Does Smoking Bans in Public Housing Include E-Cigarettes?

On Wednesday, Castro announced that Julián Castro, secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, issued an order requiring the nation’s 3,100 public housing agencies to implement smoke-free policies for all indoor residential units within the next 18 months. In effect, by the end of 2018, smoking would be banned in 940,000 public housing units nationwide.

The policy is mainly intended to protect non-smoking tenants from the environmental harms of so-called secondhand smoke. These clean-air tenant regulations also include one notable acknowledgment: “At this time, research on electronic cigarettes is still developing and lacks a clear consensus when compared with the effects of cigarettes and other tobacco products.”

With that statement, HUD distinguished between traditional combustible cigarettes and electronic cigarettes, banning the former while, at least for now, allowing the latter. This deserves praise as the only truly reasonable policy. Based on all research available so far, electronic cigarettes are far less harmful to both users and bystanders than combustible tobacco products, so grouping the two together makes no sense from a public health perspective.

However, that has not stopped the Food and Drug Administration from oddly treating electronic cigarettes as a “tobacco” product, even though they do not contain tobacco. In fact, current FDA policy is even harsher on electronic cigarettes than on traditional cigarettes. Unless Congress or a new administration takes action to repeal or revise the deeming rule, the vast majority of vaping products may have to be removed from the market.

Keeping this in mind, it is useful to remain somewhat skeptical about HUD’s announcement (before e-cigarettes are eventually banned as well). In particular, some details in the rule may foreshadow what is to come. For example, the rule states that public housing agencies “may exercise their discretion to include a prohibition on electronic cigarettes in their respective smoke-free policies if they determine such a ban to be beneficial.” What exactly counts as beneficial, however, is not defined.