NYC Council Bans Public Vaping Because It Looks Too Much Like Smoking

Today the New York City Council
approved an ordinance that prohibits the use of e-cigarettes in
all the places where smoking is prohibited, which is pretty much
everywhere except private residences and some outdoor locations
(not parks, though!). Why did the New York City Council do that?
Not because e-cigarettes, which contain no tobacco and produce no
smoke, pose a hazard to bystanders, which is the usual excuse for
smoking bans, but because they look too much like
regular cigarettes:

City Council Speaker Christine Quinn said the ban will make it
easier to enforce the city’s Smoke-Free Air
Act, which banned smoking in bars, restaurants and
other indoor public spaces.

“Because many of the E-cigarettes are designed to look like
cigarettes and be used just like them, they can lead to confusion
or confrontation,” Quinn said.

Similarly, Councilman James Gennaro, the ban’s main sponsor,

worries that e-cigarettes’ superficial resemblance to the
tobacco-burning variety will confuse children, undermining decades
of education aimed at convincing the nation’s youth that smoking is
dangerous and totally uncool. While these explanations are
utterly implausible, they do reflect the true, subrational
motivation of e-cigarette prohibitionists: They are appalled by
this product because the battery-powered devices remind them of the
real thing, triggering all the emotions of disgust, contempt, and
self-righteousness they associate with smoking.

Yet it is this very same resemblance that makes e-cigarettes
such a promising harm-reduction tool, one that mimics smoking while
delivering nicotine to the lungs without the myriad toxins and
carcinogens generated by tobacco combustion. Hence anyone concerned
about the health effects of smoking should welcome this product.
But for control freaks like Quinn and Gennaro, the cigarette form
has become such a powerful symbol of evil that they have lost sight
of the health-based rationale for their opposition to smoking, the
upshot being that they support a policy that’s apt to result in
more tobacco-related disease and death, the opposite of their
ostensible goal.