Confounding a Smoking Ban, and Bouncers

STEVEN KURUTZ
August 7, 2013
Yana Paskova for The New York Times

Bikini-topped women and sweaty guys in muscle tees were puffing away as they danced at a techno party hosted by Verboten, a roving nightclub. The surgeon general might have had a stroke.

One of the revelers, Howard Wang, 28, an information technology consultant from New Jersey, took a deep drag in apparent disregard for the law and decades of antismoking campaigns. But on closer inspection, he wasn’t puffing a Marlboro but a Bedford Slim, a brand of electronic cigarette marketed to the skinny-jean set.

“It’s the future,” said Mr. Wang, who does not classify himself as a smoker. “It’s like when you watch ‘Tron’ and they’re smoking something like this.”

Ten years after Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg banned smoking in public places, it is returning to the city’s bars, restaurants and workplaces, thanks to the growing popularity of e-cigarettes.

They can be spotted wherever traditional cigarettes had been outlawed. Tattooed Web designers and writers chain-smoke at their desks at the Vice offices in Williamsburg. Models inhale at No. 8, a Chelsea lounge, as they order Champagne. Leonardo DiCaprio has been spotted smoking an e-cigarette at several clubs and while riding a Citi Bike in SoHo.

“I’ve been smoking where I want and when I want,” said Sidney Prawatyotin, 36, a publicist who said that he had a pack-a-day, two-decade smoking habit before switching to e-cigarettes during New York Fashion Week last fall. “I no longer take smoke breaks from work. I no longer stink like tobacco.”

Manufacturers suggest that e-cigarettes are safer than their conventional counterparts and cheaper because they can last longer and are reusable; critics, however, say they glorify smoking and turn back the clock on public health advances.

Jenny Haliski, a spokeswoman for the Food and Drug Administration, said that although the agency does not regulate the devices, it wants to extend its authority to other categories of tobacco products, like e-cigarettes. “Further research is needed to assess the potential public health benefits and risks of electronic cigarettes and other novel tobacco products,” she said.

E-cigarettes are also rekindling old turf battles and raising new etiquette questions. How do you give the stink eye to smokers and demand they stub out a cigarette when there’s no flame?
E-CIGARETTES, which use a nicotine solution instead of tobacco and emit a smokelike water vapor, are already popular in Asia and Europe but are only now catching on in the land of the Marlboro Man. One major draw is that they allow smokers to indulge in places where their habit had been circumscribed or outlawed.

Recent converts include Lewis Lapham, the 78-year-old editor and irrepressible smoker, who once lost a public bet to Ralph Nader that he could give up cigarettes (he lasted five hours). In April, Mr. Lapham began smoking e-cigarettes, or “vaping” as it’s sometimes called, as a way to come in from the cold, literally and figuratively.

“For 10 years, I’ve been feeling like a pariah,” said Mr. Lapham, who has been smoking since the days when four out of five doctors recommended Lucky Strikes. “If I want to smoke, I’ve got to go outside or stand against a highway billboard.”

Now he smokes inside the offices of Lapham’s Quarterly near Union Square without fear of eviction or the inconvenience of interrupting work. “I can get through the whole office day, instead of having to go outside,” said Mr. Lapham, who switches between two brands, Blu and V2.

But he is an outlier among so-called vapers; it’s the young who have been the early adopters and the target of intense marketing.

NJOY, a leading maker in the United States whose investors include the tech entrepreneur Sean Parker, has aggressively courted younger smokers and trendsetters. The company, based in Scottsdale, Ariz., tapped Courtney Love, a longtime chain-smoker, to star in an online commercial, in which she smokes at the symphony. It also held a party for NJOY King, a new disposable model, at the Jane Hotel, the West Village hot spot, last December.

Bedford Slims, which bills itself as “Brooklyn’s Vapourette,” had set up a booth at the Verboten party, and its chief executive was passing out thin stainless-steel samples like candy.

Smarty Q, based in England, makes a matte-back model that was until recently sold at the fashionable boutique Colette in Paris. (“We’re trying to bring back the chic attitude, the sexiness in smoking,” said the chief executive, Olivier Girard.)

What better way to spread the word than to have tastemakers acting as unpaid ambassadors in the city’s restaurants, bars and clubs?

Some clubs go so far as to encourage vaping. Mark Birnbaum, a co-owner of the EMM Group, which operates SL, Finale and other high-wattage nightclubs, says it keeps customers from leaving. “It’s hard enough for us to get them in,” he said. “Then you’re forcing them out on the street to smoke.”

Mr. Birnbaum, who is also an investor in NJOY, even encourages restroom attendants to sell e-cigarettes alongside breath mints and chewing gum.

Others take a more laissez-faire attitude. “Our policy is to tolerate them, as long as no one complains about it,” said Benjamin Maisani, a co-owner of Eastern Bloc and Bedlam in the East Village, who is opening a new bar in Hell’s Kitchen this fall.

Similarly, e-smoking barely raises an eyebrow at Le Baron, a louche lounge in Chinatown run by French owners.

But although e-cigarettes “are not covered under any current policies, and can be legally used in bars and restaurants,” said Samantha Levine, a spokeswoman for Mr. Bloomberg, some places have discouraged their use or banned them outright.

Leah Rausch, who presides over the lobby of the Ace Hotel in Manhattan, said the management does not allow e-cigarettes because they might be a gateway to breaking the law. “People see them and might light up a real cigarette,” she said.

Still, Ms. Rausch wasn’t sure if the ban was informal or an official hotel policy. She asked a desk clerk, who wasn’t sure, either, but added, “I know Leonardo DiCaprio gets away with it when he’s here.”

The growing popularity of e-cigarettes is also creating headaches for club security personnel, who have spent the last decade watching for smoke with the eagle-eyed focus of someone manning a fire tower. In a dim club, it is hard to tell the difference between a Marlboro and an NJOY King, which is designed to mimic a real cigarette, from the cherry-red tip to the paper butt.

Goldin Martinez, who works security at Jimmy, the rooftop bar at the James New York Hotel in SoHo, among other places, recalled a recent run-in with a patron he mistakenly singled out for smoking. He’s still annoyed over the encounter. “It gives the place a bad image,” he said. “People think, ‘What’s up with the staff here?’ ”

Still, the mistake happens enough that e-smokers have developed a kind of hand gesture to ward off the cigarette police. The e-smoker will “put the cigarette to their forehead,” Mr. Birnbaum said. “You realize either the person is a psycho or they’re smoking an e-cigarette.”

Andrew Beaver, chief marketing officer for NJOY, likened smoking e-cigarettes to the early days of hands-free Bluetooth conversations: what looks strange now will soon appear normal.

But for now, e-smokers like Mr. Prawatyotin feel like pioneers. “I always feel like I’m the only one vaporing,” he said. That may explain why many e-smokers still huddle on the sidewalk, like nicotine exiles.

On a recent Saturday night in the meatpacking district, a group of 20-somethings took a smoke break outside Bagatelle on Little West 12th Street. Among them was Robert Sasson, 23, who was taking leisurely puffs on a Logic e-cigarette.

Why not stay at the table and smoke during dinner? Isn’t that part of the appeal of e-cigarettes?

Mr. Sasson took a drag and delivered a lecture on smoking etiquette that would no doubt please the mayor.

“Even though it’s water vapor, it’s just not proper to smoke in a restaurant,” he said. “It’s disgusting. You should step outside like any cigarette.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: August 8, 2013
An earlier version of this article misspelled the surname of a spokeswoman for the Food and Drug Administration. She is Jenny Haliski, not Halinski.