Is there any basis for their concern? No. Several academic experts’ evaluations of e-cigarette vapor show nothing harmful to anyone, so any such ban is regulatory overreach in the guise of a public health measure. Paradoxically, its effect would be to consign ex-smokers to vape outside among current smokers: a recipe for relapse.
It gets worse: in a bald-faced attempt to promote their agenda, the City’s leaders decided to simply redefine the words “tobacco” and “smoke” to squeeze e-cigarettes into current anti-smoking laws. The proposed revision states that the Council, being “concerned about the rising prevalence of e-cigarette use,” proposes to amend “smoke-free policies” to include e-cigarettes in the definition of smoking, and also to include “e-cigarettes in the definition of [a] tobacco product.”
There’s just this small problem: e-cigarettes neither contain tobacco nor do they emit smoke. Even the most vitriolic opponents of e-cigs do not contest those simple facts. Exhaling a plume of smoke-like vapor (almost entirely water vapor) does not make it smoke, nor does anything in e-cigs resemble tobacco.
This tactic smacks of despotism, as arbitrary and capricious as lawmakers can get. Am I being hyperbolic? Not only public health, but the rule of law could become collateral damage if regulators can simply re-define commonly used, long-established words to suit their agendas. What stands in the way of declaring certain words in the Code of Federal Regulations (or for that matter, the Bill of Rights) as something other than what we have always thought?
Read more: E-cigarette bans and propaganda are driven by cronyism, not public health | The Daily Caller
It gets worse: in a bald-faced attempt to promote their agenda, the City’s leaders decided to simply redefine the words “tobacco” and “smoke” to squeeze e-cigarettes into current anti-smoking laws. The proposed revision states that the Council, being “concerned about the rising prevalence of e-cigarette use,” proposes to amend “smoke-free policies” to include e-cigarettes in the definition of smoking, and also to include “e-cigarettes in the definition of [a] tobacco product.”
There’s just this small problem: e-cigarettes neither contain tobacco nor do they emit smoke. Even the most vitriolic opponents of e-cigs do not contest those simple facts. Exhaling a plume of smoke-like vapor (almost entirely water vapor) does not make it smoke, nor does anything in e-cigs resemble tobacco.
This tactic smacks of despotism, as arbitrary and capricious as lawmakers can get. Am I being hyperbolic? Not only public health, but the rule of law could become collateral damage if regulators can simply re-define commonly used, long-established words to suit their agendas. What stands in the way of declaring certain words in the Code of Federal Regulations (or for that matter, the Bill of Rights) as something other than what we have always thought?
Read more: E-cigarette bans and propaganda are driven by cronyism, not public health | The Daily Caller
