Do these arguments sound eerily familiar to tobacco harm reduction advocates?
"I think there is a risk that these could be an entry product..."
While he "agrees that kids should not be drinking these products, he doesn’t think governments need to get involved..."
"We don’t want any regulation that’s going to have an impact on accessibility..."
"...the widening availability of zero-proof adult drinks helps people who are trying to cut back on alcohol for their health."
"...they're usually near the alcoholic beverages and [offered] as alternatives. It’s very clear who they're marketed to and who they're for."
If makers & sellers of these non-alcoholic beverages don't want excessive regulation and taxation, they should learn from what the tobacco harm reduction community has experienced with these types of prohibitionists. Concerns about the gateway theory and "normalization" for youth is just the beginning.
The irony here is that people (including youth) use tobacco harm reduction products because the majority of the products still contain the chemical that they want - nicotine - without the same risks. The idea that youth would want to use non-alcoholic beverages simply because of the taste and branding (without the effects of the alcohol) is naive at best. Teens would be far more likely to go out of their way to get the real thing.
While the article admits that there’s "no evidence so far that the boom in zero-proof beverages has led kids in the U.S. to drink alcohol," Molly Bowdring (of Stanford Prevention Research Center, co-author of an opinion piece in JAMA Pediatrics on the topic) looks to the recent example of e-cigarettes as a cautionary tale," claiming that "Tobacco use was really declining among more recent generations. And then there’s this huge marketing push for vaping, and then it led to an uptick."
This claim is somewhat disingenuous. In fact, that "uptick" of “tobacco” use (which included e-cigarette use) was at the height of the teen vaping fad, was extremely brief and the decline in overall tobacco use then accelerated dramatically.
Also, as the chart shows, the decline in high school tobacco use had already flattened out considerably prior to the widespread availability of e-cigarettes popular with teens (such as Juul) in the US.
Between 2000 to 2009, when e-cigarettes came to the market in the US, overall high school tobacco use declined an average of 1.18 percentage points per year, dropping from 34.5% to 23.9%.
In the 4 years since the peak of the teen vaping fad in 2019, overall high school tobacco use has dropped an average of 4.65 points per year and is now at an all-time low of 12.6%.
That is the reason there is a need for safer alternatives!
