“Harm reduction for tobacco is essential in our world,” says Jerry Otero. “So many of the people that I work with smoke cigarettes.”
Otero has been practicing harm reduction for over two decades with people who use banned drugs and face many challenges, like homelessness, in New York City.
He’s currently the manager of the Drug User Health Hub at St. Ann’s Corner of Harm Reduction. The pioneering nonprofit recently invited me to host a vaping group there, when some other harm reduction organizations have been cagier on tobacco harm reduction.
Otero is unapologetic in his support. “People who oppose it are full of shit,” he says in the Filter video above. “The evidence is in. Vaping is much less harmful than smoking.”
He knows this firsthand, having smoked cigarettes from a young age, then quit for 20 years, then started up again. “Life happens,” he reflects.
But over 10 years ago, he bought a vape. “I literally stopped smoking the next day.”
“I love nicotine,” Otero says. “It’s a stimulant so it gives you a boost, but it also helps you relax. It levels you out in some kind of way. Everybody’s brain is a little different and needs some tweaking. The field of harm reduction accepts and celebrates that.”
“We don’t need more prohibition—what we need is good, honest information, so that we can make informed choices.”
Otero has become something of a connoisseur of vaping, now using a mod device and buying organically produced e-liquid with “cherry, vanilla and woody flavors,” though he’s not averse to the odd mango-flavored disposable.
But it’s the ability of vapes to help the marginalized people he works with that excites him the most.
Of all the drugs, “cigarettes are the hardest one to put down,” he says. When vapes can safely replicate not only the nicotine, but the inhalation, hand-to-mouth action and social aspects of smoking, he now encourages others to consider switching.
“Find a vape that you like and can afford and put down the cigarettes,” is his advice.
To policymakers, as with all drugs, his message is: “We don’t need more prohibition—what we need is good, honest information, so that we can make informed choices.”
That means putting aside “blind ideology” to “get with the facts.”
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