OLYMPIA — A bill to put restrictions on electronic cigarettes and tax them at the same 95 percent rate as tobacco products drew a crowd that overflowed several meeting rooms for a House committee hearing Monday.
The bill requested by Gov. Jay Inslee had its first public hearing before the House’s Commerce and Labor committee. House Bill 1645 aims to put the first substantial state regulations on “vaping” and to fight the habit’s increasing popularity among teenagers.
“It’s a completely unregulated industry without any sort of standards or inspections,” Grant County Health District Administrator Jeff Ketchel told the committee, “and not any sort of requirements for labeling.”
Along with taxing vaping products like cigarettes, the bill would create a law against minors buying e-cigarettes and prohibit flavored vapor products. Like a separate vaping bill that passed the Senate unanimously March 3, the House bill would require all e-cigarette products to come in child-resistant packaging, a response to more than 100 calls to the state’s poison control hotline in 2014 from parents whose young children had swallowed vaping liquid.
E-cigarette users and vaping store owners said the devices are beneficial because they keep people away from the known health hazards of smoking cigarettes. A series of speakers told the panel they had kicked years and decades of smoking regular cigarettes almost immediately after deciding to give vaping a try. Zach McLain, owner of Future Vapor in Seattle, said higher taxes would run his vapor store out of the business, which he decided to open after e-cigarettes got him out of a 25-year pack-a-day cigarette habit.
“As soon as I was introduced to vapor products and found my flavor, I was able to quit that day,” McLain said.
Health officials supporting the bill said high school students are increasingly vaping as a point of entry to long-term nicotine use. Jason McGill, a member of Inslee’s health policy team, said efforts to curtail youth smoking were rooted in findings that 90 percent of adult smokers picked up the habit before they turned 18.
“Similarly, with e-cigarettes, if we can stop it young, we can stop it for life,” McGill said.
The committee chairman, Rep. Chris Hurst, D-Enumclaw, said he supports the bill’s goal of keeping e-cigarettes away from young people, though he expressed some skepticism that raising the tax rate on e-cigarettes and related products would solve issues. If taxes drive the price too high, he said, a black market could emerge for untaxed vaping products. He said aspects of the bill have substantial support.
“At a starting point, we have a system with no regulation today,” he said. “That’s going to change.”
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