Not unlike killers of spiders, anti-smoke groups and some lawmakers are moving quickly to stomp out e-cigarettes without really knowing what effect the act will have.
By Jim Calvin, President, New York Association of Convenience Stores
Some people have responded to the emergence of e-cigarettes the way they might react to seeing a spider on their kitchen floor—“Quick, stomp on it”—without knowing if it’s really a threat to their safety, and without regard for any possible beneficial aspect.
Truth be told, the jury is still out on the degree to which e-cigarettes are a smoking cessation tool, a public health threat, or some combination of the two. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is currently sorting that out in an orderly fashion, undertaking the scientific analysis necessary to objectively define benefits and risks, and then properly balance them through regulation.
NEW YORK, NEW YORK
Here in New York, this approach isn’t rash enough for arachnophobia-driven, anti-tobacco activists, who have leapt to the conclusion that e-cigarettes are just as harmful as combustibles and deserve to be equally taxed, regulated and scorned.
New York state and New York City were among the first jurisdictions in the nation to forbid cigarette smoking in bars, restaurants, places of employment and other indoor areas. They did so because public health advocates insisted that exposure to second-hand cigarette smoke could kill nonsmokers.
Private industry responded by inventing a battery-operated nicotine delivery system that smokers could use in such places without exposing others to second-hand smoke—the electronic cigarette.
Efforts are intensifying to put the product under the umbrella of New York’s Clean Indoor Air Act, which would ban their use in public places from restaurants to concert halls, just like regular cigarettes. New York retailers who sell e-cigarettes and vaping devices, however, are urging caution for lawmakers considering a ban on the e-cigarettes, as well another measure to restrict the sale of liquid products used in them.
There are other proposed regulations that would include new package labeling requirements and tougher efforts to keep e-cigarettes from being sold to teens.
‘DARTH VAPER’
Still, tobacco opponents have assailed e-cigarettes as brimming with toxic ingredients, as a “gateway” product to hook kids on combustibles, as a device that could “re-normalize” smoking, as the Marlboro
Man reincarnated as ‘Darth Vaper.’ We on the merchant side consider it more rationally.
Consistent with our commitment to preventing youth access to tobacco-related products, NYACS supported legislation in New York prohibiting the sale of e-cigarettes or liquid nicotine to minors. We also are supporting a bill to require stand-alone “vaping shops” to register with the State and undergo periodic undercover inspections just like retail tobacco dealers do.
But we have opposed banning the use of e-cigarettes anywhere cigarette smoking is already banned. A law New York City has already enacted and New York state is actively considering. We oppose such policies because they amount to declaring e-cigarettes to be just as harmful as combustibles. They aren’t.
If groups make it too difficult to obtain e-cigarettes or vaping items, consumers will just find other ways to obtain products if the liquid e-cigarettes are banned in New York. Past experiences with tobacco products have revealed consumers going to other states or the Internet to obtain products.
Why squish a product category that, for many smokers, has already become the long-awaited viable solution to quitting combustibles?
Or ask this question. Why leap-frog the FDA by enacting an e-cigarette use ban based on conjecture that may or may not conform to what the FDA ultimately deems appropriate based on science?
If there are suddenly fewer places you can use an e-cigarette, will the transition from combustibles to vaping be inhibited, or even reversed? And is that in the long-term interest of public health? Before you stomp on that spider, we implore state and local officials to first let the FDA determine whether that’s a black widow scurrying across the floor, or a species that can help achieve the universal objective of further reducing tobacco-related health maladies.
