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Notes -
Vaping is ugly and reminds people of cigarettes, which are An Official Bad Thing, so it’s an emergency if the youths are starting to get into it.
To be clear, I fall into the camp that the worst thing about vaping is that it’s dorky. But to an elderly government staffer who thinks of their job as suppressing nicotine use, and a middle aged law enforcement policy writer who thinks their job is to ensure the kids ‘just say no’ to marijuana, I can see why they don’t make that distinction.
IMO that is the beginning and end of the crusade against vaping. It's pattern matching + disgust reaction, nothing more. For whatever reason people feel comfortable in really hating smokers (see the brilliant South Park satire where the "tolerant" characters jeered and taunted smokers, calling them "tar lungs" and chasing them off). Because people are disgusted by smoking, they file vaping into the same bucket and that's the end of it.
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