Rishard Khan

The Min­is­ter of Health, Ter­rence Deyals­ingh, has asked the At­tor­ney Gen­er­al to take a look at the ex­ist­ing leg­is­la­tion to reg­u­late va­p­ing in T&T.

The rev­e­la­tion came in a What­sapp mes­sage in re­sponse to ques­tions from Guardian Me­dia.

Ob­serv­ing World No To­bac­co Day on Wednes­day, The T&T Med­ical As­so­ci­a­tion called for the prac­tice to be reg­u­lat­ed due to its as­so­ci­at­ed health risks and to pro­tect younger peo­ple.

In a state­ment, the as­so­ci­a­tion's pub­lic re­la­tions of­fi­cer, Has­si­na Mo­hammed, called on pol­i­cy­mak­ers to pro­vide na­tion­wide pub­lic ed­u­ca­tion on the health risks as­so­ci­at­ed with va­p­ing, ad­ver­tise­ment and mar­ket­ing of the e-cig­a­rettes and their re­lat­ed prod­ucts and use of e-cig­a­rettes in pub­lic spaces.

"We en­dorse the WHO Frame­work Con­ven­tion on To­bac­co Con­trol (FCTC) rec­om­men­da­tions for our lo­cal to­bac­co con­trol poli­cies to 'reg­u­late the con­tents of to­bac­co prod­ucts (in­clud­ing e-cig­a­rettes) and pro­hib­it the sale of flavoured to­bac­co prod­ucts' as per Ar­ti­cle 9 of To­bac­co Con­trol Act of 2009," the state­ment said.