Want create site? Find Free WordPress Themes and plugins.

It’s going to be an interesting day the first time debates over electronic cigarettes are made in front of the Supreme Court. Not only will it be a defining day for the industry and possibly set the tone for the products for the next hundred years, but it will be another opportunity for Supreme Court Justices to show just how little they understand modern technology.

As covered on the news site Salon, the justices making many of the most broadly impacting decisions in the country appear to lack almost any understanding of modern technology. Although e-cigs aren’t being pushed in front of them yet, the tides seem to be trending towards an eventual Supreme Court decision over what qualifies as a tobacco product, what counts as smoking, and what constitutes a proven and supportable health claim about electronic cigarettes.

Consider 4 years after making a decision about whether Ebay constituted an invention or not, Justice Roberts (59) asked what the difference was between a pager and an email. With the oldest members of the Supreme Court reaching their late seventies and early eighties, it’s no wonder they can’t keep up with the times. And it appears that technology that can’t easily be analogized to help the members understand it tends to suffer in the end.

During the same debates over Ebay in 2006, Justice Kennedy (77), indicated that he was unfamiliar with patent troll as a term — a term which had been around for more than a decade. This was also surprising given the term’s legal implications.

This is all likely to spell trouble for electronic cigarettes. Supreme Court justices have so much trouble understanding new technology, they may be much more likely to simply consider them the same as smoking. And we know that opponents of the devices will certainly argue in favor of that view — even if it means intentionally misleading the justices or outright campaigning for ignorance.

Electronic cigarettes have been and continue to be extraordinarily disruptive to a wide range of traditional fields — including tobacco cigarettes, anti-smoking campaigning, cessation therapy, and even drug delivery. It’s only a matter of time before something forces a piece of the debate so far along that the Supreme Court becomes the arbiter. Let’s hope they have a better capacity to understand vaping than they do emails, cell phones, smart phones, GPS, solar power, software development, the internet, YouTube, search engines, video games, blogs, cable television, and the rotary telephone.