What Do Progressives Have against Vaporous Substances?

It’s weird how science and harm reduction are important lodestars for progressives, except when they aren’t.

In the classic 1979 comedy The Jerk, Steve Martin plays a very dumb guy who often misses the point. In one scene, while he’s working as a gas-station attendant, an assassin tries to kill him with a high-powered rifle. When the bullets start whizzing past his head and popping holes in some motor-oil cans, he immediately assumes the cans must be defective because they’re spontaneously springing leaks. When the sniper is pointed out to him, he then concludes: “He hates these cans!” He then runs past a soda-vending machine, and as the bullets rip into that, he shouts, “There are cans in there too!”

That 40-year-old scene comes to mind in part because that’s how my middle-aged brain is wired, but also because I occasionally wonder whether American progressives have a similar feeling about gaseous or vaporous substances. Sometimes I shout at the TV, “They hate these gases!”

Consider vaping. We’re in the middle of something close to a full-on moral panic about the practice. The president is considering taking drastic action against the nicotine-delivery systems. New York governor Andrew Cuomo, who recently instituted an emergency ban on flavored vape products, says, “Vaping is dangerous, period.”

There are so many bans on vaping and e-cigarettes that Wikipedia has a massive list of all the states, counties, and towns that outlaw the allegedly pernicious devices. It’s mostly offices, restaurants, and bars, but you’re also out of luck if you want to vape from the deck of a Washington-state ferry.

Now, I sympathize with the effort to make it harder for nonsmoking minors to pick up vaping as a habit. And while I think the bans on flavored vape products aimed at kids will inevitably lead to a black market (a possibility that many of the same anti-vaping progressives concede when the issue is, say, drugs or prostitution), there’s still room for reasonable regulations on that front.