Uh, there is a sort of stunning hypocrisy around the recent vaping related panic that
the president has shown.
Now, last week we had this sort of cartoonish moment where Donald Trump explained that the
first lady, meaning his wife, Melania Trump, is very, um, finds the vaping issue very important
because she has a son, of course.
It's also Donald Trump's son.
And it was funny and it was a good laugh, but there's actually a much bigger stunning
hypocrisy surrounding this entire vaping thing.
And Donald Trump wanting to ban and or heavily regulate vaping over six deaths that may or
may not be related to vaping specifically.
So let's back it up and kind of set the story up.
Um, what is vaping?
Vaping is, uh, inhaling and exhaling the aerosol, it's often called vapor, which suggests that
it's water vapor, but it's not, it's the aerosols produced by e-cigarettes or similar devices.
And the term vaping is used because the e-cigs don't produce tobacco smoke.
So the term vaping is a very innocuous way to say, well, these are aerosols that are
being created rather than tobacco smoke.
And those aerosols contain varying amounts of different chemicals, many of which are
known to be toxic, many of which have been linked to cancer, heart disease or respiratory
disease.
So it's obviously not a healthy thing to be doing to be vaping.
There are debates over, is it less bad than just straight up smoking cigarettes?
Is it less bad than a smoking pot in the sort of traditional way?
Those are open questions, but the idea that this is not harmful is completely laughable.
That's kind of the starting point.
Donald Trump now is talking about banning vaping altogether.
So first of all, the question is did six people really die from vaping?
I'm unclear.
The CDC has identified close to 400 confirmed cases of what they call vaping related lung
illnesses and six deaths.
Now, whether the cause is vaping itself, the answer is probably not.
From what I've researched, it does appear that there are chemicals in some of these
vaping products and it could be the chemicals themselves or interactions between chemicals
or interactions between chemicals and THC or the chemicals and nicotine which could
be causing these illnesses.
I don't pretend to know.
We don't fully know, but let's just for a second today, pretend that you know what it
is.
The, the mechanism of vaping itself that caused these six deaths.
If six people dying from something means that the president gets involved and bands it.
What about cigarettes?
What about alcohol?
And maybe even most importantly, what about firearms, whatever the intended use of these
things.
So with guns you can say, well, the intended use of a firearm is self-defense.
Cigarettes.
You can say the, the intended, uh, use is, you know, nicotine, nicotine, uh, enjoyment
of nicotine.
The pleasure of nicotine.
I don't know.
The goal of alcohol is relaxation in social settings.
It doesn't matter more than six people, many, many more than six people die as a result
of guns, cigarettes, and alcohol every year, way more than even ostensibly attributed to
vaping.
At this point in time, you can go further.
More people die in migrant detention then from vaping, and there is no interest in banning
that from Donald Trump whatsoever.
Although maybe the political circumstances are very different.
There they are, uh, the guns that are mostly killing people other than the owners are doing
the type of damage to the non-users that vaping is not, I mean in the end, vaping, if anything
is killing the vapors and the vapors alone.
Whereas firearms are killing innocent people, other people that don't even have the firearms.
So there is this incredible hypocrisy of being against nanny states and being for businesses,
doing what they will, you know, all that stuff that we hear from so-called pro-business,
small government conservatives, and then six people may be die as a result of associated
chemicals with vaping.
And Donald Trump right away is talking about banning vaping.
And there are a number of angles on this that, that I've read about, many of which are compelling.
One is that people are smoking traditional cigarettes less and less in the United States.
And that this is all part knowingly or unknowingly of a way to again, try to reinvigorate the
tobacco industry, which to some degree is suffering because people are abandoning smoking
over time, which is a really great thing.
So there's the, the sort of corporate angle.
The other one is that this is an easy moral position to take for Donald Trump.
Uh, and therefore he is jumping in head first so to speak.
Now when we talk about, aside from Trump's hypocrisy, when we talk about regulating and
banning things, there is actually a need to have an adult conversation just doing the
country's, you know, governments shouldn't ban stuff that's nanny state.
And any way when you ban something, all you do is create a black market for it.
Versus we just need to regulate and ban everything, which nobody really takes that position.
We should be scrutinizing and considering regulation of banning at regulation or banning
on each issue individually and we need to be looking at how would regulating or prohibiting
this versus that actually influenced the behavior we are trying to stop.
What sort of other effects, what side effects will there be from the regulation or the band?
There's a case to be made that aggressive regulation of guns, not bands per se, but
that aggressive regulation including background checks, including more extensive licensing,
uh, national registry required insurance, making ammunition significantly more expensive,
expensive through tens of taxation, that that would drastically reduce gun deaths, which
is the goal at least if public health advocates, if not the NRA banning vapes will actually
do very little without a more holistic approach, including looking at alternatives.
And of course, how do you justify banning vapes and cigarettes are still legal?
What you need only look at the power of their respective lobbies.
Guns have alternatives that are far less lethal knives, right?
We've talked about this before and yet there is no willingness to do anything about it.
And here we have Donald Trump all of a sudden saying, we've got a van ban vapes on the basis
of six possible deaths.
The hypocrisy is stunning, but also the hangers-on that are coming out of the woodwork with their
foe libertarian ideology are quite frankly making me sick.
Let me know what you think about the entire vaping hypocrisy.
I'm on Twitter at d pacman.
The show is on Twitter at David Pakman.