I smoked for 41 years and then finally quit smoking with vaping more than eight ago. I’ve owned and operated a vape shop for nearly seven years, helping more than 2,000 people in my small community to quit smoking with the help of flavored vapor products.
And I have a message for the Food and Drug Administration and its “Tobacco Control” allies: Your treatment of vaping is killing people. And you need to stop Tobacco Control, by which I mean the legislatures, regulatory bodies, policymakers, academia and research, the public “health” lobby groups and, of course, a complicit media. I’m painting all of you with the same brush because, from my perspective, all that matters is the end result.
You’ve trained the public to despise smokers. You even trained us to despise ourselves. And now you want to do the same again for vaping? Why?
Why would you want to prevent smokers from moving off a deadly, lifelong addiction to vastly safer vaping? Why would you put up barriers? Is this what you would want for your friends, your family?
You tax, punish and segregate us from the rest of society. You pass laws against us, not for us. Your only “Tobacco Control” message? Quit, or die.
And so smokers die, 480,000 of us every year.
Your policy and regulatory response to vaping is deadly, bald-faced prohibition; your loudest voices are chilling in their utter disdain for our lives; and your prevailing narrative on nicotine vaping is nothing short of a fairytale.
Thanks to regulators at the federal and state level, vape shops and the independent vapor industry are being systematically eliminated and our products banned. We are being driven back to smoking by the very people we entrusted to help us to quit. And we are dying.
FDA regulatory authority over electronic cigarettes ultimately stems from the Tobacco Control Act. Electronic cigarettes don’t contain tobacco, yet you apply a greater regulatory burden on vapor products used for cessation than that applied to deadly tobacco products themselves. The message to the public? Quitting smoking with vaping is more dangerous than smoking.
That is a deadly lie.
The result is people like me who use vaping to quit smoking face a hostile public. Our friends and family have been misinformed and whipped into a moral panic. Other businesses and industries are being pressured by regulation and a misinformed public to sever ties with independent vapor and vape shops, to carpet-bomb our supply chain, and to convince the public we are addicting and killing their children. National campaigns now depict us as monsters, selling depression sticks to children.
You lie, you mock mental illness and depression. You deter people from quitting smoking and force those of us who’ve quit back to smoking. And you’ve increased cigarette sales for the first time in two decades. That did not need to happen, COVID, or no COVID.
Few, if any, of the people in Tobacco Control have ever set foot in a vape shop. They appear to have no idea what we do. Yet, you are eliminating us and our products and are sending our clients back to smoking and dying.
Thousands of vape shops like mine are currently the human face of tobacco harm reduction in this country, providing the products, personal service and support currently keeping millions of Americans smoke-free. We’re not just an industry selling a product; we are a community working together, helping millions to quit smoking, and we do it far better than you ever have and ever will.
Electronic cigarettes are proven safe and effective cessation products employed by hundreds of millions of consumers over the last 18 years with no significant harm and have reduced both adult and youth smoking rates.
The scientific and statistical evidence, the consensus of the world’s experts and the global population experience of millions of successful ex-smokers suggest that vaping can be easily, safely and inexpensively regulated with a set of common-sense manufacturing and marketing standards, coupled with the message that vaping is for old guys like me to quit smoking, not for young people to start. Put me on your anti-vaping posters and watch youth use disappear. Standards that we’ve been begging for as an industry, for years.
If you can’t see that, I think you’re in the wrong business. If you’re focused on the mythical harms of an equally mythical youth vaping epidemic, you’re definitely in the wrong business. If you think the public benefits from taxing, banning, restricting and lying about the most effective and popular means of smoking cessation ever devised, you need to get out of our way because we are saving lives and you are now taking them.
The bottom line: Tobacco Control has become a clear and present danger to public health.
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