Peach, cherry, grape: call to ban flavoured tobacco products in SK

Oct 7, 2013 | 11:57 AM

Peach, cherry and grape are a few of young smokers’ favourite flavours of tobacco products.

You have probably seen these brightly coloured packages available in an array of flavours but now there is a call to ban them all.

“They have a good flavour to them,” says 18-year-old Elle Agenda. She was taking a quick smoke break outside of her school. She was smoking a traditional cigarette, but that’s not how she got started. She got hooked smoking flavoured tobacco.

“They give off a good taste in your mouth, not like cigarettes do,” she said.

These flavours are leaving a bad taste in the Canadian Cancer Society’s mouth. It’s pushing the provincial government to make flavoured tobacco illegal.

In a news release, the society states that more than half of high school students in the province who had smoked in the last 30 days, had used flavoured tobacco. The cancer society calls them “child-friendly tobacco products.”

Saskatchewan has one of the highest rates of youth smoking in Canada.

Mike McGuire didn’t start smoking with flavoured tobacco. But he has tried it.

“Usually grape or peach,” he said, noting that he prefers regular cigarettes. “With the flavoured, they don’t have filters, because of some new law or something like that. And it’s just harsher.”

McQuire was referring to changes in the federal Tobacco Act. It became illegal to flavour cigarettes and cigarillos – those are smokes that have a cigarette filter or that weigh a certain amount (1.4 g or less). Many companies got around the law by taking the filters off or by making their product weigh a little more.

Because of that, the Cancer Society is asking Health Minister Dustin Duncan to make flavoured tobacco outright illegal in the province.

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