Before I start this post there’s a few points I simply have to clarify:
As an advocate for vaping, I have no issues with teens taking to vaping or smoking if that is their choice. I would prefer that they didn’t do either of course, but if they were to do one or the other, I would prefer they vaped but I have no issue with them doing either.
This is another one of those “something on my mind” type posts where I’m going to try to clarify some thinking, and maybe organise the thoughts rumbling through my addled brain. It may also bring together some threads from previous posts that I’ve mentioned but not expanded upon.
Nothing really prompted this post as such, just a bunch of thoughts that need to be emptied out to make room for more. Time for a rewind.
The thing with journalists is they tend to get friendly with regular sources of information. The “go-to” folks for soundbites and information, no matter how bizarre that information is. The flip side of that, is when they are ‘confronted’ by opposing views the immediately adopt the “hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil” stance by retreating past la-la land up to cloud cuckoo.
This whole thing really started to gather momentum when Public Health England released the recent evidence update on electronic cigarettes. We knew that there would be some responses from the opponents to vaping, the trouble is the evidence update was in fact a response to the multitude of rubbish science and poor media.
What follows here is purely my opinion on what seems to be a subject that is becoming the flash point for a lot of debate, argument and bickering. I’ll try to be as coherent as possible.
Most of you know that the All Party Parliamentary Group on ecigs met last week and a lot of good things came from that, there is already a very good write-up on the meeting from James Dunworth over on the Ashtray Blog, after all he was there. I wasn’t. Most of the information that came from the APPG I know through either that blog, the VTTV show The Haze Hour the following day, twitter (of course), plus the following two blog posts. Sarah Jakes, guest posted on Lorien Jollye’s blog to clarify her personal stance followed by a second posting by Lorien herself.
There’s been a lot going around in the media lately about conflict of interest with regards to research into vapourisers. The biggest mud-slinging has of course been from The Lancet about the PHE Report. Of course, the trouble with the public health industry and science is this. There will always be a conflict of interest. These conflicts range from pure ideological views (Nanny McPhee et al), to funding conflicts. Sometimes the COI is subtle and sometimes not.
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.
Today Sara Kalkhoran and I published “Modeling the Health Effects of Expanding e-Cigarette Sales in the United States and United Kingdom”
Is the beginning of one of Frampton’s latest blogs. It is always amusing (if a little difficult to digest his grasp of the English language) to read these as most of the time (95% CI) it’s all based on mythical hypothesis and conjecture, none of which surprises me when it comes to the “leading tobacco control activist”.
It must surely come as no surprise at all that there has finally been a response to the Public Health England 2015 review on e-cigarettes from the hard-core anti-vaping opponents. So I wasn’t particularly surprised when the excrement hit the whirling blades of the media, no sir.
There had of course been a gleeful comment from Simone Chumpman that “the answer” (and I know someone said “42” to that) was coming “later this week” regarding the provenance of the “95% less harmful” phrase.
Over the last few years vaping has been placed under an increasingly magnified microscope, every single aspect from safety through to perceptions have been heavily scrutinized. The consumers, that is US, have been deliberately lumped into the same bracket as smokers and subsequently have been treated no different to smokers. We’ve had scare stories about “cancer causing chemicals” and have been told that vaping is a “public health threat”.
Time for a rewind, to 2009 specifically. I was still happily smoking and had no idea that the vaping community and industry existed. I had no idea that the MHRA wanted vapourisers to be placed squarely under medical regulation. Instead, all I saw in relation to smoking was the incessant beat of the anti-smoking organisations, and campaigns on the telly-box. I never had cause to contact my MP or MEP at the time simply because I didn’t care.
Another day, and yet more divisiveness in response to yesterdays PHE Report. You’ll remember that construction companies relied heavily on the advice of the BMA for information about vaping in the workplace, in light of the PHE Report those companies look like they may have to have a bit of a rethink.
Even in a radio interview on BBC Scotland (approximately 20 minutes in) with the BMA and Linda Bauld, the BMA representative admitted that they would “review” their stance on workplace bans in light of the evidence stating that vapourisers are substantially safer than smoking. It was, one of the many wonderful moments of yesterday’s deluge of reports.