2016/04

Ban. It is such a short, yet thoroughly Orwellian word. In short, ban is a simple word for prohibition. Prohibition has been attempted on numerous occasions and frankly, it never does turn out well.

Why do I want to talk about bans? Well there are a number of reasons actually, but the one that stuck in my craw was the utter insanity currently proposed by Nottinghamshire County Council. Just recently a friend asked me for some advice on countering, or at least informing a university smoke-free policy and it got me thinking.

It isn’t particularly uncommon for government agencies to bend the truth. What is thoroughly disingenuous is how they decide to bend the truth. If you’ve been paying attention, you’ll have noticed a bit of a trend. Wherever the use of e-cigarettes is prevalent, the overall combustible use declines. It is kind of hard to see how one equals the other, but that is exactly what the CDC have done.

Overall tobacco use by middle and high school students has not changed since 2011, according to new data published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) Center for Tobacco Products in today’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR).

I know. I’ve been terribly shoddy at posting recently. Fact of the matter is, work has been a royal pain and has subsequently kept me from doing what I do. There just aren’t enough hours in the day. Anyway, on to the point of this post. Following on from a previous post and various discussions on VapourTrails.tv and of course twitter, the ol’ grey matter started churning away.

See, the thing is one of the key arguments against vaping is all about the dreaded, super-evil Nick O’Teen. There are also some parties that would like to see vapour products used only for cessation - which, by the way, they can stuff where the sun shineth not - so when I combined those two “arguments” in my head, I asked myself what is wrong here?

Trouble is, they’ve not checked it twice. It must be a really slow day for the opponents of vaping, though you would hardly suspect that considering how often this article appears from a variety of seeming unrelated twitter accounts.

It is a common practice unfortunately. A body, be it Government, Education whatever buys a whole bunch of accounts, or engages with someone who can “spread the word”; either way it costs money, to share on social media an article, or a link or some other piece of information, and share it repeatedly throughout a given day or days. We saw it with the whole formaldehyde “study” (which turned out to just be a letter to the editor, not the actual study), it’s happened with the shenanigans on the daft arsed “sugar tax” (and no I don’t agree with that either) and it probably happens on a myriad of other subjects too.