USA TODAY International Edition
San Francisco foolishly bans e-cigs
Many vapers will just go back to their Marlboros
San Francisco is a city of mindbending contrasts. Park your car for more than two hours on a residential street, you'll face a steep ticket or a tow. But set up camp on a sidewalk with tents, shopping carts and stolen bicycles and the city gives you days to move. Sip from an open alcohol container in a city park and you may be cited. Inject heroin in public, and you’re unlikely to face official crackdown. Enjoy your boba tea through a single-use, plastic straw — but only until Monday. After that, municipal policy aimed at keeping plastic from ending up in the ocean forbids vendors from offering them to the nondisabled.
To be fair, the city is trying to rein in homelessness, drug use and errant syringes, but the latest policy to have its full-throated support is a ban on the sale of electronic cigarettes.
Tuesday, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors decreed that vaping products — from the popular cartridge models to tanks, vape pens and e-liquids — can no longer be sold in brick and mortar stores or purchased online and delivered to local addresses. The ban is intended to “protect youth from e-cigarettes,” according to a news release from city attorney Dennis Herrera.
Doubtless, nonsmoking teens shouldn’t vape. But what about smoking adults, the target audience for ecigarettes? If they can’t quit or don’t want to, they must have access to nicotine in a safer form. This is the principle of harm reduction.
E-cigarettes are estimated to be 95% less hazardous than conventional cigarettes. This is because they do not burn tobacco, which releases carcinogens and carbon monoxide. Vapers inhale nicotine via a propylene glycol-based and/or glycerin-based aerosol. A recent study in the New England Journal of Medicine found “vaping” to be twice as effective as Food and Drug Administration-approved nicotine replacements (patches, gum, lozenges) in helping smokers quit cigarettes.
Even more absurd is the fact that regular, combustible cigarettes remain untouched on the shelves of convenience stores. “We’re basically saying that we only care about the risks of kids vaping, but we don’t care about whether they smoke,” Michael Siegel, a Boston University professor told Wired.
This is harm maximization: Banning sale of e-cigarettes virtually guarantees that many vapers will go back to their Marlboros. It also puts teen vapers — the very impetus for the ban — at increased risk for smoking, though the legal age to buy cigarettes is 21.
Meanwhile, harm reduction is alive and well for people addicted to heroin and fentanyl. Nonprofit agencies such as At the Crossroads provide “safe snorting kits,” which include ... plastic straws. Smokers, who are consuming a legal substance, deserve the same accommodation to their health.
Lastly, as San Francisco shuns vaping, it embraces cannabis. “The 11 Best Marijuana Stores in SF” appeared recently in a local lifestyle publication.
Surely some marijuana will find its way to kids, but concern seems mild compared with the frenzy surrounding teen vaping. In fact, Urban Pharm sells marijuana in the kind of “kid-friendly” flavors — “Sugar Cookies,” “Sundae Driver” and “Watermelon Zkittlez” — that brought the marketing of vaping liquids (e.g., “Unicorn Puke,” “Cap.N Crunch,”) under deserved scrutiny from the FDA and Congress.
Lastly, the alarmism directed at nicotine’s alleged effect on teen brains would be better aimed at marijuana. Regular marijuana exposure can (reversibly) impair cognition and even cause temporary psychosis. No evidence to date shows harm from nicotine on the mental state of teens or young adults.
San Francisco’s prohibition of e-cigarette sales will go into effect early next year, unless a November ballot measure can be mounted to override it.
None of this makes sense until you recognize that in San Francisco, policy is shaped more often by prejudice than principle or practicality. It’s making the city a more difficult place to live and hurting people who need the most help.
Dr. Sally Satel is an American Enterprise Institute scholar. Erica Sandberg is a consumer-finance reporter and a community advocate.