The New Hyde Park Village Board is the latest local government to consider restrictions on hookah bars and vape shops.
Already, the villages of Mineola, Great Neck, Great Neck Plaza and Great Neck Estates have approved legislation barring them from opening or restricting where they can be located.
In New Hyde Park’s case the law would define a “hookah bar” and “vape shop” as an adult use in the village code.
This would banish them to industrial zones and bar them from being within 2,000 feet of each other or within 800 feet of a school, church, park, playground, playing field or public library. And require a special-use permit to operate.
In doing so, the hookah bars and vape shops would join strip clubs, tattoo parlors, piercing salons and massage parlors.
Not included in the list are convenience stores, gas stations and drug stores that sell cigarettes as well as bars and restaurant that sell alcohol.
The question is why?
Are hookah bar and vape shop customers that much less savory than those who frequent bars and other establishments? If so, where’s the proof.
It certainly can’t be the products they offer.
Hookahs — water pipes that are used to smoke specially made tobacco — do carry serious health risks.
But the risk is no different than cigarettes to which 40 million Americans are addicted with an increasingly large percentage of users poor and uneducated.
Smoking is also the largest cause of preventable death in the United States with more than 480,000 people a year dying of smoking-related illnesses.
But like alcohol — another major source of preventable deaths — it is legal.
Vape shops, which are often lumped in with hookahs bars, use a different technology that delivers the nicotine found in cigarettes without the harmful tar and chemicals that cause cancer.
The Royal College of Physicians recently concluded that the e-cigarettes used by vape shops offer the best hope in a generation for people addicted to cigarettes.
This is not a universally shared conclusion.
The federal Centers for Disease Control maintain that e-cigarettes could be a gateway to that serious health hazard known as traditional cigarettes or that their vapor could turn out to have long-term health risks.
But even if that is true, why subject hookah bars and vape shops to regulation and not places that sell cigarettes and alcohol — something we strongly oppose.
As it is often said, this is a free country and that means people have the right to make bad choices with what they eat, what they smoke and what they drink.
A prohibition against fast-food stores and processed foods would probably have a greater benefit to the health of residents than restrictions on hookah bars and vape shops.
But what residents consume — and where they consume it — ought to be left up to residents.
