With Colorado Governor Jared Polis considering jumping on the “ban vaping” bandwagon, and taking action to eliminate its use on college campuses, this is as good a time as any to weigh in on vaping at Colorado Mesa University. Is banning vaping a good move? Absolutely not.

This opinion piece is not encouraging vaping whatsoever. There are many cases nationwide that demonstrate the health risks of using vaping products. While most of the cases involve illegally acquired, “black market” marijuana cartridges, not all of them do. Also, it’s a new enough product that many more health problems are sure to arise from the habit.

Using vaping products, legally acquired or otherwise, is therefore dangerous. Placing oneself needlessly in danger is stupid.

I’m qualified to make such a statement because I needlessly harmed my own health for years with tobacco products. That too, was stupid. Fortunately, I was able to locate two brain cells and put them together for enough cumulative intelligence to quit.

Hopefully that’s enough to demonstrate that arguing against a ban is not the same as arguing in favor of vaping. If vaping is a bad idea, then why is it wrong to ban vaping products?

Three things: determined imbeciles, redundancy and freedom. Those are three very different things and each will be considered independently.

Though vaping isn’t wise, there are many individuals that will insist upon doing it even if they don’t have permission from Uncle Polis. That means more individuals will be likely to purchase the black market cartridges, which have already been identified as the biggest reason for severe health issues.

In other words, the ban would steer determined individuals straight to the worst option. Banning vaping because the black market cartridges are extremely dangerous, thus increasing sales of black market cartridges is slightly less intelligent than using vaping products.

The next argument against banning vaping on campus is the redundancy of such a notion. CMU is already a dry campus. Marijuana is currently a banned product here. It’s the black market marijuana cartridges that are the problem. Black market means “not legal,” and a synonym for that is “banned.”

So now there’s an argument to ban the banned products containing a banned substance. It feels somewhat like the double stamp to a triple stamp referenced in the movie Dumb and Dumber.

Finally, there’s freedom. This nation was founded on freedom and many individuals have fought and died to protect it. That includes the freedom to harm one’s health or make other choices some might consider stupid.

It’s just not a good idea to infringe on freedom in the name of protecting people from themselves. Whenever such a move is done, it makes it that much easier to take some more freedom next time.

There’s a saying “the road to hell is paved with good intentions.” Banning vaping products at CMU and other campuses might be founded on the good intention of protecting health, but protecting freedom is more important.

A stand should be made, even if it means protecting the ability for individuals to do something we may not personally believe in. Otherwise good intentions may slowly transform this country into hell instead of the beacon of freedom the founding fathers envisioned.

In conclusion, nobody should vape. However, that should be their decision based on an internal desire to be healthy; not a choice made by overzealous hall monitors in government. Vaping should not be banned at CMU or any other campus.