“Beware: Second-hand stupidity kills.”
That’s just one of the killer lines from Greg Gutfeld’s rant against the five Democratic senators who introduced a bill to ban marketing e-cigarettes to teenagers. (It’s from The Five’s e-cig segment I linked to on Saturday.) Gutfeld called the e-cig “the greatest medical device since The Clapper,” arguing that it signifies the “first real progress for ending smoking . . . for good.”
To Barbara Boxer’s claim that there is no way of knowing whether e-cigs are harmful, Gutfeld responded: “Science, you bozo.”
Boxer and her comrades are, by my lights, far worse than bozos.
They fixate — like the puritanical Nanny State thugs they are — on the “Ooh, bad people get addicted to bad substances” aspect of the issue, rather than on the tremendous leap forward the new technology provides existing smokers. They fear, they say, kids starting with e-cigs and then taking up smoking tobacco. An unlikely scenario. Nicotine via water vapor is not a likely “gateway” to nicotine-with-deadly-tars via smoke.
E-cigs aren’t for everyone. The guy who puts these Common Sense episodes up online for me has tried it, and failed. Not a smoker, he wanted to see if he could swap some caffeine over-use with some controlled nicotine use. But he could not breathe the hot steam in.
The gateway was closed.
For smokers, however, the device serves as a wonderful substitution, swapping deadly tar-producing smoke sticks with a much cleaner nicotine rush. It will save lives.
Regulating it, taxing it — discouraging its use — would, as Gutfeld says, “make Death smile.”
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.