Sounds reasonable. I’ll be interested to hear what the opponents have to say.
City Council on Wednesday will consider a proposal to bar the use of e-cigarettes and any kind of vaping in public spaces under Houston’s smoking ordinance.
The move would update the city’s rules for public smoking, which were written before electronic cigarettes existed, Health Department spokesman Porfirio Villarreal said Monday.
Houston currently bars tobacco smoking in enclosed public places and seating areas, and within 25 feet of any building. Smoking in covered bus stops and light rail stops also is prohibited.
The measure would add all forms of vaping — including electronic cigars, pipes and hookahs — to the smoking ban, enacted in 2007 to reduce public secondhand smoke exposure.
Health officials proposed the amendment in light of rising e-cigarette use among middle and high school students, Villarreal said. As many as one in 10 Houston middle school students vape, according to health department data.
[…]
While scientists do not have a full picture of the long-term health effects of using e-cigarettes, research suggests the ultra-fine particles within the vapor can increase a person’s risk for cardiovascular disease and cancer, said Ronald Peters, Jr., a retired professor at the University of Texas at Houston’s School of Public Health who studied teen vaping behaviors. Banning public e-cigarette use is a common-sense way to reduce the risk of exposing children and vulnerable people to those potentially harmful vapors, he said.
In addition to removing vaping aerosols from public settings, the ban would have the added benefit of reducing kids’ exposure to all forms of nicotine use, he said.
If you’ve been around this blog for awhile, you know I’ve closely followed the various efforts to restrict smoking in public places. I’m all in favor of such things, though to my surprise in searching for the origin of the city’s ban, which was first proposed in 2004 for restaurants, it turns out I was an incrementalist at first. Go figure. After nearly two decades of lived experience, I see no real problem with keeping all forms of smoke away from the general public. Vaping is less objectionable than tobacco, and I’m sympathetic to the argument that the availability of e-cigarettes has enabled some smokers to transition to something less damaging to them. But they have also served as an on-ramp to nicotine for kids, and if there’s a case to be made that limiting where vaping is allowed will help reduce its appeal to kids, I’m all for it.
I’ll be interested to see how this plays out at Council. There was a lot of opposition from some folks back in the day, mostly bars and musicians who worried about the effect on their livelihood, but all these years later I have a hard time imagining that kind of organized resistance to this. Still, it took several tries to get to where we are, with small steps taken each time, so it would not surprise me to see a somewhat watered down version of this pass at first, to be revisited at a later date. We’ll see if I get any press releases from a pro-vape/anti-ban constituency like I did with regular smoking back in the day.
UPDATE: A later version of the story contains this bit of interest:
Most restaurants support including e-cigarettes in the ban, said Melissa Stewart, executive director of the Great Houston Chapter of the Texas Restaurant Association. Health officials consulted the chapter on the proposed amendment in December, she said.
“Many restaurants have already been enforcing a no-vaping rule at their own discretion,” Stewart said Tuesday afternoon. “Overall, what we have seen is most restaurants have treated vaping like cigarettes. They have not allowed it.”
Definitely a difference from before, especially for restaurants that also had bars. No guarantees, but that will help the ordinance get passed.
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