Last year, I and many others concerned about helping smokers quit the world s number one public health problem testified before New York s City Council and their Health Committee against proposed regulations which would put e-cigs in the same category as the real killers, cigarettes. This, despite the fact that e-cigs/vapor products contain no tobacco and emit no smoke. In response to the scientific testimony against such a wrong-headed measure, the esteemed council members argued, Shut up. They then proceeded, just before their terms expired, to rubber stamp then-Mayor Bloomberg s request for the ban.
While this was unsupported by any relevant science or data, the actual harm was likely to be relatively minimal. The new measure, on the other hand, would be devastating to both New York s public health, and would essentially put the vibrant but nascent e-cig/vapor industry out of business here. The measure, proposed by Costa G. Constantinides, has 7 co-sponsors, including the chair of the Health Committee. A hearing before that committee is likely to occur on Thursday, Oct. 23rd 2 weeks from tomorrow. Councilman Constantinides seems to have the good of public health in mind, we are certain, when he emits idiocies such as this, as told to the NYDaily News: These flavors are direct marketing to children. They appeal to children, and we re taking them out of that market. These guys are not in the quitting business. They re in the addiction business.
This guy sounds like an oppressive bully. If he spent half, no one-quarter as much time actually doing some research, even from the CDC s own data, as he does fulminating about issues of which he is strikingly ignorant, he might learn the destructive fallacy of his line of thought. If his proposal is enacted, many thousands of New York s ex-smokers will resort to combustible tobacco cigarettes to their great detriment. And the booming, innovative e-cig/e-vapor industry, composed of many small businesses and zero members of Big Tobacco, would be expelled from our formerly-free, experimental, liberated City. No one s health will be improved, vapers will purchase their products in nearby regions of the tri-state area, and the cold dead hand of over-regulation will once again have triumphed: we devoted to public health as well as simple freedom should not allow this travesty to come to pass!
