Most of you will remember the post Misinformation vs Information I put up a less than a week ago. That post led to Thud!. Both of those posts originated from a questionable article in Vox.
Of course, the author of that article immediately came under fire from many within the vaping community. However, there is some (relatively) good news. The author, Julia Belluz has taken some time to speak to one of us vapers and put out an opposing view.
Let me start this post off with the following statement:
I do not work for, nor am I affiliated with either the Tobacco or Vaping Industries. I am a semi-normal person that works a bog standard 9-5. I have opinions and feelings.
There, now that is well and truly out of the way, on with the post.
It seems that many in public health, and by extension the “smokefree” agencies don’t believe a single word anyone says. I’ve told my story on this blog, and it has been shared by me and many other vapers in an effort to make it heard. It seems that certain folk don’t believe a single word. That hurts.
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.
Oh to be a fly on the wall in the marketing department of the California Department of Public Health these days. They must have some really interesting discussions about how to spend taxpayer money on their latest campaign that specifically targets electronic cigarettes and vaping.
$75 Million for five years
We know that the total budget for the next five years rolls in at $75 Million, thanks to Stan being so kind in posting the information on his public blog. We also know that the current campaign cost CADPH $7 Million. They have to spend even more of the taxpayers dollars in an effort to push their website up the Google Search rankings. Even went as far as buying ad placements.
I do try to post fairly regularly in order to rid my addled brain of the flotsam and jetsam that inevitably ends up in there. There has been a lot going on the last few days what with CDPH being completely useless. Expensively useless at that. Taking over from CDPH, the CDC are trying to do their own bit with a Twitter campaign.
How many times do we have to tell you folks, when trying to belittle ecigs on Twitter be prepared for one hell of a fight. Let me see, we had the SF “curbit”. Fail. CDPH and “stillblowingsmoke”. Big fail. Now we have “Tipstakeover”. EPIC FAIL.
It is no secret that the “much respected” Tobacco Control “expert” Stanton Glantz is to put it bluntly, widely despised by those of us in the vaping community. He hasn’t really got that many friends in the world of science either. Most, if not all of his “papers” have been analysed and mostly discarded as junk science. He also doesn’t like us very much, but I couldn’t really give a damn about that.