Regulators Claims Over Vaping’s Health Risks Got Dirty-Truth Goes Up In Smoke
I don’t expect the truth about guns from the NRA, nor the health risks of a brand new product to come from the device maker. I do however expect and insist that health advocates not adopt dishonest tactics. I expect clean data well reviewed and then a peer process. Then and only then publication.
Another issue is what about those that vape non nicotine/tobacco products? Fruit juiced glycerine? Well that gets confused because one objection is health effects (unknown) and the level of appeal to the very young, which would make sense given a candy like flavor. Then we get to those that vape recreational or medical marijuana in places where that is legal. This too is in it’s regulatory infancy. There is no agency overseeing the safety and health of the marijuana concentrate business. Why? Because that’s usually a federal oversight agency, and marijuana is of course illegal at the federal level. Buyer beware!
To reiterate-Don’t listen to the advocates on either side. If you vape understand you are far less protected than when drinking milk off the shelf. If you don’t, don’t start unless you can glean a real health benefit out of it after honest reviews of alternatives.
One CDC ad relies on anecdotal evidence to make its point. It features a story from an e-cigarette user, a 35-year-old wife and mother named Kristy from Tennessee who says she started smoking e-cigarettes hoping to quit combustible cigarettes. Instead, she began to smoke both, until her lung collapsed. The American Vaping Association reportedly called the ad “patently dishonest,” saying that it implies vaping led to lung disease, when in reality Kristy had gone back to smoking cigarettes alone in the months before her lung collapsed. California’s anti-vaping campaign lists toxins that humans once thought were safe—arsenic-laced powdered wigs, radium therapy, and of course cigarettes—and compares them to e-cigs, using a deceptive associative tactic that we’ve called out before.
The backlash against those campaigns has been swift. In the battle between public health and e-cigarettes, e-cigs have one major advantage: a massive population of users, many of whom credit the product with helping them to quit smoking, and who loudly defend their choice to vape. One thread on the American Vaping Association’s website collects anti-#CurbIt tweets. vaporvanity.com, a pro-vaping site, quickly posed the question: “Are The Members Of The San Francisco Health Department The Stupidest Human Beings On The Planet?” And pro-vapers launched a site nearly identical to California’s—called Not Blowing Smoke—that claimed that, well, basically everything the state said was a lie. The state’s Facebook post was quickly taken over by angry vaping fans. “There is this hyper-aggressive social media response to anyone who doesn’t think e-cigarettes are the greatest things ever,” says Glantz. “They’re trying to shut down any criticism.” Derek Smith of San Francisco’s Tobacco Free Project says his older colleagues saw similar reactions decades ago, when the city launched its first anti-smoking campaigns.
In a perfect world, the safety of a fun, potentially helpful smoking cessation method wouldn’t be left to nasty debates like this. The problem is, as in the early days of campaigns against cigarettes, there isn’t definitive evidence that e-cigarettes cause long-term harm—a point that pro-vapers will be quick to remind you of. But there also isn’t definitive evidence that they’re safe. And there are many good reasons to assume they’ll be found in time to increase cancer and heart and lung disease. “E-cig people would like you to believe that because the evidence that we have on them is limited, that we don’t know anything. And that’s just not true,” says Glantz. There’s a difference, he says, between not having evidence of an effect and having evidence of no effect.