My 2 Cents: Anger Over E-Cigarettes

What are we going to do about these E-Cigarettes, now more commonly called "Vapes" short for vapor?

OSU is the latest university to consider banning them from campus, and they are banned in a lot of public places, but I've got to agree with a lot of people who wonder if it's short sighted to do so.

If you're unfamiliar with them, they're battery powered fake cigarettes. When the user takes a puff, a heater inside the vape converts the refillable flavored oil in the tube and turns it into a vapor carrying nicotine. It's not smoke.

It is not really a tobacco product, doesn't carry all the carcinogens. From what I've read, there doesn't seem to be any second-hand danger.

One person I talked to today says he can feel a noticeable improvement in how he feels since switching from cigarettes to E-cigarettes, and hopes to quit that eventually too.

Some people say it defeats the purpose to ban something that is helping people get off cigarettes. Others claim the seemingly harmless vapes will create new cigarette smokers, we'll see.

There's no doubt that in our increasingly smoke-a-phobic society even the appearance that someone is puffing on something nearby gets our hackles up, but maybe we should think of it more like a handheld nicotine patch.

I'm Kelly Ogle and that's My 2 Cents.