Kevin Skipper smoked 30 cigarettes a day for 15 years. And then he quit.
But he still “smokes.”
Since the first time he inhaled the blackberry-flavored vapor from an electronic cigarette, he was hooked. He switched his bulky pack of Marlboro Ultra Lights for a sleek vape pen.
But come Thursday, e-cigarettes, which don’t contain tobacco but rather turn liquid nicotine into vapor, may be placed under the same umbrella as traditional cigarettes.
Even though e-cigarettes do not produce smoke or smell, the City Commission will vote on an ordinance that forbids the use of e-cigarettes where smoking is already prohibited, said City Commissioner at Large, Helen K. Warren.
The meeting is at 1 p.m. Thursday at the City Hall Auditorium.
“If it looks like a cigarette and acts like a cigarette, we will treat it like a cigarette,” Warren said.
E-cigarette users like Skipper are about 60 percent more likely to quit tobacco than smokers who do cold turkey, according to a U.K. study. Yet the city commission voted unanimously on the first approval.
“This ordinance doesn’t tell you how to quit,” Warren said. “It just tells you where you can’t do it.”
If the ordinance receives its second and final approval Thursday, it will become effective immediately.
“Tobacco kills 1,100 people a day, and we don’t want to give people a reason to go back to them,” said Skipper, the president of a nonprofit corporation called VISTA Truth, which promotes vaping businesses.
The ordinance will define e-cigarettes as combustible tobacco products, Warren said. Alachua County and five cities around Gainesville have already passed the ordinance, including Archer, Hawthorne and High Springs.
“There’s a lot of synthetic cannabis, and when you get new items in your community, you have to ask yourself if there should be a policy or not,” Warren said. “We decided to comply with county statutes.”
Skipper hopes to persuade city commissioners at the meeting to become informed through workshops and panels before making a decision.
“They are more than welcome to come speak,” Warren said, “but once you have an ordinance in place, it takes a lot to make it go in another direction.”
The vapor market size is about $2.5 billion this year, according to a report from Wells Fargo Securities.
The owner of The Grab Bag Co., a local e-cigarette store, said almost all people who come into his store and want to quit tobacco products do so.
“As far as business goes, every week, our sales percentage goes up,” said owner Jacob Jones. He said he doesn’t worry about a decline in sales.
UF political science sophomore Alfredo Ramirez, 19, said he hadn’t heard of the initiative but believes it’s a mistake.
“I think it is misguided, especially when it is done for ‘public health’ and the ‘public good’ when the short- and long-term health effects have not been drawn conclusively by the scientific community,” he said.
[A version of this story ran on page 8 on 11/19/2014]
