From the Publisher header
Imagine you are a health advocate specializing in tobacco control and your life’s mission is to get people to stop smoking cigarettes. Now imagine that (let’s call it) a medical device was invented that, when used as intended replaces the smoker’s urge to smoke cigarettes. For many former smokers, this treatment also is temporary, meaning that they quit smoking cigarettes and then stop using the device. Wait, before you decide how wonderful this new development is, even if the “patient” needs to continue treatment, this device is determined to be 95% less harmful than regular smokes.
Glenn Anthony John
Glenn Anthony John, Tobacco Asia Publisher
Of course we’re talking about e-cigarettes or vaping and as a normal health authority and/or tobacco control advocate you should be taking to the streets screaming aloud to all and sunder about this amazing new product available now that will vastly improve the health and welfare of smokers globally. Right? No, instead you choose as your mission the destruction of the e-cigarette business and try to block everyone from obtaining the product.
Why would you as a health proponent specializing in tobacco be so against something that was clearly so much less harmful than cigarettes? Maybe because you’ve led a blinder-ed life of anti-tobacco zealotry and anything whatsoever related in any way, shape, or form to the tobacco industry must be stopped. Maybe you want to control people and intrude into their personal lives, or maybe you think people are so stupid that they would be better living under a nanny state dictating to them – preferably by a dictator – what they should eat, drink, wear, worship, etc., so they don’t get it wrong and hurt themselves. Maybe you’re afraid of the future – if everyone switches to the more healthful e-cigarettes there may be no need for you, so best to demonize them now and you’ll still have a career. As a health nut, do-gooder and probable control freak, instead of supporting such a change to e-cigarettes for the better, you will blindly throw the baby (e-cigarettes) out with the bathwater (regular cigarettes).
That is unless you have the logical reasoning of Public Health England, the British health authority (also no friend to the tobacco industry) which declared firmly last August that e-cigarettes are “significantly” less harmful than tobacco. Now they are joined by Breathe 2025, also no friends of tobacco, whose mission is to “see the next generation of children born and raised in a place free from tobacco”. They encourage anti-tobacco advocates to become “e-cigarette friendly and support people who want to use e-cigarettes as it makes them quit smoking”. They even go so far as to recommend e-cigarettes for pregnant women who smoke to keep them smoke free.
They also say “treating e-cigarettes in the same manner as tobacco in terms of policies [such as smoking in public places] sends a misleading message to the public that smoking tobacco and using e-cigarettes are equivalent in terms of risk [when is it known that] e-cigarettes are substantially less harmful for users than tobacco cigarettes, with no known health risks to bystanders.”
Most health advocates today specializing in “tobacco” are at war and have been for decades, and everything tobacco and tobacco-related must be stomped out. In fact they are no longer advocates of health, they are anti-tobacconists, whose aim is to destroy the tobacco industry. And that’s a big difference. A health advocate like, for example Public Health England can see the potential health benefits of vaping and e-cigarettes, ostensibly the organization’s stated and named goal. The anti-tobacco extremists, by declaring war on e-cigarettes, are actually moving against the health of millions of people around the world by denying them the correct information and access to something which may be less harmful to them.