The “Indoor E-Cigarette Ban Act,” sponsored by Student Senator Zack King, is currently working its way through our student government and seeks to ban e-cigs indoors on campus.

If you’re not familiar with e-cigs, they work essentially the same as a fog machine. Both devices heat up a solution, creating a vapor. The difference is that e-cig users inhale the vapor, which usually contains nicotine. “Vaping,” as it’s called, allows users to get a hit of nicotine sans tobacco.

Using e-cigs indoors subjects unwilling participants to the vapor they produce. But the justifications for the ban are, at best, laughably unscientific, and at worst, intentionally misleading.

The bill starts with the premise, “The use of E-Cigarettes and other smoke and vapor producing devices is currently unregulated at NCSU, particularly indoors.” Smoke producing devices are regulated. You can’t smoke a cigarette, cigar or pipe indoors.

E-cigarettes don’t produce smoke. Smoke is a product of combustion, and there’s no combustion with e-cigs. Including the term “smoke” is unnecessary, and an apparent attempt to conflate something widely understood to be harmful — tobacco smoke — with e-cigarettes.

The language of the bill isn’t just misleading — it’s also vague. The bill’s stated aim is “that the use of E-Cigarettes and other smoke and vapor-producing devices be banned in all indoor areas on campus at NCSU.”

In addition to e-cigs and fog machines, medicinal inhalers and boiling water also produce vapor, although I doubt it’s King’s intent to put asthmatics at risk, or to ban making coffee or ramen noodles.

If the Student Senate passes the e-cig ban, its implementation would be up to the university committee of Student Health Services, which does have the authority to “interpret for the university community the approved policies, regulations and practices” and would likely enforce the resolution’s intent regardless of its vague wording.

Student politicians should, however, take this opportunity to learn a crucial lesson if they have future political aspirations: Poorly written bills open the door to unintended, and often undesirable, consequences.

The bill jumps the rails, however, in this line: “Nicotine is proven to be both an addictive substance and a carcinogen.”

According to the American Cancer Society’s website, “Many people mistakenly think that nicotine is the substance in tobacco that causes cancer. This belief may cause some people to avoid using nicotine replacement therapy when trying to quit. Nicotine is what helps get (and keep) people addicted to tobacco, but other substances in tobacco cause cancer.”

Perhaps King knows something the American Cancer Society doesn’t.

More likely, though, is that he’s been skimming headlines like this one from The Motley Fool: “Can You Guess What Cancer-Causing Agent Researchers Just Found in Electronic Cigarettes?”

The article references a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine that found that certain e-cig devices, when run at high voltage settings, produce “formaldehyde-releasing agents.” Formaldehyde, unlike nicotine, is proven to be a carcinogen.

The problem is, as New York Times columnist Joe Nocera pointed out, “this conclusion is highly misleading. People don’t vape at a high voltage because it causes a horrible taste.” Nocera points to human studies showing that even at voltages lower than the ones tested in the NEJM study, “people simply couldn’t inhale; the taste was unbearable.”

And the articles overlooked a critical finding from the NEJM study: At normal voltages, no formaldehyde-releasing agents were detected. Unfortunately, headlines like “Can You Guess What Cancer-Causing Agent Researchers Just Found Not To Be Present In Electronic Cigarettes?” don’t quite draw in readers like their sensationalist counterparts.

Nocera reported that when made aware of the headlines, “David Peyton, one of the study’s authors, … insisted that the study had been mischaracterized.” Stepping back from the strong wording of the letter to the NEJM reporting the study, Peyton said, “It is exceedingly frustrating to me that we are being associated with saying that e-cigarettes are more dangerous than cigarettes. That is a fact not in evidence.”

Published in the journal Inhalation Toxicology, a 2012 study titled, “Comparison of the effects of e-cigarette vapor and cigarette smoke on indoor air quality,” found “no apparent risk to human health from e-cigarette emissions.”

The bill also claims that “studies have shown higher absorption rates for individuals with second-hand exposure to vapor and other forms of smoke.”

It’s unclear what “higher absorption rates” the bill is referencing, although it appears to be another attempt to associate tobacco smoke and e-cigarette vapor by using research about second-hand cigarette smoke as evidence that second-hand vapor is harmful.

Research into the effects of second-hand vapor is limited, but a 2014 study published in the Oxford Journal of Nicotine & Tobacco Research concluded that indoor e-cigarette use “may involuntarily expose non-users to nicotine but not to toxic tobacco-specific combustion products.” It should be noted, however, the study found levels of nicotine exposure to be 10 times higher in tobacco cigarettes than in e-cigs.

The Indoor E-Cig Ban Act is presented as a public health measure, and while the long-term health effects of e-cig vapor aren’t fully known, what research we do have doesn’t support the claims presented in the bill.

Research does, however, seem to suggest that e-cig use may be significantly less harmful than tobacco use, and attempts by politicians — student or otherwise — to equate the potential harms of vaping with the proven harms of tobacco could dissuade smokers from trying e-cigs as an alternative.

Even if e-cigarettes are a less harmful alternative to smoking, other students, faculty and staff may not want to be exposed to users’ vapor. Instead of trying to ban indoor use through legislation, however, Student Government should look for a more creative solution.

Research in the field of behavioral economics has shown that social pressure exerts great influence on people’s behavior. In one study, researchers found that when subjects see their electric bills compared with the neighborhood average, those using more power scaled back their consumption.

Reducing indoor e-cig use could be as simple as an awareness campaign showing e-cig users that other vapors are conscientious about when and where they vape, or reminders that being subjected to e-cig vapor is unpleasant to non-users.

This type of social pressure could be particularly effective on a college campus, where students often give their social interactions just as much weight as their academic pursuits.

And unlike the Indoor E-Cig Ban Act, there’d be no need for misinformation, fear-mongering or unscientific claims.