Health Canada released their new guidelines for vape product advertising restrictions, dated June 26. It establishes new rules for how vape products can be advertised across Canada where there are no conflicting provincial regulations in place. We had a brief read through it and are happy to report that our customers are not likely to be impacted by these new regulations.
The objective of the new regs is to reduce youth inducement while balancing the needs of smokers and vapers. In our view, they did an excellent job, understanding that vape shops are already age-restricted spaces and focusing their efforts where youth are actually seeing vape product advertising; mainly in convenience stores, where they're allowed to frequent. Since our customers don't buy their products from convenience stores anymore, we'll just focus this article on changes that will actually be experienced. We also noticed in the document that Health Canada now recognizes that the EVALI outbreak was officially deemed by the CDC to have been caused by Vitamin E Acetate (which was only ever found in illicit THC products), just as we had been saying all along. It's a small footnote, but a huge vindication for our industry and a tacit endorsement that vape products will not cause the problems that were seen in the illicit US THC market.
In-store, vape shops will proceed as before. You can still view vape products in vape stores. You can still buy vape-brand apparel in vape stores, because they're age-restricted. Where you may see a vape product advertisement, it will now be accompanied by a health warning, such as "Warning: Nicotine is highly addictive." You will no longer see or hear vape product advertisements in broadcast media, where youth have access.
Really, the main item you may notice is a change to the initial age-gate on websites such as our own. While it's said that a simple checkbox (e.g. Attestation to being age of majority) no longer suffices, they do not offer specific guidelines for what will suffice at this time. Our age selection and Facebook profile verification options may suffice. Otherwise, you may see something more involved such as securely verifying age through a database such as Equifax, where no information is kept locally or on our website. A cookie may be kept in your browser for your convenience so you don't need to do this every time you visit, but we would not have any of your personal information saved whatsoever, in respect of privacy laws.
The new restrictions come into force in as little as 30 days after the publication and in some instances, 60 days after.
That's it. Thanks for reading and have a great day!
The TheraVape Team.