Ban E-Cigarettes? Why not?Follow

The image looks like a necklace hookah.

Edited, Sep 12th 2013 11:42am by lolgaxe

Must be something wrong with US cigarettes if the smoke smells like wet dogs. I've smelled a wet dog (large one at that), and it smells nothing like my Pall Malls.

Anyway, the French (naturally) did a pretty big report on e-cigarettes, and the conclusion was that, nicotine or no nicotine, e-cigarettes aren't harmless. It didn't exactly paint them as dangerous, but they also couldn't confirm that they are harmless.

Meh.

I'm probably going to switch to one soon. Just need to find a good one online, because our government banned (yup) the sale of refills here.

Edited, Sep 12th 2013 10:17pm by Mazra

So in other words the results were inconclusive and they need more funding to better investigate the issue?

Scientists...

Government employees

Or worse, stale cig smoke smell on someone who just came in from the rain who just smoked a fresh cig... I have a coworker that knows not to come near me on days it is raining, She is a nice person but damn does she stink.

They should just make the e-cigs pink or neon green or something, that way they don't look as much like cigarettes anymore (yeah I know there's coloured cigs, not common though).

I quit a year ago. And I've thought about maybe trying these but then I think - why the hell would I do that? Get my nicotine cravings going again and before you know it, I'd probably be back on the real things again. No thanks. Also, I like not spending money on this stuff anymore.

And the Classic Tobacco flavor has a subtle hint of coffee that is just kinda nice.

There are plenty services which will order it for you in the US and have it shipped to you in Denmark (at a price, of course).

I'm not a big fan of the phrase "nanny statists" (or variations thereof), mostly because it's overused rhetoric that usually removes thought from the issue in favor of emotional reaction. However, there is a growing population who have adopted the idea that the absence of government regulations is "bad" somehow and that people's rights are served by protecting them with regulations. Obviously, sometimes regulation is good, and sometimes it's bad. But many people simplify this down and look at the method and fail to step back and think about what they're really trying to do. We sometimes get lost picking sides over how to do something and fail to ask whether what we're doing really makes sense.

I don't think these people think that government control is a good thing. I just think that they've become so used to the method of going to the government to solve problems that it doesn't occur to them that along the way they're empowering it at the expense of their own freedoms. I don't believe that they think about the government control angle so much as the government taking action angle.


How this applies to causes is similar IMO. I think that sometimes people get so caught up in the cause itself that they lose sight of why they started it in the first place. The cause becomes institutionalized and people start to define themselves by the act of pursuing "the cause" rather than the thing the cause is supposed to be about. This gets worse when you get layers of action that are taken as part of the cause and which make sense in one context, but may not make sense in another. People substitute the actions for the objective and begin placing more weight on the former than the latter. Thus we have environmentalists praising Brazil for becoming energy independent via their adoption of biofuels, while failing to recognize that this was accomplished by decades of slash and burning vast amounts of rainforest, which the environmentalists of just a decade or so earlier were strongly opposed to. Somewhere along the way, the cause of environmentalism forgot that it was supposed to be about minimizing the impact humans have on the planet, and turned it into "green energy". So using ethonol as a powersource became "good" in their eyes and outweighed the harmful impact on the environment required to get there.


I think with regards to e-cigs, a similar thing has happened. People have spent so much time being 'against smoking', that they've latched onto the actions and image of smoking and focused on those things. The cause has long worked to eliminate advertising of smoking or the use of smoking in films and popular media under the assumption that if people don't see other people smoking (especially in glamorous portrayals) they'll be less inclined to start themselves. So the original objective of reducing people's exposure to the harmful effects of smoking has been replaced with fighting against the public image of smoking. It would not surprise me if much of the motivation for the second hand smoke argument really has less to do with the actual effects of second hand smoke (which are real, if minor), and more to do with eliminating public exposure to smoking itself. And by exposure, I don't mean to the chemicals in second hand smoke, but actually seeing people smoke in public places. If you can ban smoking from as many places as possible, the same logic used with regard to advertising and media applies.

Seeing people vape in public almost certainly instills a sense that those people are "cheating" somehow by being able to do something that looks like smoking without actually inhaling (or exhaling) harmful smoke. I can totally see some anti-smoker types being infuriated about this. Because somewhere along the line they've lost sight of the purpose of the cause and have latched onto the methods of the cause. The methods say you must minimize the image of smoking in order to protect people. Someone vaping appears to be getting around the rules. So it's not unreasonable that some will react by trying to change the rules to apply to e-cigs as well. They've substituted the purpose of the cause with the methods of the cause. To them, it doesn't matter that the person is inhaling harmless vapor. It matters that they're doing something that looks like smoking, so it must be stopped.

I honestly had not read the gbaji text vomit up there... but thanks to you BD, I had to read that... Am I... about to agree with... and rate u gbaji....?

I feel so dirty.

It's gbaji, though. That's more like a clock with no hands or digital display!

Yea... I will have to admit that this time... this one time.. gbaji is... r.. r.... not wrong.