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.
“Much has changed since we ran the inaugural Summit in 2013, when calls for medicinal licensing and outright bans on e-cigarettes were dominant”.
Reading that in the introduction and welcoming statement in the e-cigarette summit programme highlights, at least in the UK, just how far things have come. When you have the likes of Professor Ann McNeill, Professor Robert West, Professor Linda Bauld, Professor Marcus Munafò, Dr Konstantinos Farsalinos, Professor John Britton, Professor Peter Hajek, Professor Ricardo Polosa talking about e-cigarettes folk sit up and listen.
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.
This is going to be a first. Normally, my posts (with one exception so far) are written entirely by me and me alone. They reflect my thoughts, feelings and opinions on the variety of subjects, points of view and commentary on “science” surrounding the topic of vaping. This time, I’ve enlisted the aid of a few other advocates and vapers to help me compile this post, as I feel this is actually a pretty big topic for just one person to cover.
There is a saying on Twitter, “If you can’t debate in 140 characters or less, you’ve lost the argument”. Sometimes this could be true, but in others the character limit is incredibly, well, limiting, even with character substitutions and abbreviations it is incredibly difficult to get your point across on a complex subject.
This is one of the reasons I have a blog, so I can take my time and be as wordy as I need to be to explain the things I’m writing about.
It has definitely been an interesting few days all said and done. A televised debate took place over the weekend on vaping which kicked off the usual shenanigans with many folks sending the usual tweets to the person on the negative side of the debate. Of course, this was aired on Fox which has a certain reputation for being a little unusual, to put it mildly.
Who was involved in this debate?
For this post, I’m going to bring in a very special guest. Most of you will know who this is, the southern candidate for Vapers In Power. Dear readers, I pass this page on to Liam Bryan.
My First Hustings So, two days before I was really nervous - I mean, we’re a single issue party and I’d pretty much insisted that “Protect Our NHS” give me an equal voice. They didn’t want to at first, they said there wasn’t enough time for the “major” candidates as it was.
As we all know, vaping and electronic cigarettes are under increasing scrutiny. Some of it is surprisingly the good kind of scrutiny, the majority of it is not. We all have our stories as to why we vape. Some of us wanted to reduce harm to our own bodies. Others were looking to give up tobacco cigarettes. Mostly it’s the former.
What doesn’t help us in the ongoing, slow fight against the various regulations and legislation being brought up in the various political arenas is when vendors do stupid stuff.
