Cleveland Bans E-Cigarette Smoking

The county’s smoking rates had fallen to less than 19 percent of residents in Cleveland in 2007. But that rate is back up to about 24 percent. And in some Cleveland neighborhoods, more than 30 percent of adults smoke.

For Cleveland City Councilman Joe Cimperman, the statistics are a call to action.

“Our goal is to change the culture of smoking in Cleveland and if people have a problem with that than that’s good,” Cimperman says. “People should have a problem with people dying too soon from diseases like emphysema and lung cancer.”

The city had already banned cigarette smoking in publicly-owned outdoor areas such as parks, community gardens, and within 150 feet of public places like City Hall and the convention center. Now, that law extends to e-cigarettes.

Executives in the e-cigarette industry have said the product can help people quite tobacco, but Cuyahoga County’s Health Commissioner Terry Allan says there’s no definitive proof and disagrees.

Instead, Allan says, e-cigarettes are another way to become addicted to nicotine.

“Public health people see e-cigarettes as a renormalization of tobacco use. It’s a tobacco product,” Allans says. “And we consider it a tobacco product.”

Other cities that have banned smoking e-cigarettes include New York and Chicago. And, closer to home, Lakewood banned the sale of e-cigarettes to minors earlier this summer.