L.A. City Council Unanimously Bans Vaping in Public Places

As
expected, the Los Angeles City Council today
voted unanimously to ban vaping everywhere that smoking is
banned, including indoor workplaces and outdoor locations such as
parks, beaches, and restaurant patios. Although one of the main
rationales for the ban is that children might confuse e-cigarettes
with the real thing and mistakenly conclude that smoking is not so
bad after all, an amendment that would have exempted bars and other
establishments that are open only to adults
failed by a vote of 8 to 6. In a generous concession, the city
will allow people to vape in vaping lounges, in e-cigarette stores,
and on stage for “theatrical purposes.”

Judging from the
account in the Los Angeles Times, the debate
over the ordinance was dominated by non sequiturs: 

Councilman Mitch O’Farrell, who pushed for the new restrictions,
spoke of his unhappiness at breathing secondhand smoke during his
days as a waiter in the early 1990s….

Council President Herb Wesson, in the most passionate speech of
the day, described his decades-long addiction to cigarettes, a
habit he told his colleagues would almost certainly kill him one
day.

Wesson said he began smoking because he wanted to be cool.

“When you’re 15, you want to be cool,” he said. “And I will not
support anything—anything—that might attract one new smoker.”

What if the thing that “might attract one new smoker” already
has helped thousands of smokers quit a habit that was threatening
their health and their lives? Why do these actual people count for
nothing in Wesson’s calculus, while the hypothetical person
attracted to smoking by vaping has the power to move legislation?
And what on earth does O’Farrell’s distaste for secondhand smoke
have to do with a project that generates none?

Here is what passed for
scientific guidance at the council meeting:

“Safer does not mean safe,” Dr. Jonathan Fielding, the county’s
public health director, told the council. “Although they are less
harmful than traditional cigarettes, some e-cigarettes contain some
health risks.”

Fielding is absolutely right: Safer does not mean safe. But
safer does mean safer—in this case, given the absence of tobacco
and combustion, much safer. So why is the Los Angles City Council
taking steps to discourage smokers from switching to a far less
hazardous source of nicotine?
For the children:

Foes of e-cigarettes said they threaten to make smoking socially
acceptable after years of public opinion campaigns to discourage
the habit. Young people who get hooked on the nicotine in
e-cigarettes may then turn to tobacco use, said Jonathan Fielding,
director of the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health.

“We don’t want to risk e-cigarettes undermining a half-century
of successful tobacco control,” he said.

It is rather mysterious how that would happen, since the main
selling point of e-cigarettes is that they are much less dangerous
and disgusting than the conventional kind. Nor is there
any evidence that vaping is a gateway to smoking. But
politicians do not need evidence when they’ve got the
precautionary principle.