Reading the public agenda announcement for the Feb. 3 city council meeting, I saw the announcement of a proposed "expanded smoking ban" and thought to myself "OK, sure. Cigarettes are bad, secondhand smoke is dangerous." I decided to spend my evening otherwise engaged. Imagine my surprise to open up my favorite Boulder blog the next morning (Your Boulder) and find that the city had in fact extended not just the geographic reach of our downtown smoking ban, but also expanded the definition of "smoking" to include vaporizers.
The increasing opacity of the political process around numerous project approvals and policy changes is unacceptable. Agendas are not being honestly or fairly described, and the public is not being sufficiently informed of these proposed decisions ahead of time. Do I have an opinion about vaporizers? So happy you are interested — yes. They save lives.
I am a former smoker, who knew what were best cigarettes to buy, managed to quit with the help of these devices, which simulate the act of smoking itself in addition to delivering an optional dose of nicotine. I was never strongly "addicted" to nicotine, but enjoyed the physical act of smoking; therefore no other method (patch, gum, whatever) could satisfy the urge to smoke the way vaping did. It feels good to be smoke-free, to smell nice and have clean teeth and nails.
To be able to live the active Boulder lifestyle! Cigarettes are also deadly — they harm every organ in the human body and kill nearly 500,000 people a year in the U.S. alone. That's one in five deaths from any cause! Cigarette smoke contains 5,000 chemicals, hundreds of which are toxic. Nicotine, which can be lethal at high concentrations, is actually one of the less harmful substances in cigarette smoke.
In 2010, nearly half of all the smokers in the U.S. attempted to quit, but only 6 percent succeeded according to a CDC study (who knows how many re-started after the study!). Quitting smoking has been said to be more difficult than quitting drinking or using heroin. It might be almost as difficult as applying for a building permit in Boulder!
It is true that we probably do not have all the evidence surrounding potential harms from the use of vaporizing devices. Much alarm has been raised over their use however, and no wonder — they threaten both the finances of the traditional tobacco industry and alarm anti-smoking advocates who see immediate and total abstinence as the goal. Studies consistently show that vaping, while not completely benign, is far less harmful than smoking. Instead of hundreds of toxins, which act in concert to produce disease, there are at most two in vaping — nicotine and the artificial "smoke," which is the same kind used at rock concerts and Halloween parties.
Restrictions on smoking in public places were enacted in order to clean up the problem with secondhand smoke and provide social shame and isolation that would provide incentives to smokers to quit. However, after decades of efforts to reduce smoking, there are still millions of smokers who are currently unable to quit, despite knowing the health risks and despite penalties for smoking inside, outside, in cars, hotel rooms, or basically anywhere except huddled over a trash fire in the back alley.
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