Missouri Gov. Mike Parson launches unserious, half-hearted anti-vaping campaign
If Missouri Gov. Mike Parson really wanted to fight the vaping epidemic among middle schoolers, he would take real action.
He could push to raise taxes on vaping products, as other states have done. Or he could move against the flavored products that attract kids, as the president has talked about doing.
But no, Parson is not ready to say he supports either of those things. “I don’t know that pricing it out of somebody’s reach is always the right answer,” he said. Though yes, it is the right answer, particularly for kids.
Instead, the governor has announced a new social media campaign that’s supposed to bring attention to the dangers involved without spending any money.
This Clear the Air Campaign, as it’s called, is intended to dispel myths about vaping, and that’s fine. But it’s not intended to be too successful, and won’t be.
“As we go forward, we’re trying to change a trajectory” on vaping, said Randall Williams, the state health director whose department made national news for tracking the menstrual cycles of Planned Parenthood patients.
Williams noted that the rate of youth vaping has doubled in the last two years in Missouri and in the country as a whole. “We’re sensitive to the fact that Missouri reported its second death last week.”
But not sensitive enough.
Almost three dozen more Missourians fell ill from vaping, a majority of them young people.
All of this is in keeping with Missouri’s incentives to smokers and rewards to Big Tobacco. Currently, Missouri has the lowest cigarette tax in the country — just 17 cents a pack since 1993. The national average is $1.81, and Washington, D.C.’s is $4.50 a pack.
Parson says he doesn’t want to be too hasty. And maybe that has nothing to do with the fact that tobacco companies have been among his top campaign contributors.
“The simple thing we know is that it’s a problem,” Parson said at a news conference. “And what we’re really trying to do … is trying to get out in front of a problem that could explode on us.”
Boom, it already has.