The above photo, which depicts a college-aged-looking dude “vaping” on a Metro train, was taken and tweeted this morning. At first glance, you may think “oh hell no, why doesn’t a WMATA employee yell at him?” That’s because vaping on Metro, while inconceivably annoying to your fellow Metro riders, isn’t completely banned. Actually, the rule on whether you can vape—smoking an electronic cigarette that’s supposedly less harmful to you and those around you—on Metro is rather complicated and pretty murky.

The issue of whether or not you can vape on Metrorail first popped up as the subject of a column by Washington Post’s John Kelly. He, too, encountered someone vaping on Metro and was baffled as to why it was happening and no one stopped it:

In the blessedly cigarette-free Metro, it was jarring to see the woman “vape.” (That’s the term the e-cig community has adopted for what they do.) People are still figuring out how to treat the devices. The Department of Transportation said it was going to ban them on airline flights and then decided to defer to individual airlines. In Hawaii, the buses of the Oahu Transit Services implemented a ban May 1.

But on Metrorail, it depends, specifically, where you are as to whether you can vape. “It depends on the law in the jurisdiction,” Metro spokesman Dan Stessel tells DCist, “just like fines for fare evasion, prohibition on eating/drinking, etc.” In Maryland, for example, the law states that “smoking, including use of e-cigarettes prohibited on MARC commuter rail system trains,” but smoking e-cigarettes in public places isn’t outlawed, though there is a bill on the table to do so.

In Virginia, the state’s smoking ban doesn’t apply to e-cigarettes, meaning you can chief away on Metro trails rolling through the state (it does, however, apply to Virginia Railway Express trains).

D.C., however, is still trying to figure out how to deal with e-cigarettes. There’s currently no laws banning e-cigarettes indoors, like other tobacco products. There was a bill on the table to ban e-cigarettes indoors, but it, uh, went up in smoke.

So that makes vaping—the oral equivalent of sporting a bad goatee or wearing a fedora (that is, if you’re not in a ska band)—in Metrorail trains a complicated issues. It depends on the local laws of where you are in the Metro system. Nonetheless, vaping is annoying and you shouldn’t do it indoors (or at music venues) anyway.

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