The Problem With San Francisco’s Potential Vape Ban

Published on March 22, 2019

San Francisco is on a bit of a banning spree. Last year, it was electric scooters. Now, the city is considering a bill to get rid of cashless stores and legislation that could effectively ban vaping. That last bit of proposed legislation hinges on the idea that we don’t yet know enough about e-cigarettes to allow them. It’s not an outright ban; it’s a proposed ban of vapes that have not undergone review by the Food and Drug Administration. But at the moment, that’s all of them.

The vaping ban is meant to “protect youth from e-cigarettes,” according to a press release put out by City Attorney Dennis Herrera, who is proposing it along with Supervisor Shamann Walton. It’s of a piece with the recent outcry over the “epidemic” of teen vaping, as outgoing FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb has described it (he led his agency in restricting the sale of vaping cartridges in flavors like mango and sour gummy). Worry over e-cigs has been building since research last year showed a rise in teen vaping. Juul, the only brand named in the San Francisco press release, is a bit of a phenomenon with teens: The product’s early ads featured young people, and its Urban Dictionary definition notes that the device is “commonly mistaken for a USB stick,” making it easy to conceal at school.

Cutting down on teen vaping is a fine goal. Like all tobacco products, e-cigarettes cannot be sold to those under 18 years of age (though some states have upped that to 21). But calls like this one show how moral panic over teen e-cigarette use tends to obscure e-cigarettes’ potential as an essential harm reduction tool and a safer alternative to cigarettes, a known cancer causing agent.

The lawmakers behind the San Francisco proposal say they just want the FDA to move faster on evaluating e-cigarettes’ role in public health. It’s true that the FDA has not vetted e-cigarette products—but it has a plan to do so by 2022 (a deadline it pushed back for good reason, as Jacob Grier has argued in Slate). Requiring vaping to be regulated right now or else also stands in contrast to the comparatively lax requirements for cigarettes: As Herrera pointed out to me in an email, “there is no legal requirement for the FDA to conduct that type of review for traditional cigarettes, which were on the market before that law went into effect.”