Opinion

We all know how badly the state wants to control our lives, from deciding what we can and cannot eat to where we can and where we can’t light up a ciggie or vape.

Of course, they always make some ridiculous claim about it being for “public health” or to “protect the kiddies” as if saying that makes their state sponsored intervention into our private lives makes it alright. I got news for you, stay the hell out of my private life. It is mine to do with as I please and not the property of the State for you to control.

Habit, dependence, addiction, compulsion, craving, fixation, ritual. Each one of these words has a similar underlying meaning and are often used to describe the continuing act of smoking or vaping, and by extension an “addiction”. But what does it mean exactly?

As my brain slowly clears from the almost overwhelming amount of research publications, conferences and media stories nagging questions come to the fore. This one in particular has bothered me ever since my smoking days. What exactly is a habit and are habits the basis of addiction?

There is a heck of a lot of things rattling around in my head regarding the ongoing saga in the media about vapour products/e-cigarettes, whatever you wish to call them. Having recently reached a pretty handy milestone in being off combustible tobacco for a year, I’ve had a look back over the general thread of my vaping life and my participation in activism and advocacy, and I’m trying to understand a few things. Maybe this post will give my brain the help it needs. The question is, where to begin?

It’s odd isn’t it? A global online community of vapers numbering in the thousands, nay millions. One huge, dysfunctional family.

So why is it that when the community is needed, only a few hundred step up?

https://twitter.com/vapemestoopid/status/609740393224257536

At last count, 1,373 signatures on the campaign started by the Welsh Liberal Democrats. This is not a campaign to raise funds for research, it is a campaign to let those with more power than sense know how very wrong they are. Yet only 1,373 seem to care enough to sign it.

You may remember that earlier this week a whole host of bantha poo-doo hit the fan, covered quite succinctly by the wonderful VapeMeStoopid on her blog. This all kicked off with the announcement that the Welsh Assembly were intending to impose a ban on the use of electronic cigarettes in public places (bars, clubs, and so forth) and to bundle them into the same restrictions for use as combustible cigarettes.

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:

I’m kind of hoping that this will be a relatively short post, although I doubt it as the subject is one that I have some deeply held opinions. This also is not the post I had originally planned on writing, but that’s the way it goes sometimes.

Today’s murmurings and mumblings stemmed from an article on Euro Scientist. The title and the overall tone of the article is actually very positive with some strong-minded words from ASH’s Deborah Arnott regarding electronic cigarettes.

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.

For some reason many elements of regulatory bodies and public health are determined to bundle electronic cigarettes up with tobacco rulings. Of course, they claim it is all in the name of public health, denormalising smoking, protecting the children, or some other inane reason.

Most of those reasons are of course, founded in ideology rather than actual facts but they are determined to put vaping in the same pigeon-hole as tobacco and smoking.

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.