President Donald Trump may have done the right thing by not knowing. Seriously. 

On Sunday, it was announced that Trump was backing off of the flavored vape ban he proposed in September. An anonymous senior official at the White House told The Washington Post that the move to pull back on the ban was due to Trump’s lack of knowledge on the subject as a whole. 

“He didn’t know much about the issue and was just doing it for Melania and Ivanka,” the senior official said. 

As I’ve said in the past, moving forward on this ban would’ve been an enormous double standard when compared to the regulation of tobacco cigarettes. We have decades of research and evidence that points to the dangers of cigarettes while vaping is still relatively new to the scene. Not to forget that it was the addition of vitamin E acetate in THC vapes that were causing the deaths by vaping all over the news this summer, not nicotine vapes. 

Because vaping is new, we don’t know a lot of the side effects in the long term and further research needs to be done before we can draw any major conclusions that warrant a ban on flavored vapes. In this sense, Trump did the right thing by acknowledging the lack of concrete knowledge. 

Is vaping good for you? Absolutely not, but it may be safer than cigarettes. In fact, if you aren’t currently smoking cigarettes, there’s no reason for you to ever start vaping.  

I started vaping because I quit cigarettes. My lungs feel about five pounds lighter than they did when I smoked cigs. I no longer wake up coughing up god knows what. I go on runs now and my breath no longer smells like a cat died. 

I may not have needed flavored vapes to keep me off of cigs, but it’s certainly more enjoyable.

Contact Jarett Theberge at [email protected].