Here’s just what we need! A well organized attempt to ban E-cigarettes:
…the latest push from tobacco eliminationists doesn’t involve actual smoking, which has already been driven out of polite society more thoroughly than Rev. Jeremiah Wright sermons, early David Allan Coe records, and Three’s Company-era gay jokes combined. But it does lay bare the prohibitionist mindset and its fixation on scrubbing the planet clean of any behavior or attitude the crusader deems unacceptable.
This time, the buttinskys are trying to douse the dreaded e-cigarette, a device that supplies a safe nicotine hit to the user without bothering or endangering anybody else. E-cigarettes use replaceable cartridges in which nicotine or flavors are heated, vaporized, and inhaled (users are called “vapers”). Some e-cigarettes look like conventional cancer sticks and others look more like something from a bad Sylvester Stallone movie set in the near future. Questions of fashion aside, they are not just a safer way for smokers to get the nicotine they crave, they are apparently as safe as milk (well, pasteurized milk, anyway, and assuming you’re not lactose intolerant).
Critics warn that trace amounts of bad stuff can be found in e-cigarettes’ vapor, but that is not necessarily cause for concern, much less prohibition. As a new review of the literature on e-cigarettes from Drexel University’s Igor Burstyn concludes, “Current data do not indicate that exposures to vapors from contaminants in electronic cigarettes warrant a concern. There are no known toxicological synergies among compounds in the aerosol, and mixture of the contaminants does not pose a risk to health.” In fact, the inability to show proof of harm was one of the reasons the Food and Drug Administration’s 2010 bid to control e-cigarettes as a “drug-delivery device” failed in court. Burstyn notes further there is even less reason to be concerned with second-hand fumes, which are by definition even less concentrated that what the vaper sucks down. His main concern is that users knowingly choose whether they’re getting nicotine or not.
As Michael Siegel, who teaches at Boston University’s School of Public Health, wrote in a recent New York Times’ debate on e-cigarettes, despite evidence that e-cigarettes reduce overall harm from smoking, “many anti-smoking groups oppose these products because they are blinded by ideology: they find it difficult, if not impossible, to endorse a behavior that looks like smoking, even though it is literally saving people’s lives….What’s not to like?”
Naturally, Mayor Bloomberg is leading the charge.
Yawn.
Once again, I think this calls for deliberate civil insolence. While smoking itself may have been relegated as a moral offense to the lowest circles of Hell, self expression is still protected under the First Amendment, and it remains legal not only to keep and bear cigarettes, but even to brandish them in public:
Simply go out and buy a pack of cigarettes. They’re expensive, but still legal to buy and own, even in places which criminalize smoking, but the neat thing here is that if you’re a non-smoker you only need to buy one pack, to have months or years of fun. There is a right to carry in all fifty states.
So you just take your pack of cigarettes, and simply brandish it in public! Take it out and tap it on your hand, on a table, anywhere! That little “Tap tap tap!” is the sound of freedom, and it irritates the anti-smokers almost as much as the sound of a match being struck! Yes, striking matches is still legal in most places too. And so is taking out a single cigarette and tapping it. Sure, you can’t smoke it, but if you’re a non-smoker that’s beside the point.
You’re just exercising your First Amendment right to freedom of expression.
Where else can you have so much fun for a few bucks?
It will just get funner and funner too.
The fag-grabbing bastards deserve to have cigarettes waved in their face in protest.