Lighting up debate on e-smoking Print

When it comes to electronic cigarettes, and where people can smoke 'em, the Santa Maria City Council may have stepped one toke over the line.
Pardon our reference to a lyric from a hippie-era rock song, but it just seems to fit with the action taken by the City Council last week banning the use of e-cigarettes in public spaces.
Santa Maria isn't the first city to ban the electronic smokes, and it won't be the last. Los Angeles city officials last week instituted a similar ban in parks, restaurants and workplaces.
Santa Maria's prohibition isn't that all-inclusive, with the ordinance against so-called vaping — for vaporizing — not including parks, some stores, homes or hotel rooms.  Lucky Strike Original Red
Our concern about the council's action is that it happens before useful gathering of evidence, pro or con, about e-cigarettes. In fact, the debate is raging nationwide about their use, and the potential problems they may cause.
One fact seems fairly evident — electronic cigarettes are helping people kick their regular cigarette habit. Of that, there is little debate.
Another fact is that switching from a regular tobacco-filled cigarette to the electric format eliminates one of tobacco products' biggest risks — tars deposited from the mouth down to the lungs of a tobacco-cigarette smoker. Those tars offer a horror house of carcinogens, so eliminating them greatly reduces the risk of smoking-related cancers.
Beyond that, however, little is know about the e-cigarettes. They do contain nicotine, which is why smokers can more easily tolerate the switch. They contain water, which is vaporized by heating from a battery. What else is in there is anyone's guess, because the manufacturers aren't required by law to disclose the ingredients, so they aren't disclosing.
On balance, however, we'd have to say switching from tobacco to water vapor laced with nicotine is a good thing.
There is another "however" — sitting next to a person vaping away on an e-cigarette can be almost as annoying as sitting next to a tobacco smoker. And because there is no evidence, either way, of what effects e-cigarettes have on the human body, perhaps the council's decision to separate smokers from non-smokers makes sense.
Our objection to the council's ban on e-cigarettes is that it was made without evidence to support a pressing need for such a law. But, there are enough unanswered questions on both sides of this debate that it should continue.
One issue that could soon be resolved is the actual risk factors involved with using electronic cigarettes. The devices are not currently regulated by federal law, but the Food and Drug Administration has filed a request for the authority to regulate such products. If that request is granted, it launches a series of scientific investigations that could provide some answers.
Whatever the ingredients in e-cigarettes, they are likely to pose only a fraction of the risk involved in smoking tobacco products. The typical, inhaled puff of a tobacco cigarette, for example, contains more than 4,000 potential and known toxic substances.
And we can't imagine e-cigarettes killing as many people as cigarettes containing tobacco, which each day adversely affect the lives of perhaps more than a billion humans worldwide, plus the untold billions who live and work in proximity to smokers.
In that context, governments should welcome the switch from tobacco to heated vapor containing nicotine.
At the very least, the City Council might have waited for better evidence, pro or con, about e-cigarette use before enacting legislation against using the devices in public.