The Planet of No Vapes

Lawmakers continue to ban a smoking-cessation practice that’s virtually harmless. But what fun is progressivism if you can’t order people around?

A merican lawmakers spend a lot of time writing legislation to keep dangerous objects — from firearms to drugs to pedophiles — away from schools. (Had any of these politicians met an actual human child, they might want to instead protect adults by banning schoolchildren from appearing anywhere outside a school.)

But now the City of Milwaukee has identified another practice so pernicious it must be kept away from the walls of our sacred K–12 institutions. The city’s planning commission has recommended a new rule barring vape shops from operating within 1,000 feet of elementary or secondary schools, libraries, playgrounds, and day-care centers. (Potential loophole: Who will protect fetuses from firing up vape pens in utero?)

The new rule applies to “tobacco” and “e-cigarette” retailers, conflating the two products as if they are somehow equally sinister. But regulating “e-cigarettes” because of their name is like prohibiting root beer because its name contains the word “beer.”

The problem with traditional cigarettes, of course, is that the nicotine they deliver rides on the back of tobacco smoke and other chemicals such as tar and arsenic, which can cause cancer, heart disease, stroke, lung diseases, diabetes, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and a host of other horrible ailments that, if you contracted them, would cause Anthony Fauci to shake his head at you.

Instead, vapes deliver nicotine on a stream of water vapor, casting aside most of the dangerous carcinogens one finds in cigarettes. That’s why there’s barely any scent when someone is vaping — if you’re in the back of an Uber with an active vaper, you might not even smell it. The danger of second-hand e-cigarette vapor is effectively zero.

The only real common denominator between cigarettes and e-cigarettes is nicotine, which is a stimulant that is about as dangerous as caffeine. Doctors sometimes prescribe it to patients. Anyone can buy it over the counter in gum form. Sure, it is possible to get hooked, but the Royal Society for Public Health has declared the drug “fairly harmless.”

But vaping looks like smoking, and on that basis the anti-tobacco ninnies have gone all out to pretend it is a threat to public health. This is primarily because the tobacco prohibitionists have actually done their jobs too well — according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the percentage of Americans smoking cigarettes has been cut in half, from 21 percent in 2005 to 11 percent in 2022.

And as we know, activist groups are loath to run to their donors and declare, “Well, our work is done here.” When the supply of crises falls short of the demands of fundraising, it is simply time to create more crises. The worst thing that could happen for race-based activists in America, for example, would be racial harmony — which is why activists have to populate college campuses with diversity and equity counselors, to convince students they should be miserable, and therefore need more diversity and equity counselors.

So even despite Public Health England’s declaration that vaping is 95 percent safer than smoking cigarettes, the busybodies are once again here to dictate what everyone should be putting in their bodies.

And governments are tripping over themselves to follow suit. As of December 2022, every state has increased the age for buying e-cigarettes to 21. States such as California, Massachusetts, New York, and New Jersey and large cities such as Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Diego have banned the sale of flavored vaping products. In 17 states, vaping is included in their public-smoking bans.

To reiterate — these states ban bar and restaurant owners from allowing customers to come to their private property and enjoy a harmless product that bothers no one. You are more likely to have your meal ruined by the unreadable QR code menu.

But what fun is progressivism if you can’t order people around? Back in 2005, when the City of Madison, Wisc., enacted its smoking ban in public places — with the stated goal of saving lives by eliminating second-hand smoke — it included chewing tobacco, which, of course, produces no smoke whatsoever. But a city alderwoman expressed concerns that bars would set out large, Civil War–era brass spittoons, and that someone might kick one over with the juice “sloshing . . . into an open wound.”

The anti-tobacco groups complain that vaping is a gateway drug to real smoking, but study after study shows this to be pure hysteria. A 2019 study by researchers at Brown and Harvard Universities demonstrated that high schoolers who vape with flavored liquids do not then move on to become cigarette smokers.

“E‑cigarette use is largely concentrated among youth who share characteristics with smokers of the pre‐​vaping era, suggesting e‑cigarettes may have replaced cigarette smoking,” one of the study’s authors told Filter. “The decline in youth smoking really accelerated after the availability of e‑cigarettes,” she added.

The tobacco police nonetheless point to a rash of lung injuries around 2019, in which young people were showing up in hospitals with a condition known as “vaping-associated pulmonary illness.” Sadly, seven people died during this period.

But the CDC analyzed samples from 29 of the patients, and in every case, the samples contained vitamin E acetate, which is used to deliver THC, the active ingredient in marijuana. The CDC reported that 86 percent of the patients sampled said they had vaped an illegal THC product — so they had been using vaping paraphernalia outside the legally accepted process. (This is why lawn mowers come adorned with warnings like “do not hold above your head and try to trim hedges while blade is running.”)

As we know from the Prohibition era, the e-cigarette bans will simply create a black market for vaping products, either enriching businesses that sell them just across state lines or forcing people to buy more dangerous products. None of the lung injuries mentioned above have occurred outside the U.S., suggesting that public policy might be contributing to a dangerous underground market of vaping products.

In fact, if the goal is to get people to quit and stay off tobacco, vaping has proven to be the answer. The bans on flavored vaping liquids will only serve to punish adults trying to quit smoking but who prefer the fruit- and candy-flavored vape liquids. This is why, according to a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, teen tobacco-smoking increased when the City of San Francisco banned all vaping products. The anti-smoking zealots are forcing kids into the arms of Big Tobacco.

Finally, because no issue in America is ever settled until it gets as stupid as possible, anti-tobacco groups have begun to push a racial- and gender-equity angle, arguing that new laws are needed to protect the LGBTQ+ community, which is “disproportionately harmed by smoking and vaping.”

Put another way, LGBTQ+ people love vaping, and the Nicotine Squad wants to jump in and tell them what is best for them. As if gays, lesbians, and trans people haven’t had it hard enough, the true believers want to come in and make them all miserable. How is this not a hate crime?

(This echoes the federal government’s efforts to ban menthol cigarettes, which any study, if conducted, would show has led to a 1,000 percent increase in African Americans who say, “Man, I really wish I had a menthol cigarette right now.”)

Progressives love to skewer conservatives for indulging in moral panics over bathrooms, crooked elections, critical race theory, and the like. But the Left has plenty of imagined bogeymen that they believe justify further oppressive government regulations, and vaping restrictions are one.

So, while it may be that conservatives want to stop you from watching drag, it’s the progressives who are stopping you from enjoying a drag.