Cops in California Visit Local High School to Tell Parents How You Get High Using an e-Cigarette

Police in Sebastopol, California are
warning local educators that teenagers could be using e-cigarettes
to get high. They held a meeting for parents at the local high
school this week so that “parents, grandparents and other community
members have a chance to find out about practices like smoking hash
oil in electronic cigarettes,” the Press Democrat reported.

Though police say they mean to explain local teenage trends,
there’s nothing new, or local, about it. Last year, local police in
New York and the media there hyped the “threat” of using
e-cigarettes and vapor pens to smoke marijuana without the smoke.
It could
lead to heroin, one cop said. Opponents of e-cigarettes have
been pushing the idea that the safer alternative to cigarettes
should be shunned since the product first came out, and tacked the
boogeyman of drug use onto them years
ago as part of that effort. But from cigarette papers to
apples, knives, and light bulbs, a host of everyday household items
could be used to get high by the resourceful. There’s no need to
demonize any of them, e-cigarettes, or drug use to have an honest
conversation, in fact it makes it impossible.

It is, though, the best way for drug warriors to stem the
growing opposition to prohibitionist drug policy, and to get
comments like this one, from the Press Democrat story:
“you better believe some tweeker has come up with a way to smoke
some methamphetamine liquid hybrid dope from one of these things.”
An internet search finds that yes, naturally there is interest in
smoking meth out of e-cigarettes, not by tweakers but by users
interested in partaking away from home. The discussion of that
possibility in one forum suggests it could be possible, and also
includes plenty of advice to keep “use as discrete as possible”
when away from home because of the propensity of the media to jump
on stories where drug users can be portrayed negatively.  It’s
a war on drugs, indeed

Related: Reason TV talks to neuroscientist Carl Hart on what an
adult conversation on drug use would have to include: