It’s slightly awkward the first time you see one. For me, I was walking through the baggage claim at the airport and some nervous man, all jittery from his flight, just whipped one out.
Maybe you’re sitting in class and someone towards the back of the room pulls it out but tries to conceal it. Perhaps you’re at work, and you see a flash of one from a co-worker. Unless you’re close enough, you can’t smell it, but you’re seeing it and wondering, could that really be what I think it is?
Yeah, you guessed it. I’m talking about electronic cigarettes.
There have been all kinds of smoking bans created in the U.S., with most restaurants and some bars going to a completely smoke free environment. We can’t smoke in buildings, and now at this school we aren’t supposed to smoke on campus. Some cities even have laws that you can’t smoke within so many feet of a building.
Yet some brilliant mind thought, how can we smoke without actually smoking? Like most everything we consume these days, the electronic cigarette was made in China by a man whose father died of lung cancer. He was a smoker himself and invented a way to smoke without tobacco, according to the Electronic Cigarette Association.
The electronic cigarette was only introduced to the U.S. in 2006. Since then the battles began, with states trying to ban the use of electronic cigarettes in the same places as tobacco products are banned. So far, Florida has no bans on the use or purchase of electronic cigarettes.
The electronic cigarette is essentially a vaporizer, burning chemicals inside of it that are released in the form of vapor from the smoker’s mouth when they exhale their puff. The vapor does smell, and is different depending on what flavor the smoker is using.
I think as a society we’ve come a long way with smoking, and we’re accustomed to not seeing people smoke in certain environments such as grocery stores, airports, schools and in the work place. These laws were created to protect nonsmokers from the harmful chemicals in cigarettes. With electronic cigarettes, we’re not being subjected to anything harmful from the tiny amount of vapor they release.
When debating about electronic cigarette bans, I think it comes down to what we’ve trained ourselves to see as being socially acceptable. It’s no longer socially acceptable to smoke in a building, so when we see someone doing it, it kind of takes us by surprise.
The bottom line is that smoking is smoking. For me, it’s not so much the danger in second hand smoke as it is the smell, the stigma attached to it and the fact that it is addicting. I can’t do any of my bad habits at work. I’m not allowed to text, swear at people or drink while working, so why people should be allowed to smoke their electronic cigarette on the clock or in the classroom is beyond me.
Outside of places where it would normally be inappropriate to do anything that is a distraction to the situation, I think we just need to readjust the way we think when we see someone taking a drag. They don’t have to light up, so there is no flame to put out. It’s a battery-charged cigarette.
I say, puff away.
