Vapers attack poor thinking
Vapers refuse to roll over and accept the stupidity of supposed experts and legislators
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by Dave Cross
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Blasting News has lambasted a couple of leading anti-vaping campaigners this week. Firstly they attacked pharma-funded Stanton Glantz in California and then they turned on the UK’s Martin McKee. “Despite overwhelming evidence of e-cigarettes being at least 95% safer than cigarettes,” they write, “public manipulation continues.” They reported that when confronted on radio to state what the most dangerous thing about vaping is, he replied: "They keep people smoking cigarettes."
Like McKee, Glantz will lie and then continue repeating the lie in order to give it traction – and this extends to his funding. On POTV, we covered how he received payments from a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson. He also pockets $6.61 million a year from the National Institutes of Health to spread his ideologically driven campaign. But when asked, he replies: “I've never taken a penny from any drug company.” At best this is a disingenuous rejoinder.
Blasting News continues: “These tobacco control groups have a vested interest in keeping smokers unaware of the benefits of e-cigarettes and the public needs to question motives of any group hiding behind children and misstating facts, including the Centers for Disease Control & politician Tom Frieden.”
It’s not just vapers attacking nonsense online; the vaping community is fighting back in Kentucky. Last week, Ashland city commission set the wheels in motion to ban e-cigarette use inside public places. It was driven by the mayor Chuck Charles’s laughable concern for the public’s health: “When you’ve got a chemical that’s used in *anti-freeze, it doesn’t take much to realize it’s harmful.”
Vaper and storeowner Melissa Goodwin responded to Charles’ hysterical outpourings: “People are afraid of what they don’t understand. Legislation should come down to the burden of proof, just like in court.” Vapers and vape shop owners campaigned against the moves and achieved a small victory with stores being allowed to continue offering samples and trials.
Jerry Goodwin, a fellow ecig entrepreneur, added: “We’re a big, tight-knit group. We’re going to push. The city’s going to do what they want to do, but we have several national advocacy groups that will be coming to our aid. I think the controversy’s a little bit bigger than what they were expecting.”
Many vapers in the UK are ready to throw in the towel following the detrimental preliminary ruling from the EU courts last month, but if they do the likes of Glantz and Ashland’s mayor win. If vapers give up the fight then stupidity and ignorance wins.
*PG is used in antifreeze. Unfortunately for Chuck, it is used in non-toxic antifreeze and it is the quantity of a toxin that makes it dangerous – not simply its presence. Tinned tuna has traces of lead (highly toxic in larger doses), we wonder if Charles will campaign to have that banned from his town too?
Photo Credit:
Fist image: Vaping Underground http://vapingunderground.com/
Dave Cross
Journalist at POTVDave is a freelance writer; with articles on music, motorbikes, football, pop-science, vaping and tobacco harm reduction in Sounds, Melody Maker, UBG, AWoL, Bike, When Saturday Comes, Vape News Magazine, and syndicated across the Johnston Press group. He was published in an anthology of “Greatest Football Writing”, but still believes this was a mistake. Dave contributes sketches to comedy shows and used to co-host a radio sketch show. He’s worked with numerous vape companies to develop content for their websites.
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