Electronic Cigarettes: A Loophole for Smoking Bans?

News, Rights

Thanks to electronic cigarettes, it may now be easier to get away with smoking on an airplane than with using a cell phone. The devices are beginning to reverse decades-long efforts to ban smoking in public places, experts say, and may also be contributing to a rise in underage smoking, as well as marijuana use.

A Loophole in Smoking Bans?

 E-cigarettes, which use liquid nicotine solution and batteries in place of paper and flame, emit vapor instead of smoke, and don’t produce the telltale cigarette odor or ash. Proponents say that makes the devices a discreet (and less harmful) alternative to smoking, enabling people to smoke whatever they want, wherever they want, and without attracting attention.

But lawmakers and public health officials fear that e-cigarettes are helping tobacco sneak back into non-smoking zones, as well as the hands of children. And because it’s hard to determine what’s actually in the devices, they also worry that e-cigarettes could contain illegal drugs instead of just nicotine.

E-Cigarettes: What’s in Them?

The discreet nature of vaporizers — including their ability to hide what’s inside — has a few people worried. “Do you want to see a 15-year-old with a vaporizer making like he has an e-cigarette but there’s grass in it, the liquid version of marijuana?” asks Massachusetts State Rep. Jeffrey Sanchez, a Democrat who authored a bill adding the devices to public and workplace smoking bans and prohibiting youth from buying e-cigarettes. “You could vaporize anything if you put it in liquid form,” Sanchez says.

Now that 20 states, along with Washington, D.C., have legalized medical marijuana, Massachusetts and others are bracing for the arrival of dispensaries, which often sell cannabis solutions for vaporization. While marijuana vaporizers have been on the market much longer than e-cigarettes, there is debate over whether the products can (or should) be used interchangeably to inhale either pot or tobacco. The Tobacco Vapor Electronic Cigarette Association, which represents that industry, says none of its members make marijuana paraphernalia. “It’s a whole different animal altogether,” says CFO Thomas Kiklas.

That may be beside the point, as marijuana vaporizers and electronic cigarettes are indistinguishable. Some companies are even marketing vaporizers for both purposes. Rapid Fire Marketing, for one, makes the CannaCig vaporizer, but is re-branding the device to appeal more to tobacco users than marijuana users, says spokesperson Rick Lutz. “The reality is, whether it’s cannabis or tobacco, it can be used in a vaporizer in order to convert what normally is smoke into a vapor,” Lutz says. In a nutshell: you can get the effects of marijuana without the smoke.

Concern over e-cigarettes has especially focused on youth, who in many states can buy the products without being carded, while sales of traditional cigarettes and tobacco are restricted to ages 18 and over. The number of minors who have used e-cigarettes more than doubled to almost 2 million middle and high school students between 2011 and 2012, according to a recent report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Can You Vape in No-Smoking Zones?

There has been some confusion on whether smoking bans also apply to e-cigs. Smoking has been banned on U.S. flights (and their bathrooms) for more than a decade, with penalties ranging from thousands of dollars to arrest, but electronic cigarettes have landed in a legal gray area. While the Department of Transportation believes the existing rule also applies to e-cigs, it proposed an amendment in 2011 to explicitly prohibit them.

The ability of e-cigarette users to “vape” undetected in just about any place has prompted efforts to regulate the new industry. Under current Massachusetts law, e-cigarettes could technically be used in the halls of schools and in other places where smoking would be legally unheard of.

Even airplane passengers don’t seem to have problems smoking e-cigarettes in plane lavatories—or in their seats, for that matter. Rob Fontano, owner and president of high-end e-cigarettes seller Fort Myers Vapor, says he has used them in more than 20 airports without being stopped—even while waiting in line to board and in airplane restrooms. Fontano even claims to have a customer who is a pilot, that uses an e-cigarette in the cockpit.

Until there is an official ban on vaping in places where smoking is also prohibited (the plan is to do so by mid-2014), e-cigarette users are making their own rules, waiting to be stopped by individual carriers. Officially, American Airlines’ policies do prohibit the “activation” of e-cigarettes, but having one on board is not prohibited. In other words, using a vaporizer is as easy as using your cell phone to play a game without a flight attendant noticing.