E-Cigarettes have opened up a new battleground in the world of the nanny state, and I for one am finding it hilarious as political parties seem incapable of coming up with a coherent policy on e-cigs that isn’t a complete contradiction to themselves.

The Greens like to think of themselves as ‘progressive’, informed, and tolerant, but their efforts to restrict e-cigs shows them to be ‘repressive’, ignorant, and utterly intolerant of any choices they would not have made for themselves.

Patrick Hannaford nails the hypocrisy beautifully in his Spectator article:

The Greens should be commended for their stated commitment to an evidence-based approach. But harm reduction has long been the centrepiece of the Greens’ drug policy, and yet they have aggressively opposed e-cigarettes, despite a Public Health England report finding that e-cigarettes are 95 percent safer than smoking.

NSW Greens MP Jeremy Buckingham made headlines in 2015 when he operated an e-cigarette in the upper house chamber of the NSW Parliament. The stunt was an attempt to drum up support for tougher laws, with the party stating, “The Greens believe e-cigarettes should be treated like real cigarettes, with the same regulations, restrictions and prohibitions.”

Read the article to enjoy the authors take-down of their ‘evidence based policy’ furphy.

It will come as no surprise to readers of this blog that I am of the view that people should be free to smoke, or not smoke, whatever they jolly well please. But even putting that aside for a moment, even accepting the idea that the government should be telling us what we can an cannot have, and be protecting us ‘from ourselves’, a ban on e-cigs still makes no sense.

There is not yet enough reliable data to be certain about whether e-cigarettes are safe, or harmful, but early indications are that they’re certainly going to be less harmful than the cigarettes that many people are using them to replace, so that’s a net-positive for the public health nannies. And there’s certainly plenty of data that suggests that normal cigarettes are very harmful (although not as harmful as the public health lobby would have you believe… but that’s a post for another time), so what’s the problem here?

Technology… real progress, is doing what politics could not… it’s getting people to voluntarily and willingly change their behaviors for better ‘public health’ outcomes. And that is the real problem. It’s not a political answer, therefore the politicians can’t accept it, as it puts them on the sidelines and not in the lime-light.

The Greens are terrified of the relevance deficit which would befall them if real progress were to render them… irrelevant. Their number one priority isn’t policy outcomes or improved public health… like every political party their number one priority is to consolidate more power and more money into the party. Everything else is just a vehicle by which to achieve that aim. And when technology achieves what their policies could not, then this is a problem, a threat, and certainly not a cause for celebration.

So I’m rather enjoying the show as I’m watching the Greens tie them up in knots with ‘drugs yes, e-cigs no’, ‘harm reduction yes… unless it’s tobacco harm reduction… in which case… no’… and of course in the process they’re alienating a large portion of their younger ‘hip’ support base who happen to be very in to vaping and e-cigarettes.

And in the end they’re doomed to failure, because as someone somewhere once said:

You can’t stop progress.

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