Georgetown to allow vaping at e-cigarette specialty shops
Move comes after shop owner tells how recent ordinance hurt business.
GEORGETOWN— Customers can get a chocolate bacon flavored electronic cigarette at Allin Still’s store in Georgetown, or any other combination of 400 cake and candy flavorings.
But the Georgetown City Council recently passed one of Central Texas’ most aggressive ordinances restricting electronic cigarettes, and Still says the new rules are hurting his 2-year-old business, the Peace Pipe Vapor Store.
The ordinance, effective April 23, banned the smok- ing of electronic cigarettes in public places. It also prohibited people younger than 18 from buying or possessing e-cigarettes.
Since then, Still said, sales are down 10 to 15 percent because customers were not allowed to smoke in his store. On a good day the store attracts 75 to 80 people, and some prefer to smoke inside so they can test the flavors, he said.
Electronic cigarettes heat up a solution including nicotine and flavorings to create a vapor that users inhale. Instead of smoke, users exhale the aerosol.
Still raised his concerns to city government. The council responded Tuesday by voting unanimously to ask city staff to amend the ordinance so that people could smoke inside stores that sold only vaping devices.
“I didn’t have the intention of causing you any anxiety or making you think you couldn’t continue with your current business,” City Council member Rachael Jonrowe told Still at the meeting.
Still said the vote was a “great relief” for himself and his wife. “We felt like our city was working with us.”
People younger than 18 are still forbidden from entering a vaping store in Georgetown. Vaping stores also are not allowed to share a common wall with any business that allows minors inside.
The Peace Pipe Vapor store is in a stand-alone building
along Austin Avenue near Georgetown High School in Georgetown.
Still, a Vietnam veteran who previously had a historical renovation business, said he and his wife opened the store because they wanted to help people stop using tobacco.
He and his wife had used e-cigarettes to kick a 50-year habit of smoking cigarettes, he said. “We decided if this worked for us, it could work for other people and everybody we knew smoked,” he said.
Smokers who arrive at the store wanting to quit tobacco can get decreasing amounts of nicotine put into their solution for their electronic cigarettes, Still said.
Dr. Stanley Glantz, the director for the Cen- ter for Tobacco Research and Education in California, said studies show electronic cigarettes are not effective in helping smokers get off nicotine.
Allin Still said his experience shows otherwise: 1,800 people have signed a board in the store saying they have used e-cigarettes to quit tobbaco.