General

Back in August I had the distinct pleasure of meeting Nicky from the Harrow Stop Smoking Service to talk about all things vaping. Talking about the devices, reasons for using them, differences, experiences and all that. It was a really good positive meeting and could quite easily have gone on for far longer than the time allotted.

The recent event was a heavily condensed version of that meeting with a guest speaker, Jessica Harding and myself. It was publicised as a ‘Stop Smoking Service Annual Update Meeting’ which would include the latest information on vaping, with an emphasis on the PHE Review. This post will include commentary from Jessica along with both our thoughts and impressions on the event and those who attended.

Why oh why are there no end of ’experts’ claiming all sorts of utter bunkem when it comes to vaping? I’m reminded of the looney scientologist that on occasion goes on a rampage against us vapers. I’m not sure why these morons do this kind of thing, although I did notice that in the looney scientologists case he had just released a book. No I haven’t read it and I have no intentions to.

With the fun and games over in Warsaw at the moment with the Global Forum on Nicotine,things have been relatively quiet on the anti or scaremongering front, but a couple of articles did catch my eye, one of which I’m a little hesitant to talk about simply because the underlying subject has such a wide range of opinions from the vaping community.

The first of these articles or stories would be this one:

WHO says, sit down. WHO says, stop smoking. WHO says, vaping is bad. Vaping is good.

They haven’t actually said the last one and that’s because they seem to think that vapour products are made from tobacco. Idiots. “We don’t know what’s in them” they cry. “It’s just another addiction”. Oh my word.

Today is of course “World No Tobacco Day 2015” and there has been an awful lot of spiel emanating from the WHO twitter feed as you would expect when they consider tobacco to be the world’s most lethal pandemic. Uh huh. A pandemic is an epidemic of infectious disease that has spread through human populations across a large-scale, maybe worldwide. Thing is, last time I checked tobacco is not infectious. Dependence building maybe, but not infectious. You can’t catch tobacco through the ’normal’ disease vectors.

“When you tell somebody somethin’, it depends on what part of the country you’re standin’ in… as to just how dumb you are.”

Nobody could say that except Burt Reynolds, but we know a few folks that are dumb no matter what part of the country they are in.

Good grief. Somebody really doesn’t like smoking do they? Let me see, out of the God knows how many films I’ve watched since the age of about 13, there must have been hundreds of scenes that included someone either sparking up a ciggie, cigar or just generally having a ball tooting on one. Do I find that disturbing in any way shape or form? No siree.

For the first time in a long time, I actually spent some me time last night and watched some actual live broadcast television. Nothing in particular, just had the TV on and channel hopped for a while before settling in with a beer or three.

As I was watching “live TV” on my Sky box and not a recorded show I endured the adverts that litter the shows and it got me thinking, as stuff often does. What makes a good advert?

Advocacy. Such an interesting concept isn’t it? You have one group of folks saying one thing, and another group saying the opposite. Before social media there were unending group meetings, PR, debates and all that jazz. True it was much slower to get the points across, but that didn’t matter in the grand scheme of things as it gave each side a lot of time to come up with something ‘better’. Not to mention getting the face time to get the point across.

Within the realms of the so-called ‘public health’ arena, there is always an agenda. More often than not, those agendas may actually prove to be beneficial to the actual public. But that’s in terms of actual medical professionals, the boots on the ground. When it comes to the other entities claiming ‘public health’ agendas. Not so much.

For years, smokers have been a target for a whole variety of campaigns to try to get them to quit smoking, but the smokers weren’t the original target. When it became clear that smoking was actually causing a relatively substantial amount of harm, those in gubmint decided to try to do something about smoking. Getting folks to cut down or give up the habit entirely seemed to be the whole idea. Anti-smoking. Cue a myriad of campaigns aimed at informing the public of the dangers of smoking. To be fair, the initial thrust did have a pretty big impact as the general public didn’t really know what potential harms smoking caused. Well and good, the Anti campaign worked, smoking rates dropped, uptake dropped. But not significantly.

Well come on in and have a seat folks we need to have a little chat. All the drinks are on the counter over there, sorry Dave, no home-brew cider, not after the last time.

This post is going to take a slightly different approach to my usual style, but first I’ve said this before and it seems I must needs say it again:

I have no affiliation with, nor do I work or receive payment from any vaping business or advocacy group.

This is definitely a recurring theme recently isn’t it. First there was “stillblowingsmoke vs notblowingsmoke” then we had Vox spreading the same drivel. Wired picked up the story, as did many others. All in all, the public are reacting to what those in Public Health are trying to tell them, but not in the way you’d think.

I am of course talking about TobaccoFreeCA who really don’t seem to know quite what to say. For one, being a “Tobacco Free” entity you’d expect them to be fully behind whatever the delightful Department of Public Health says about smoking, and by extension vaping. Not quite.