Let’s do a little thought experiment. Take anything you know to be a solid gold fact and have this fact not only be something you’ve researched the hell out of, but one that has also been proven over and over again to be true in your own experience.
Okay … now how would you feel when you read news articles that say the exact opposite of what you know to be true? And regardless of how many time the false talking points are debunked … they show up over and over again as if they’ve never been discredited. You might start getting the idea that there’s an agenda behind making sure disinformation trumps your known fact. This has happened so many times before I should be used to it by now, but as the tagline on the poster for Jaws IV The Revenge said, “This time it’s personal.”
I remember once years ago a speaker at a Stop Smoking Seminar came up with what she thought was one of the best reasons to quit smoking. She said, “Imagine how much money you'd save if you gave up smoking!" Yeah … I got it … people addicted to cigarettes are simply lacking good money-management skills. I realized at that moment the speaker didn’t know anything about How Addiction Works and later when I asked her what method she used to quit smoking she said, “Oh … I’ve never smoked … I just run these seminars.” With my suspicions confirmed I asked for my money back, didn’t get it, and went out and bought a carton.
I smoked for 44 years and tried to quit off and on over the last 36 of those years. I tried every stop smoking method out there, except for the stop smoking drugs that could have nasty suicidal side-effects. I finally was able to quit smoking about 4 years ago. March 6th 2010 to be exact. My electronic cigarette starter kit arrived in the mail and I quit smoking that day. I didn’t really quit smoking … I just learned how to smoke properly … without the smoke. More flavor … less death.
I spent a huge amount of time researching e-cigs before buying my first kit and I’ve learned a lot more since. Here’s how it shakes out:
E-cigs work like this: a battery heats a coil that vaporizes a flavored nicotine solution. The water vapor is inhaled and exhaled giving the user the same sensations of smoking. The critical difference between cigarettes and e-cigs is the e-cig user is not inhaling or exhaling smoke consisting of over 4,000 chemical compounds of which at least 69 are known to cause cancer.
People using Nicotine Replacement Therapies, the patch, gum, lozenges, sprays, and inhalers, have, at best, a 7% success rate. Smokers who switch to electronic cigarettes have a success rate of over 70%. E-cigs are ten times more effective than traditional Nicotine Replacement Therapies. I think that’s pretty damn impressive but what’s really amazing is the amount of anti-e-cig propaganda that’s succeeded in convincing city and state politicians to ban the use of electronic cigarettes in public places just like they were regular cigarettes.
One key anti-e-cig propaganda talking point is the conflation of second hand smoke from tobacco cigarettes with second hand vapor from e-cigs. An article about e-cigs from last month’s The Christian Science Monitor said, “ … experts say consumers can't yet be sure whether they are safe either for users or people exposed to second-hand vapor puffs.”
Imagine this … we’re sitting in an enclosed room while I puff away on my e-cig. If you could magically inhale 100% of what I exhale … why in 10 to 15 minutes you might receive the equivalent amount of nicotine found in a serving of eggplant. The Christian Science Monitor hasn’t published articles about the threat to public safety from Eggplant Parmesan, and the FDA isn’t considering a ban on Ratatouille, but we should all be extremely wary of … e-cigs?
We all know second hand smoke is harmful but we should know second hand e-cig vapor is harmless. But that runs counter to The Agenda. The fear-mongering propagandists are trying to persuade people that electronic cigarettes are Bad For You. See the deal is that if e-cigs are successfully demonized as cigarettes … they can be taxed like cigarettes. According to a BBC News article regarding the economics of tobacco, “The US government makes seven times more money from the sale of a pack of cigarettes than the cigarette maker does.”
A cigarette is the only consumer product which when used as directed kills its consumer. Cigarette smoking causes about one of every five deaths in the United States each year. The most effective way to quit smoking is to switch to electronic cigarettes. E-cig vendors legally can’t say that to promote their products.
But I can.
I’ve seen folks who have smoked for 30 - 40 - 50 years easily quit smoking by switching over to e-cigs.
Professor Carl Philips of the University of Alberta School of Public Health said, “ … Switching is so close as good as quitting that from a health point of view there is no point in worrying about the difference."
Dr. Joel L. Nitzkin, MD, the Chair of the Tobacco Control Task Force of the American Association of Public Health Physicians wrote, “AAPHP favors a permissive approach to E-cigarettes because the possibility exists to save the lives of four million of the eight million current adult American smokers who will otherwise die of a tobacco-related illness over the next twenty years.”
But those voices are ignored while New York City recently banned e-cigarettes in public places. The propaganda is working. Y’know why?
About 80% of the adult population in the U.S. doesn’t smoke. They have no reason to care whether or not e-cigs are banned or are taxed as heavily as tobacco cigarettes. They are the perfect demographic to have e-cig lies sold to them. They don’t know they’re being lied to and don’t care enough to find out.
There are about 44 million smokers in the United States. About 2 billion smokers in the world. The global addiction to cigarettes brings in revenues of about a half trillion U.S. dollars annually. In 2010 Big Tobacco profits in the U.S. were equal to the combined profits of Coca-Cola, Microsoft, and McDonald’s.
About a half million smokers die off each year but Big Tobacco need not to worry about their wheezing, ailing, dying, but always lucrative, cash cow customers. Every day, nearly 4,000 kids under 18 smoke their first cigarette and 1,000 kids under 18 become new daily cigarette smokers. The billions will continue to roll in.
The promotion and use of electronic cigarettes obviously could cut a big slice out of the profit pie of Big Tobacco, Big Pharma’s stop smoking products, and the government would lose out on all those wonderful “sin tax” dollars. It’s in the Government-Corporate interest to spread lies about e-cigs. There’s too much money involved to do something as absurd as tell the truth … regardless of how many lives could be saved.
Sound familiar? Yeah … Same As It Ever Was … Again.
