Mr Truman experiments with electronic cigarettes:
To be honest, I am not actually perfectly sanguine about the health potential of these things. They appear to be much, much safer than regular cigarettes. But I will be (pleasantly) surprised if we do not discover, at some point down the line, that vaping (“e-smoking”) doesn’t correlate with higher instances of throat and lung cancer. The throat scratchiness has not gone away. The chest feels better, but there is a persistent shortness of breath. Though I honestly have no problem that the lying scumbag tobacco companies were made to pay for their lies, I do feel like the smokers should have known better. Your body lets you know in every imaginable way that smoking is bad for you and it took a refusal to listen in order not to hear it. If I listen to my body now, what I hear is that this is an imperfect solution.
And one question that has puzzled me as a nonsmoker/nonvaper: Will these contraptions get the same sort of contumely routinely heaped upon Sir Walter Raleigh’s burning leaves?
That’s what I am concerned about, and the proposed regulations are already moving us in that direction. This is of particular concern to me because what finally got me to make the transition to ecigs is that I stopped treating them like regular cigarettes. My initial goal was to impose all of the same restrictions on vaping as I had imposed on smoking. This was a dead end. The only result of that exercise was that it became a cheap copy with the only advantage being that I didn’t have to deodorize every time I came back in and I didn’t have ash to contend with. It was only once I started allowing myself to vape indoors and try a multitude of flavors that I started seeing cigarettes more as an inconvenience rather than a superior product. As such, if we want people to make the transition from smoking to vaping — and we should — then we should give vaping a greater degree of latitude.
Already we seem to have more vapor outlets than cigar bars, for what that’s worth.