Yesterday Mayor Michael Nutter of Philadelphia signed anti-vaping legislation that will go into effect on July 1st. As is the norm with these type of laws it was done for all the wrong reasons.
The laws will first ban the selling of e-cigs and vaporizers to minors. This is nothing more than what I like to call feel good legislation. It makes the politicians look good and their constituents feel good even though they’re putting a stop to something that wasn’t happening anyway. I live in the land of tobacco and you’d think that if there were an epidemic of kids getting cigarettes or their electronic equivalents from merchants you think it would be happening here. It isn’t and as far as I know it’s not happening anywhere else. Am I saying it doesn’t happen at all? Of course not but it’s not happening on the level that the politicians and busybodies think it is. Every merchant that I’ve ever made a purchase from has a sign letting customers know that the items in question will not be sold to minors. So Nutter is just putting a law into effect that the vaping community was already enforcing on its own.
The other law is also more of the same, it bans vaping in public places. Again I really don’t have that much of a problem with this because vaping allows me to go longer without a hit than smoking did. Not to mention if anyone is going into a public place to raise a stink that they’re vaping and not smoking is not helping their cause.
You would think that Philadelphia had more pressing matters on its hands like rampant crime, poverty and poor education but I guess they got all that sorted out.
The Trench Reynolds Report 