| 摘要 | San Francisco is a city of mind-bending contrasts.
Park your car for more than two hours on a residential street and you’ll face a steep ticket or a tow. But set up camp on a sidewalk with a collection of tents, shopping carts, and stolen bicycles and the city gives you days or more to move.
Sip from an open container of alcohol in a city park and you may be cited. Inject yourself with heroin in public, and you’re unlikely to face official response.
Enjoy your boba tea through a single-use, plastic straw – but only until July 1. After that, municipal policy aimed at keeping plastic from ending up in the ocean forbids vendors from offering them to the non-disabled.
Speaking of plastic, about 2 million of the 5.8 million syringes distributed last year by the city littered the streets or washed into the bay.
To be fair, the city is trying to rein in homelessness, drug use, and errant syringes, but the latest policy has its full-throated support: A ban on the sale of electronic cigarettes.
Yesterday, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors decreed that vaping products — from the widely popular cartridge models, of which JUUL is the best known, to tanks, vape pens, and e-liquids — can no longer be sold in brick and mortar stores or purchased online and delivered to local addresses.
The ban is intended to “protect youth from e-cigarettes,” according to a press release from City Attorney Dennis Herrera.
Doubtless, non-smoking teens shouldn’t vape. But what about smoking adults, the target audience for e-cigarettes?
If they can’t quit or don’t want to, they must have access to nicotine in a safer form. This is the principle of harm reduction.
E-cigarettes are estimated to be at least 95% less hazardous than conventional cigarettes. This is because they do not burn tobacco, which release carcinogens and carbon monoxide. Vapers inhale nicotine via a propylene glycol-based and/or glycerin-based aerosol.
A recent year-long study in the New England Journal of Medicine found “vaping” to be twice as effective as FDA-approved nicotine replacements (patches, gum, lozenges) in helping smokers quit cigarettes.
Even more absurd is the fact that regular, combustible cigarettes remain untouched on the shelves of convenience stores. “He says that San Francisco is not proposing to ban traditional cigarettes, whose health risks are well documented” this is harm maximization: banning sale of e-cigarettes it virtually guarantees that many vapers will go back to their Marlboros. It also puts teen vapers — the very impetus for the ban — at increased risk for smoking.
Meanwhile, harm reduction is alive and well for people addicted to heroin and fentanyl. Nonprofit agencies such as At the Crossroads provide “safe snorting kits” which include … plastic straws.
Smokers, who, remember, are consuming a legal substance, deserve the same accommodation to their health.
Lastly, as San Francisco shuns vaping, it embraces cannabis. “The 11 Best Marijuana Stores in SF,” appeared recently in a local lifestyle publication.
Surely some store-purchased marijuana, though legal for adults only, will find its way to kids, but concern seem mild compared to frenzy surrounding teen vaping.
In fact, Urban Pharm, sells marijuana in the kind of “kid-friendly” flavors — “Sugar Cookies,” “Sundae Driver,” and “Watermelon Zkittlez”— that brought the marketing of vaping liquids (e.g., “Unicorn Puke,”“Cap’n Crunch,”) under deserved scrutiny from the Food and Drug Administration and Congress.
Lastly, the alarmism directed at nicotine’s alleged effect on teen brains would be better aimed at marijuana. Regular marijuana exposure can (reversibly) impair cognition and even cause temporary psychosis. No evidence to date shows harm from nicotine on the mental state of teens or young adults.
Prohibition of e-cigarette sales will go into effect early next year unless a November ballot measure can be mounted to override the measure.
None of this makes sense until you recognize that, in San Francisco, policy is shaped more often by prejudice than principle or practicality. It’s making the city a more difficult place to live and hurting people who need the most help. |
