CASAA Call to Action: Unless you have been living under a rock for the last few years, “protecting the children” is the loudest and most dominant reason used to enact local legislation restricting and in some cases eliminating vaping from planet Earth and Mars. The supporters of the FDA’s deeming regulations shout this mantra every chance they get. It’s a very powerful tool since it tugs at your heart strings and all of us want to protect children in one way or the other. Protecting the kids also garners large amounts of media traction since the media loves to exploit this issue with huge amounts of coverage. Unfortunately, this mantra is also used as a guise to severly restrict many other areas of vaping, which are not directly related to protecting our kids.
I vigorously support child proof caps for ejuice bottles, full and accurate disclosure and warnings on ejuice labels, eliminate the cartoonish characters from all labels and branding, advertising should be restricted to adults only, eliminate images and “names” which obviously appeal to kids, respect and comply with the Trademark laws and don’t use “names” and or “images” which infringe on a “Mark Holder”, and all signage should clearly state that this product is for adults who are 18 years of age or older and or the legal smoking age in their respective geographic location. Given these thoughts, it’s crystal clear to me that some web sites who sell products for vapers need to clean up their act and deploy “Age Verification” for their site. For the last week Iv’e been surfing around the web and my own subjective findings are that around 50% of all vaping products web sites are non compliant. This is deplorable. Their is no excuse for not deploying “Age Verification” on your site. Including but not limited to sites which sell ejuice, flavors for DIY, DIY supplies, NIC, PG/VG, Mods, tanks, drippers, toppers of all flavors, wick, wire, editorial sites, and parts. The technology has been around for years and started in the adult industry. All the major CMS systems like WordPress have plugins and many of them are free. Even if you run a Forum, you can certainly insert the appropriate “Age Requirement” text in your Agree registration text. The same “Age Requirement” procedure also applies to your YouTube Vaping centric videos and or Ebay listings for Vaping products. Easy peasy with just a few words at the beginning of your video or someplace in your Ebay listing. How can the Vaping Community ever hope to improve our image and mitigate this hot button issue unless we comply? We can do much better and unless we voluntarily comply, we will be slaughtered with regulations. I guarantee you that this issue will be the number one priority in the FDA’s final rule and local laws will continue to use this lever to insure the elimination of vaping.
Given my inflammatory and outspoken views on web sites that do not deploy “Age Verification”, I wanted to set an example for others so yesterday I deployed “Age Verification” for this site. The way this WordPress plugin works is the way the real deal Age Verification should always work. You can’t view this site until you answer the question. Select YES and bingo, you can see this entire site. Select NO and I send you to a Sorry page and the party’s over for the kids. You can’t surf this site. Please note that “Age Requirement/Verification” text in your Shopping Cart is NOT Age Verification. Also note that the Legal Smoking Age is not always 18+. It varies with a given “geographic location”: country to country and state to state in the USA. For example, in NYC you must be 21 years of age or older.
I even toyed with the idea of calling out the numerous offenders but frankly the list would be very long and I want to give Vaping Web Site owners a warning and a reasonable amount of time to comply. Vaping Web Site owners of all flavors (pun intended), you have been warned. Please deploy “Age Verification” on your site yesterday!