Smoking is, to say the least, an extremely unwise gamble, but it has long been obvious that America’s anti-tobacco jihad has evolved to the point when it is more about its activists’ urge to control other people — and to demonstrate their own supposed virtue — than about health care.
That means that this report in Gothamist comes as no surprise at all. Here’s an extract:
The Bloomberg administration is quietly working to explicitly categorize electronic cigarettes as tobacco products and enact a sweeping ban on flavored e-cigs….Initially the bills, drafted by the Health Department and introduced into the Council at the request of Mayor Bloomberg, were silent concerning the City’s position on electronic cigarettes.
“The bills were written with no intention of addressing electronic cigarettes at all,” Health Department Commissioner Thomas Farley told e-cigarette proponents [PDF] at a hearing in May.
The draft language reveals that this is no longer the case. While menthol and tobacco flavored e-cigarettes would ostensibly remain available at convenience stores, the burgeoning flavored e-cig market would ironically be relegated to “tobacco bars,” of which there are very few in New York City—mostly because they must have been in existence before December 31, 2001.
“This is a de facto ban on electronic cigarettes,” says Dr. Michael Siegel, a professor of Community Health Sciences at the Boston University School of Public Health and a supporter of electronic cigarettes. “Pretty much all electronic cigarettes are flavored; they’re essentially flavored products. You’re basically telling a bunch of ex-smokers to go back to cigarettes.”
Dr. Siegel adds, “I think this would be a public health disaster.”
Indeed it would. While claiming that ”smoking” e-cigarettes is risk-free would be nonsense, there can be no doubt that, as a method of nicotine delivery, they are far, far safer than traditional cigarettes. If all New York’s cigarette smokers switched to their e-equivalent, tax revenues might fall (not, of course, that that has anything to do with all this), but life expectancy would rise, and health would improve.
That would be something that an “activist” city government should want to encourage, or at least not discourage. But, if the drafts seen by Gothamist accurately reflect the intention of the Bloomberg administration this is not the case in New York City. That’s because the aim is no longer the preservation of health, but the pursuit of an absolutist degree of purity that has lost all connection with reality, something, in fact, with more than a touch of the cult about it.