“We have nothing to fear but fear itself,” progressive patriarch and late President Franklin D. Roosevelt once said. What a world we live in where we literally fear what we don’t know, and then ban it or regulate the living daylights out of it so we’ll never know what we are actually afraid of.
This mindset seems to be in vogue in San Francisco where they are covered in poop and are banning electric scooters. The progressive city plans on following up with all that progress by now proposing a ban on vaping.
Politically moderate Virginia raised the age to purchase e-cig and vaping products while at the same time the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has ignored evidence that shows that vaping isn’t dangerous at all It only makes sense that San Francisco would join the anti-vaping hysteria caused by big tobacco.
Slate covered the widely unpopular proposal, in which contributor Shannon Palus correctly pointed out that the unintended consequences of this law would actually create another issue entirely.
“The problem with the proposed ban,” Palus said. “Is that it wouldn’t just keep vapes away from teens; it would also keep them from an essential audience: adult smokers.”
Research has shown that e-cigs/vaping has caused a massive reduction in the overall population of adult smokers who thanks to this technology, are no longer at as high of a risk of cancer caused by the burning of tobacco (a carcinogen) and the other poisonous agents used as ingredients in cigarettes.
Palus continues, “In the end, the proposal raises the question: Why not just add old-fashioned cancer-causing cigarettes to the list of things not allowed in San Francisco too?” The answer is that it has never been about public safety, just about virtue signaling in order to tap into the public fears over teen vaping usage in order to score political points.
After all, the article states, “The lawmakers behind the San Francisco proposal say they just want the FDA to move faster on evaluating e-cigarettes’ role in public health. It’s true that the FDA has not vetted e-cigarette products—but it has a plan to do so by 2022.” Therefore it is a win-win for progressive lawmakers in San Francisco.
They appear to be leading the effort to save kids and show leadership, and even if nothing dangerous is found by the FDA, they still get to say they were doing it for the safety of children.
This is a political act, plain and simple, and because of this, adult smokers with addiction will fall back to cancer-causing cigarettes and consumers will have less market freedom because of policies backed by fear mongering.
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