Indiana Parks Want To Prohibit Vaping and Smokeless Tobacco

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The Parks Department of Fishers, Indiana is looking to introduce an ordinance that would ban e-cigarettes and other “cloud-producing” products that may or may not contain nicotine from city parks and public spaces, adding to an existing public ban on cigarettes, cigars, and pipes.

Proposed bans like this one in Fishers are the result of two factors: a recent explosion of the vaping industry in the United States, especially among young people, and an uncertainty about how people’s health is affected by vapor clouds in public places.

Here at Breazy, we believe that the growth in the vaping industry is a good sign for reducing the harm that traditional cigarettes inflicts on the country. The more that people vaping, the less who are smoking tobacco products.

We also believe think that measured regulation is healthy for a growing industry, and also that the dangers of combustible cigarettes should not be imposed on vapes and e-cigarettes, which have been proven as effective tools to quit smoking.

Local Opposition

This would be the first time that Indiana would target vaping in its anti-smoking legislation, and the ordinance faces pushback from the local vaping community.  

“I believe banning it in parks is excessive,” Taylor Hatfield, the local general manager at Fishers Vapor Trails, told Indystar earlier this month.

The last time that Indiana was hit with legislation about smoking in 2012 when they imposed a statewide indoor smoking ban in most public places. These laws banned smoking at bars and other public places for people under 21 years, but didn’t specifically target vaping.

Despite that Hatfield said that most bars didn’t allow vaping.    

“I’d say 85 percent of them don’t let us vape,” he said, “a couple allow it, but only if we keep our vaper clouds low,” he said..

Reports

In December 2016, a flawed U.S. Surgeon General assessment of e-cigarettes determined that vapor clouds expose young children to potentially dangerous levels of nicotine and other chemicals. Unfortunately, the prohibition against e-cigarettes has increased, and a number of states that have raised the smoking and vaping age from 18 to 21.

Others outside the United States have not been so quick to condemn e-cigarettes, but rather see the potential of e-cigs as cessation tools to quit cigarettes.

'It is simply not true that e-cigarettes are a tobacco product or that vaping lures children to smoking or that it creates dependence in non-smokers. The prevalence of smoking among young people is at all time low and regular use of nicotine containing e-cigarettes among never-smokers is extremely rare,' says Prof. Peter Hayek, Director of the Tobacco Dependence Research Unit at Queen Mary University of London.

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, e-cigarette use among high school students rose from 1.5% in 2011 to 16% in 2015. Federal health officials estimate that about 3 million middle and high school students use e-cigarettes.