The anti- vaping campaign is being pushed to the wall by a steady stream of sound advice from doctors, scientists and researchers. And the situation is looking up for the pro-vaping community.
Last week, the Guardian published an opinion piece by Professor David Nutt, a prominent British pharmaceutical scientist. He is a professor of neuropharmacology at Imperial College London and chaired the National Advisory Committee on the Misuse of Drugs until 2009. He is also the author of “Drugs: Without The Hot Air,” a book that has become popular in Europe to debunk misinformation about drugs and quick fixes for health problems.
Nutt is also an outspoken advocate for vaping. His opinion piece in the Guardian focused on tearing down the anti-vaping community’s misinformation campaigns and scare tactics aimed at bringing down the industry. Armed with accurate information and using mainstream platforms, Nutt chose to call out the lies and scare tactics that vapers are fighting against.
The opinion piece focuses on providing objective information, including some research that has been sponsored by tobacco companies interested in the community. However, Nutt has chosen to do what the vaping community has been asking for: provide all of the above information in English.
Using the examples of the sugar and alcohol industries, both of which have produced studies showing how these two substances affect health and the public, Nutt sets out to show why vaping is the opposite. Vaping is an answer to a problem, not a problem in itself.
While it’s true that some studies have had conflicts of interest, as Nutt points out, they’re rare. Studies funded by Big Tobacco to prove that vaping is safer than smoking account for just 5% of all published research. In fact, these studies have produced the exact opposite results that researchers hoped for: the results have been dismissed as soon as the public learned which industry was behind them.
Furthermore, many anti-vaping groups have argued that the huge variety of flavors available today will make it easier for kids and teens to learn to smoke. Nutt dismisses this view, especially since young people who vape rarely use nicotine- containing e-liquids because it would conflict with the flavor they have chosen. In fact, recent studies in the US and UK show that the rate of underage smoking is actually decreasing.
The professor also went on to discuss the possible motives that the tobacco industry may have for the research they sponsor. Some anti-smoking groups say that by creating strict and difficult-to-negotiate regulations, as has happened in the US with the FDA bills that are currently in effect, it will force all companies other than tobacco companies to do nothing but comply. Others say that by making the public think that vaping is as bad as smoking, Big Tobacco will eliminate the industry and return to being the profitable giant it once was.
Both of these statements would be true and completely valid if not for a couple of reasons: one, vaping has been proven to be 95% safer than smoking, and two, many vapers have become accustomed to Big Tobacco’s marketing and public relations programs. Vapers know that the misinformation the industry is spreading is false and are working diligently to replace it with more objective information.
The most heartbreaking thing about this, as Nutt says in the article, is that there is a secret that many people in the legislative and scientific community know and that the public will certainly agree on:
Banning smoking is impossible.
It’s true that in the United States, federal law protects tobacco companies from direct attacks or laws requiring their products to be taken off shelves. While the public may not know this, health and anti-smoking organizations do.
So if anti-vaping groups want to eliminate traditional cigarettes knowing they can’t, what’s the best option then? If they believe vaping leads to smoking, then they’ll do everything they can to ban it. After all, there are plenty of anti-vaping groups that genuinely believe vaping is harmful to the public despite a wealth of research proving otherwise.
Because vaping isn’t protected like smoking, banning it seems like the right thing to do to anti-smoking groups. By suggesting that kids might be drawn to vaping and end up smoking later in life, anti-vaping groups are actually playing into the hands of an industry that wants to suppress the growth of vaping.
Unfortunately, this misguided approach will do more harm than good. Nutt notes several times in his article that if traditional cigarettes are allowed to stay while vaping is banned, it will deprive the community of an effective smoking cessation method, leading to many people losing their health, even their lives.
No one wants to see people lose their health over the vaping controversy, but that’s what’s happening. Until more people like Nutt speak up in mainstream forums, creating a dialogue between the community, the vaping industry, the tobacco industry, and the government, we’ll be forced to figure out what information is useful and what isn’t through much more complicated methods.
This article was published on churnmag by Jimmy Hafrey and translated by The Vape Club
