Holy shit, common sense, way to make an appearance!

Holy shit, common sense, way to make an appearance — hell hath officially frozen over …

Through whatever uncharacteristic reasoning that briefly struck the New York court system earlier this week (this is the same state that says people are being murdered in New York because of legal weed in Colorado and tried to ban large sodas once), a judge has ruled that, under law, vapers are not the same as smokers. Kind of …

In this particular case, a man by the name of Shawn Thomas was arrested after being seen puffing the sickest of clouds from his vape pen on a subway platform, an area where smoking anything is justifiably banned. At the end of 2013, the city’s Smoke Free Air act was amended to include e-cigarettes — an unfounded move that most states (including Colorado) are mimicking in their own policies.

Unfortunately for the cops, they charged him under state law, which doesn’t specifically pertain to  anything but actual cigarettes. After challenging the charge in court, the judge agreed that vaping isn’t smoking per the current wording.

Because, it’s not … there really weren’t a ton of branches to climb to get to the obvious result.

“‘Smoking’ means the burning of a lighted cigar, cigarette, pipe or any other matter or substance which contains tobacco,” the ruling reads. “An electronic cigarette neither burns nor contains tobacco. Instead, the use of such a device, which is commonly referred to as ‘vaping,’ involves ‘the inhalation of vapourized e-cigarette liquid consisting of water, nicotine, a base of propylene glycol or vegetable glycerin and occasionally, flavouring.’ This does not fit within the definition of ‘smoking’ under the law.”

The ruling isn’t a huge win for the vaping community, however, because the state is already in the process of changing the terminology to include e-cigarettes and vape pens. Most areas that are following the trend often lump everything together even though handheld vaping is considered to be almost 95 percent safer, emits less formaldehyde than previous studies implied and helps tens of thousands to kick their smoking addictions annually. But who really wants that kind of logic in the world anyways, right?

It's not surprising though, to see an industry that was hardly even a thing up until a few years ago get pushbacks from lawmakers. Once you start pulling in numbers — like the $3.5 billion vaping does — there tends to be certain types that either want a piece of the money action or would rather see companies fail because of the cut-ins to other profits. Likewise, building laws like the ones challenging the vaping industry are arguably never about the safety of Americans. We shouldn't ever believe that laws are ever passed because of something as unprofitable as "safety."

This isn't the biggest victory for the vaping community, but hey, it's a start … 'Merica.