Alachua County Commissioner Robert “Hutch” Hutchinson has spoken positively of a draft ordinance on e-cigarettes the County Commission is considering that would prohibit their sale to minors, ban people from using them in nonsmoking areas, and require they be kept behind the counter wherever they are sold.
In a video he posted to Facebook on Thursday, he decided to try one for himself. The post is titled ‘The Virgin Toker: Sacrificing health for experience.’
At the start of the short video, which clocks in at 1 minute and 13 seconds, he says there are a lot of questions he and others have about e-cigarettes so he bought one along with some zero-nicotine, mango-flavored fluid in order to give it a shot.
He then announces he’s going to take “my very first toke of this stuff” and takes a puff.
“Tastes like mango,” he concludes after exhaling the water vapor.
“I didn’t inhale. I’ve smoked less than a pack of cigarettes in my entire life and most of that was in a pool hall in eighth grade, so I’m not about to start,” he says.
Hutchinson ends the video by saying it was an interesting experience and inviting anyone interested in trying the e-cigarette to give him a call.
He told The Sun if he’s going to support regulating e-cigarettes he wanted to at least try them first. He didn’t realize you could buy zero-nicotine fluid for e-cigarettes until he went out to buy one, and he also found out you can buy flavors specific to certain cigarette brands depending on what kind you smoke or used to smoke.
“It’s pretty interesting technology,” he said.
As far as he can tell from talking to clerks at local gas stations and stores, they seem to be treating them like cigarettes and refusing to sell them to minors even though e-cigarettes aren’t kept behind the counter like tobacco cigarettes are.
One thing that’s better about an e-cigarette is it doesn’t give off any vapor unless someone is actively using it, he said, whereas a smoker could be holding a cigarette or could perch it in an ashtray and it would still give off secondhand smoke.