Author: Derek

Nick Gillespie, over at Reason, wrote an article on the anti-smoking crusaders new campaign against e-cigarettes.

Witzman
H.L. Mencken famously defined puritanism as “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.” He might have been describing contemporary anti-smoking activists, that dour band of fuss-budgets constantly on the prowl for new ways to make life slightly less bearable by limiting the choices available to grown adults.

Incredibly, the latest push from tobacco eliminationists doesn’t involve actual smoking, which has already been driven out of polite society more thoroughly than Rev. Jeremiah Wright sermons, early David Allan Coe records, and Three’s Company-era gay jokes combined. But it does lay bare the prohibitionist mindset and its fixation on scrubbing the planet clean of any behavior or attitude the crusader deems unacceptable.

This time, the buttinskys are trying to douse the dreaded e-cigarette, a device that supplies a safe nicotine hit to the user without bothering or endangering anybody else. E-cigarettes use replaceable cartridges in which nicotine or flavors are heated, vaporized, and inhaled (users are called “vapers”). Some e-cigarettes look like conventional cancer sticks and others look more like something from a bad Sylvester Stallone movie set in the near future. Questions of fashion aside, they are not just a safer way for smokers to get the nicotine they crave, they are apparently as safe as milk (well, pasteurized milk, anyway, and assuming you’re not lactose intolerant).

I’ve had several friends who made the switch from tobacco to electronic. One in particular saw his “smoker’s cough” vanish completely. Granted, this is purely anecdotal, but the scientific evidence is there.