They say that when you want to destroy a forest you cut down the young trees, and this is what tobacco firms are doing; destroying our children's lives who are the future of this country.
They are doing this by introducing e-cigarettes, which are colloquially called vapes. The vapes are in the market together with smoke-free snus, a type of moist powdered tobacco.
When people smoke the snus using the vapes, they look very cool. The aim here is to hook teens to nicotine and increase profits for tobacco firms.
The snus and vapes come in different flavours like candy, coffee, vanilla, pineapple. They are passed as being "less harmful and non-addictive" unlike traditional cigarettes.
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Be warned; most of the snus and vapes contain nicotine, which is the key ingredient in cigarette manufacture.
Most of the teens I spoke with, in high schools and universities, confessed that because they could not afford the trendy vapes and snus, they had turn to traditional cigarettes.
At this point, it will be instructive to recall that the vaping plan, introduced in 2007 to curb traditional smoking, has backfired.
This is because our teens start with vaping and eventually end chain smoking traditional cigarettes. World Health Organisation (WHO) statistics show more than seven million people die annually as a result of inhaling nicotine.
At least 1.2 million of these people are non-smokers who are exposed to second-hand smoke. The same data show that 80 per cent of the world's 1.1 billion smokers live in low and middle-income countries like Kenya.
Another interesting bit on vaping is that Kenya imports all the snus flavours and vape juices.
Many countries such as Brazil, Singapore, the Seychelles, Uruguay, India and even Egypt have banned e-cigarettes. Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, Norway and Japan are restricting the use of vapes, and yet here we are importing them. US President Donald Trump is all over Twitter preaching against vapes.
Apart from nicotine, vapes also contain metallic pollutants such as carbonyls which are very injurious to our health. These metallic pollutants are also very volatile.
A simple Google search will show you many situations when vapes have exploded when put in the user's pocket. It is time they put an end to this "trendy way of smoking".
