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Electric Cigarette Ban May Impact Smoking Cessation
On November 6, the Missoula County Public School System passed a policy ostensibly targeting electric cigarette use by teachers, students and staff on campus. They could be inadvertently undermining people's attempts to quit smoking. The language of this policy is open to interpretation as an “abstinence only” or “cold turkey” preference to quitting smoking.
How This E-Cig Policy Could Hurt Recovering Smokers
The specific language of MCPS's policy is that “nicotine innovations” are to be banned on school property. As e-cigs are regulated as tobacco products, it is assumed that they would not be allowed on public school property already. Putting them under a different, vague category has raised a controversy.
E cigarettes are not the only “nicotine innovations” out there, if understood as a relatively new variation from the centuries-old smoking, snuffing and chewing. This label just as easily refers to nicotine patches, lozenges and gum. The policy itself did not specifically mention any particular nicotine innovation. It is only assumed by the current parties that this means vapor cigarettes, and not FDA approved smoking cessation methods.
Vaping in the Boys' Room—Unfounded E Cigarette Fears
The greatest concerns that most e cigarette bans try to address is that they are possibly a “gateway drug” and that no one knows what health risks they pose. Last year, the FDA tried to ban e-cigarette sale on this basis. They got overturned by a federal judge because neither of these concerns were substantiated.
If it's the students that Montana's Office of Public Instruction and MCPS are concerned about, electric cigarettes are already regulated by tobacco laws. If the students are under 18 (or 21, depending), of course they should not have them. As for the faculty and staff, by these same tobacco policies, they should not have them on campus.
Generalized terms have typically been the loopholes exploited in contracts, laws, statutes and policies. Can “nicotine innovations” be exploited this way?
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