Vaping

Well. This is it. Today is the last day of the transition period. Tomorrow, May 20th, is the day when any non-notified vaping product can no longer be legally sold. Tomorrow is when the new legislation will really start to bite.

What will happen? There isn’t a straightforward answer to that.

Let’s look at what we, as a community of consumers have been able to enjoy.

Over the years, we have been able to enjoy tank sizes of up to a whopping 7-8ml. I once complained about the drive towards a particular subset. Was I right to do so? Maybe, maybe not. Let’s face it, the number of tanks on the market that are in excess of the ridiculous 2ml limit imposed aren’t generally going to be for new users, and rarely for the average Joe in the street that just wants an alternative to smoking.

I know, it’s been awhile since I last put finger to key. Far too much going on outside the twitter- & blog-spheres for me to put aside time to regularly post. Real life eh?

It seems the hypocritical vapers friend ASH have been up to their old tricks. Again. I’m not at all surprised, after all this time last year they said the 250,000 vapers that use 20mg/ml and above don’t matter. Fancy that!

VCU researchers aim to educate the public about the dangers of e-cigarettes and produce results that would compel tighter government regulation.

This little gem comes via (yet another) ridiculously pointless “study” into the ’effects of vaping’ by researchers at Virginia Commonwealth University. A study that, by the way, has taken two years and collaboration between faculty from VCU’s Biomedical Engineering and Biology departments.

The study is one in a series of seven projects by research universities across the United States that look into the potential health impacts of e-cigarettes on parts of the head, face and oral cavity. Each study is funded with part of a $2 million grant from the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research, part of the National Institutes of Health.

Regular readers will of course remember fondly that the EU held another “public consultation” recently, with the closing date of last month. This so-called public consultation was all about the taxation of manufactured tobacco products. Of course, being the EU and with the shiny new Tobacco Products Directive it just had to include the humble e-cigarette, despite (of course) neither the devices themselves, nor the liquid refills containing any actual manufactured tobacco at all - natch.

There’s a new study doing the rounds at the moment. Well, I say “study” but it isn’t really. It’s yet another survey, with participants selected from eight southeastern Connecticut high schools from spring 2015. “This study is the first systematic evaluation of the use of dripping among teens,” says the lead author Suchitra Krishnan-Sarin, professor of psychiatry at the Yale University School of Medicine.

That does beg the first question, why is a professor of psychiatry even looking at e-cigs? I suspect I already know the answer, as do most of my regular readers.

It must be something about this time of year for all the idiotic anti-vaping, anti-nicotine or anti-anything, to crawl out from under whatever rock they’ve been hiding under and spout a tranche of utter bullshit before scuttling back to their safe space, complete with a shiny new grant to cook up more bullshit.

Today saw the on-line release of three, well two, actually - one of them was an opinion piece - papers in the Journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics. It seems that AAP are ever so friendly with a certain rotund “professor” at UCSF, as one of these papers is his.

Every year, without fail people resolve themselves to doing something. “I plan to cut down or stop drinking/smoking”. “To lose weight”. “To go to a gym”. We’ve all made these resolutions and, 99 times out of 100, we never actually stick with them. Some do, and I’ve got nothing but admiration for those that can actually stick with a ‘New Year’s Resolution’, but most of us last maybe a week or two, sometimes a month before jacking it in.

Stan is an idiot.

There. I’ve said it diplomatically. For once. Never again.

Starting with e-cigs triples odds of starting cigarettes among college students; the evidence just keeps piling up

The latest of his blog titles screams at you that starting the use of an e-cig will most definitely lead the crazy youth of today to take up smoking. Y’see, Stan is a firm believer in the whole gateway theory. That theory goes that should a young, impressionable youth (up to the age of 30) be taken in by the kiddie orientated marketing of e-cigarettes by “Big Tobacco” then sooner or later that impressionable youth is going to progress to cigarettes. It is inevitable. Resistance is futile.

I guess it’s a case of “start as you mean to go on” regarding ‘scientific research’ on e-cigarettes. The very first paper I read in 2017 has this in its conclusion:

FDA is required to publicly display information about the quantities of chemicals in cigarettes and cigarette smoke in a way that is not misleading. This information, if paired with information from advertising or FDA disclosures indicating that e-cigarette aerosol contains lower amounts of those same chemicals, could have the unfortunate effect of encouraging smokers to become dual users or increase their existing dual use under the mistaken impression that they are significantly reducing their health risks.

Surveys. I’ve touched on the usual suspects upholding their own data as though it was the Holy Grail before. ASH is utterly remorseless when it comes to trumpeting their own data, usually for their own means, and they also heap scorn on data that contradicts their sacrosanct view of the populace. Typically, in the UK we have two primary sets of survey data on smoking - the ASH survey (hosted by YouGov) and of course the Smoking Toolkit Study.