leave behind is a decidedly mixed record of accomplishment. Right now, we’re going to concentrate on a notable failure that is as hard to explain as this country’s crumbling infrastructure and a half-million deaths from opioid overdoses:
Vaping.
By the time the first boomers were in high school, the U.S. Surgeon General had already warned about the dangers of smoking. While the tobacco industry spent a few more decades denying that nicotine was addictive, the use of alternate nicotine delivery methods — gum, lozenges, patches — was a standard medical approach to smoking cessation by the time the youngest boomers were teens. Before Y2K, Congress and plaintiffs’ lawyers pressured R.J. Reynolds to abandon the wildly popular Joe Camel cartoon mascot, which was as familiar to children as Mickey Mouse.
Americans gave up smoking, and nicotine, by the droves. Nationally, smoking fell by two-thirds. So when e-cigarettes began to be commercialized early this century, we knew nicotine was addictive, and we knew that subtle appeals to children made for effective marketing.
And yet we let our country be flooded with an addictive, inhalable drug flavored like bubble gum and candy. The vape sellers insisted, with wide-eyed innocence, that they weren’t targeting kids or nonsmokers, just offering a fabulous, safer alternative to cigarettes — and we let them do it, without the kind of regulation or discouraging taxes that we apply to either cigarettes or medicine. And it turns out that vaping is not always safe and can even be deadly.
Millions of our kids are hooked because we failed to say no to something that was waving every red flag. It’s not too late to do the right thing, but it is too late to be anything but ashamed.
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