Sometimes you see government take an action, shake your head and simply wonder, “Why?”
Case in point: The Los Angeles City Council will vote soon on an ordinance, approved Feb. 24 by a special committee, that will regulate electronic cigarettes in the same way as tobacco cigarettes, including banning them in public places.
Anyone with even a passing familiarity with e-cigarettes knows they simply aren’t the same as tobacco cigarettes. Most obviously, they don’t contain tobacco, or any of its noxious tar.
They don’t burn. They don’t smell bad. Rather than toxic second-hand smoke, users exhale largely harmless water vapor with trace amounts of chemicals comparable with ambient air (hence the handle “vapers”).
For all those reasons, e-cigarettes seem like the public health boon of the ages. Why would anyone want to do anything to dampen an opportunity to free perhaps millions of smokers from a deadly habit and clear the air for the rest of us?
The answer, as usual in City Hall politics, relates to the axiom that “Where you stand depends on where you sit.”
Central to any cause or controversy, in turn, are two factors: fear of the new and unknown, and an enemy. E-cigarettes provide both.
First of all, no matter how many studies are done on the relative safety of the product, no matter how much evidence is compiled on their use and value, there are always new concerns to be raised.
Then there’s the fact that e-cigarettes offer the perfect foil – the evil tobacco companies, who are making major investments in the segment. If those folks are involved, they have to be up to no good.
But the truth is that tobacco companies now find themselves where phone companies, the music industry, retailers and many other businesses have over the last two decades: face to face with a market-disrupting innovation.
Rapid transition
Like these established industries before them, tobacco marketers must make a rapid transition to a new and better technology – or watch their markets disappear.
Some industries didn’t make the transition in time, often despite their best efforts. Ask Kodak, which was knocked off its perch and hounded from the market altogether by phones in cameras, or book publishers struggling to deal with online sales or PC makers facing the tablet revolution. These industries and others were either forced to adapt to or give way to the ease, convenience, savings and new benefits to consumers of disruptive technologies.
In the case of e-cigarettes, analysts are raising the possibility that they will overtake sales of conventional tobacco cigarettes in the next decade. All the evidence to date suggests that it will be a good thing, even a great thing, if they do.
Even in the early stages of their development, it is obvious to anyone without a conflicting interest that e-cigarettes already offer tremendous advantages from a public and personal health perspective. Those advantages can only be expected to increase as the technology is refined and we learn more about how to use and market them to get smokers to switch.
But none of those advantages can be capitalized on if future vapers and marketers have to scale a mountain of shortsighted, wrongheaded regulations based on truly unrelated products and a flood of disinformation.
Seeing through the motives of those who want to over-regulate and ahead to the possibilities e-cigarettes offer should lead the City Council to stand where the rest of us do: wanting to give this promising product innovation a chance.
Natalie Blanning is the executive director for the Consumer Alliance for a Strong Economy, a suburban Sacramento organization that seeks to inform the public about policy issues that could affect their businesses or lives.
