Listen Now: 
Māori Television’s new high profile current affairs programme has drawn fire from Māori health advocates for blowing smoke over vaping.
Mihi Blair, the national tobacco control advocacy manager for Hāpai Te Hauora, says Te Ao With Moana’s criticism of vaping being promoted as a smoking cessation tool, rather than health agencies sticking with a hard line quit smoking message, was unhelpful.
She says if Māori had found it easy to quit they would have.
"To put vaping into that conversation and say don’t promote vaping as a tool to quit, we’re actually pushing people away from a product, a tool that can actually help them. We don’t want that . We want as many tools as we can to support our people to get off tobacco," Ms Blair says.
Hāpai Te Hauora is concerned the Government isn’t moving fast enough on regulations for the marketing and sale of vaping products, which is slowing companies to promote them as an alternative way of smoking rather than a cessation tool.
!["p_facebook"]("/site/uma/images/story_img/facebook.jpg")
& !["p_twitter"]("/site/uma/images/story_img/twitter.jpg")
Copyright © 2019, UMA Broadcasting Ltd: www.waateanews.com
RELATED NEWS
