TO THE EDITOR:
Although the editorial written against the ban on vaping indoors includes flowery language about the “freedom of choice and property rights” of business owners, it seems that the rights of everyone else have been completely forgotten.
As a former smoker who struggled before quitting, I can say from experience that whether someone is smoking traditional cigarettes, hookah or electronic cigarettes, the effect is the same on those around you.
I started smoking before I was eighteen, like many smokers, because it was so normalized by the people around me, and it was especially hard to quit when everyone else is doing it.
I still get an itch to smoke whenever I get a whiff of secondhand smoke in the street, or smell the flavors coming off a portable hookah.
The author has suggested, anecdotally, that banning e-cigs in businesses will have negative public health effects because people will switch back to using traditional cigarettes, but this ignores the plurality of patrons who don’t smoke at all.
One of the most successful ways that Americans have decreased the number of smokers, as opposed to other Western countries in Europe, has been through the campaign to stop smoking in public; if we allow vaping where we used to ban smoking, then it won’t replace the smoking of today, but the smoking of the 1950s.
The author said that it is “well-established” that e-cigs are safer, but remember that it took generations before it was well-established that cigarettes weren’t safe to begin with.
Christopher Bowers
