Pen-vapes. Man, we all thought we were pretty stealth at first with them. Taking puffs at baseball games, in restaurants, in airports, on trains, planes and buses. But guess what? It’s no secret that that us ganja tokers figured out how to put cannabis in e-cigarettes anymore. The cat is out of the bag (of sticky-icky).

Case and point: cops in Nassau, New York are testing e-cigarettes for pot when they find one of the devices on suspected drug criminals.



The news comes buried in a NBC New York piece about the rise in popularity of e-cigs and portable oil vaporizers. In it, Detective Lt. Kevin Smith, who heads up the narcotics unit of the Nassau County Police Department says he’s wise to the new trend and doesn’t like it. Not one bit. No siree.

“I care a lot about it,” Smith told the news outlet. He then continued with this gem of pure Reefer Madness: “For young people, marijuana is a gateway. The next thing you know they’re doing acid, molly, even heroin. I don’t like it that people are giving it a pass.”

Cops in Nassau who bust someone with drugs and find an e-cigarette have to send it in for testing. Smith didn’t say how successful that has been so far. Probably not very.

For those that don’t know, the pen-shaped devices can be filled with various types of hash oils from diluted C02-extracted oil to units that can vaporize chunks of wax and shatter oil. We here at Toke of the Town love them. We’ve got a Cloud personal vape and hardly go anywhere without it these days.

The rest of the article is pretty useless, frankly. It’s more of a scare piece than anything. They quote the New York Assemblywoman who sponsored legislation banning the sales of e-cigarettes for minors. We actually don’t have an issue with that one really, but that doesn’t mean her logic isn’t completely insane:

“Once you try electronic cigarettes, you can become hooked to them, move on to cigarettes and then move on to other drugs,” Rosenthal said.

So by the combined logic of Rosenthal and Smith, e-cigarettes lead to heroin use.