this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2024
39 points (84.2% liked)
Asklemmy
43408 readers
1550 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Kids vaping is often a mental health problem, not a criminal problem. Nicotine is used by people with untreated mental illness to self medicate, and as long as you have kids without adequate access to mental health care you’re going to have kids vaping. From what I can find something like 1/3rd of people who need mental health services in Canada haven’t got the care they needed in the past year. That’s a lot of kids.
Criminalizing selling but not possession is a very basic way of preventing the criminalization of addiction. Throwing a kid with untreated or badly controlled ADHD into juvie, or fining them, or whatever punishment you’re imagining here, is basically the worst way to deal with addiction.
Because I’m sure someone will misconstrue this as me saying it’s okay for kids to vape: it’s not, that’s why they need mental health services, even if it’s ‘only’ for addiction. Criminalizing them doesn’t help them.
no teen i know vapes because of their mental health. right now, Here in germany, every teen I know smokes and occasionally (when having the money) vapes.Its the standard.
You aren’t in their heads and you have no idea why they’re vaping. If every teen in Germany smokes (doubtful), proportionally teens who have a mental illness will smoke more and be more likely to become addicted, not only because they’re smoking more but because of the brain chemistry at work leading them to smoke to begin with. Self medication isn’t an exaggeration, nicotine acts similarly to MAOIs. It’s a shitty medication substitute.
I'm a teen myself and so I hang around a lot of them, in my groups everyone smokes usually they started because of their friends and so on. its literally the standard in my field of people, and yes that's a field with a lot more mentally ill people compared to other groups. So I guess you are sort of right.