There is a whole secondary approach being deployed by those in various sockpuppet tobacco control charities across the pond with our dear American friends, all intent on reducing tobacco prevalence and protecting youth. Their grandiose plan is to *ahem* raise the legal age of sale from 18 to 21. That’s it. They completely ignore the fact that there are age restrictions already in place, albeit terribly enforced by the local authorities (as is the case everywhere else).
Why is it that whenever we get media attention on vaping from anywhere in the world, a quick dive around into the “study” behind it generally doesn’t match up to the headlines? Or should it be, why on earth are media outlets and the journo hacks not asking the right questions whenever they get their grubby little mitts on a story?
The cool factor: Teens report positive feedback to using e-cigarettes
It seems that insanity reigns supreme pretty much everywhere you look these days. From the incredibly bizarre rulings down under to the outrageous propaganda emanating from the US. Nothing in the realms of tobacco harm reduction or e-cigarettes is left alone.
So you’d be forgiven for thinking that the insanity couldn’t get much worse. But it has.
You’d think from this headline that the recently passed legislation would actually be a good thing wouldn’t you? Well, you’d be way off course. Not particularly surprising really.
Whilst sitting at my home office desk, transferring the hundreds of photographs taken from my best friends wedding yesterday I tried playing a little catch up with all the shenanigans that have been going on for the last two days. Needless to say, I failed miserably. But one or two items did catch my eye and they both have a commonality.
It would seem that our delightful friend, Frampton Blands has been up to his usual trickery. Or at least, he has been trying to. This article popped into my social feeds and it is pretty clear from the title alone that it is going to be pure and utter bunkem.
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.
Wasted tax $$$
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.
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.
When I’m not working (or supposed to be working that is), I spend a fair chunk of my time surfing around in cyberspace. Not looking for anything in particular you know, just spending (alright wasting) time. On this occasion I ended up reading an article from down under and it got me thinking, which is always a worrying thing to happen.
This is the point where I normally write something along the lines of “the article in question is here” and provide a handy link for you to have a read of it yourself. Not going to do that as I really do not want to give the website any more traffic. Besides, the article itself is the main reason for this post.
Seems like my plan of taking a few days out have gone awry with some olds. There’s been an alarmist survey on teen e-cig use, covered in delightful depth by Clive Bates. By the way, the study that the news articles refers to hadn’t actually been published yet at time of print.
The piece of olds I’ve been looking at has gone a little unnoticed. All well and good, means I can write this in relative peace 😉
Hmmm how to start this post. It is, or at least for me it is a bit of an upsetting topic but with the recent kerfuffle it needs to be addressed. Again.
For this post, I will be heavily referring to the brilliant postings from the lovely Lorien over on her blog. True, she hasn’t posted for a while but she has been incredibly active elsewhere and I simply cannot give enough credit to her, or any of the other advocates. Some of you may be wondering why I’m referencing older posts, well the answer is pretty straightforward in that nothing has changed.
Settle down folks this double posting isn’t going to become a regular thing. Sometimes something happens in the world of vaping that just requires a second post.
By now you should have seen the debacle that is the article from Vox. It is, to put none to fine a point on it, dire in the extreme. Terribly one-sided, and all of it in favor of a particular US Researcher’s point of view. I’ll be honest and state that I suspect the article may have been written by that researcher with only a few changes made by the author herself. Call me cynical if you like.
