Truth or (unintended) consequences

“Man vaping electronic cigarette” by Jim Hedd is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

When Ocean City, MD, banned smoking and vaping from its boardwalk, the city manager said visitors to the popular seaside resort would police themselves.

“Will we haul people off to jail for smoking on the boardwalk?” asked David Recor. “No, that’s not our approach.”

It hasn’t worked out that way.

This month, Denzel Elam Ruff, a 34-year-old tourist, defied an order from police to stop vaping. He was surrounded by three policemen, pushed to the ground and punched by one of the officers, cell phone footage shows.

Ruff, who is Black, was charged with disorderly conduct, resisting arrest, second-degree assault, and failure to provide proof of identification, all misdemeanors.

This wasn’t the first time that Ocean City police used force against vapers. In 2021, police tackled, tasered and arrested four Black teenagers after a confrontation over vaping on the boardwalk.

Ethan Nadelmann, the former president of the Drug Policy Alliance, noted on Twitter:

Anyone who thinks that banning #vapes, flavored #ecigs or #menthol #cigarettes is not going to replicate what we’ve seen with #marijuana #prohibition, ie, #police arresting lots of young people, especially boys and men of color, well, think again!

These violent confrontations should be kept in mind in the wake of a new report from Truth Initiative, the US’s largest anti-smoking group, that calls for bold and sweeping government actions to gradually end the use of all tobacco products — not just cigarettes, which are lethal, but safer nicotine delivery systems as well.

The report, called Gamechanger, says restrictions on the sales of cigarettes and vapes “must focus on the products themselves and policies should be written so that the violators are the manufacturers and retailers, not people who use, possess, or purchase tobacco or nicotine products.”

During a webinar about the report, Robin Koval, Truth Initiative’s president and CEO, scoffed at the idea that a ban on all tobacco products would lead to over-policing, dismissing it as “really a distraction.”

This is naive at best naive and disingenuous at worst.

To its credit, Truth Initiative would like to phase any ban on tobacco products, to give today’s smokers more help in quitting and more time to do so. One of its policies would prohibitthe sale of tobacco products to people born after a certain date, creating what’s been called a “Tobacco-Free Generation.” The upscale Boston suburb of Brookline, MA, for example, has banned tobacco sales to anyone born after January 1, 2000. A similar law passed in New Zealand takes effect in 2025. These laws recognize that today’s smokers struggle to quit.

But Truth also wants an immediate ban on all flavored tobacco products, including e-cigarettes, which millions of former smokers have used to help them quit cigarettes. Truth is also urging the FDA to immediately ban all menthol cigarettes.

Consider, for a moment, the unintended consequences of such actions.

Does Robin Koval really believe that police would ignore people selling menthol cigarettes on the streets, if they become illegal?

Has she forgotten Eric Garner, who was choked to death by a New York City police officer while being arrested for selling loose cigarettes without tax stamps?

Has Truth paid any attention to history?

In the epilogue to Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition, author Dan Okrent’s deeply-researched history, he writes:

In almost every respect imaginable, Prohibition was a failure. It encouraged criminality and institutionalized hypocrisy. It deprived the government of revenue, stripped the gears of the political system, and imposed profound limitations on individual rights. It fostered a culture of bribery, blackmail and official corruption.

The 50-year-old war on drugs isn’t going well either. In 2021, the CDC for Disease counted more than 107,600 drug-related deaths — an all-time high.

Now Truth wants to launch a war on nicotine that is all but doomed to fail.

Remember, there are more than 1 billion smokers around the world.

“Can anyone name any psychoactive substance enjoyed by many which has been more-or-less eradicated from planet earth in the last few thousand years?” asks Alex Wodak, a physician and the director of the Australian Tobacco Harm Reduction Association.

There’s lots more to say about Truth’s Gamechanger report. I wrote about the report last week in Filter, and wrote a longer critique of Truth Initiative last year, also in Filter.

Truth, the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids and Bloomberg Philanthropies have spent so much time and money on their crusade against vaping that it’s easy to forget that there’s been some excellent news about smoking lately.

The smoking rate in the US fell to a historic low last year even as e-cigarette use is rising, according to the CDC.

This isn’t accidental, of course. People in the US and around the world are switching from lethal cigarettes to safer ways to obtain nicotine, including vaping.

The terrible irony is that the misguided crusade against vaping will keep more people smoking, cause more death and disease and, astoundingly, benefit the tobacco industry.

Unintended consequences, indeed.