State Sen. Missy Irvin of Mountain View likens the marketing of vaping products to teenagers to putting beer in baby bottles and selling it as a fun and useful product for infants.
It's an apt comparison, though incomplete--if we accept Irvin's full array of concerns about this fad if not outright epidemic.
Apparently, hordes of Arkansas school kids are regularly inhaling this vapor--usually with nicotine, often with pleasant flavoring--through these e-cigarettes.
As Irvin described the issue to me the other day, the problem is not merely that an adult product has wound up in the hands of children. More alarmingly, it's that we don't yet know nearly enough about the health risks of the product.
"My No. 1 concern is the new generation of nicotine addicts this is creating, and the unknown health conditions and costs associated with that," Irvin told me.
So a truer comparison for these vaping products might be putting beer in baby bottles to market to infants without anyone yet understanding why beer was making people stagger and slur and want to fight.
Concerns about vaping in Irvin's senatorial district's schools, often on devices easy to hide and use in bathrooms, have become rampant from school officials and worried parents since February or March, she told me.
I heard pretty much the same story from state Sen. Jim Hendren of Gravette, the president pro tempore of the Senate.
He announced Monday that he has a draft bill he'd like considered in a special session before the end of the year to restrict vaping marketing to children and otherwise regulate and tax vaping just as tobacco products are regulated and taxed.
Irvin, chairman of the Senate Health and Public Welfare Committee, said she's generally on board with Hendren's draft, which could change, and probably will be a co-sponsor though the measure is, at best, only a "first step" on a problem "we don't begin to have a handle on yet."
But while doctors try to figure out what is causing collapsed lungs and losses of consciousness and even deaths among young vapers--whether it's the basic product itself or the predictable adaptations of the product for consumption of other and dangerous chemicals--the state could go ahead and put a stop to social-media targeting to children, which often touts tasty vapor flavors.
The irony--and there almost always will be one--is that e-cigarettes were until recently considered helpful means of curbing consumption of tobacco smoke, and, on balance, healthy advantages, reducing lung cancer and emphysema and heart disease.
They might yet prove to be just that, statistically. But Irvin doesn't think 13-year-old kids are taking up vaping to stop cigarette habits they don't have. They're taking it up because it's been pushed on them by clever marketing and cultural forces, which is why kids do most anything.
Hendren, a moderate Republican by modern definition, tried and failed during the regular legislative session this year to raise taxes on vaping and tobacco products and use the money to pay for an earned income tax credit for low-income workers. The Senate passed the bill for him largely as a courtesy, but lobbyists derailed him in the House.
This time, with public attention and concern greater and sentiment changing, Hendren wants only to raise vaping taxes to tobacco equivalency and apply all restrictions on tobacco to vaping products.
He wants schools to get the money.
He said there are two avenues for getting such a bill passed in the short term. One would be to wait for the fiscal session early next year and try to suspend the rules with a two-thirds vote to add the bill as a non-fiscal item. He's too worried about getting a mere majority to risk banking on two-thirds.
It would be more practical, then, to consider the measure in a special session this year when it would require a simple majority, which Hendren calls a "50-50 proposition."
Gov. Asa Hutchinson, who is Hendren's uncle, has the same attitude toward special sessions that Mike Beebe had--that there's no reason to call them unless passage of the agenda is pre-emptively assured.
Hendren says he has enlisted help from others in trying to lock down two sets of votes--majorities on the floors of the two chambers and majorities in the committees that would have to vote to send the measures to the floor.
Hendren is wary of the power of lobbyists, especially the independent hired-gun ones who can be brought in to join lobbying cabals to focus on beating single issues in a special session.
But even the Trump administration is working on banning flavored vaping devices.
So this might be the one time we could find something constructive in that other dangerous addiction raging across Arkansas--the one to Trump.
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 09/19/2019