Ashtray Blog: An Electronic Cigarette Blog

E-Cigarette Interview: An Interview with Paul Bergen

The Electronic Cigarette seems to be under attack more than usual at present – which makes it an appropriate time for us to publish our interview on the Electronic Cigarette, much of which relates to Electronic Cigarette safety.

The interview is with Paul Bergen of the Tobacco Harm Reduction Project. Those of us who follow the blog regularly will know that we are fans of the project. The project is an excellent source of information, not just for those interested in the electronic cigarette but also about other alternatives to smoking such as smokeless tobacco. You can also check out the Tobacco Harm Reduction Project’s excellent e-cigarette FAQ’s.

Overall, the project takes the tack that it is better to switch to an method of nicotine intake which removes the majority of the risk than it is to continue smoking, even if the method of smoking is not entirely risk free.

We have added a comments section to the end of the interview should you wish to give your own opinion!

The first time I heard of someone vaping I was very confused.

E juice also got me in a ponder – electricity for the Internet? – and smoke juice just seemed like a contradiction in terms.

E-smoking – itself a term that invites confusion – already seems to have gathered its own vernacular, although I have yet to work out how much of the slang is purely American and how much is international.

With both smokers and e-smokers under attack, perhaps it is not suprising that a new jargon has arisen that helps to distinguish vapers from the non-vaping community.

It does, however, cause confusion for those who want to get in on the act.

That’s why we have come up with The Electronic Cigarette Glossary – designed to help you digest e-cig literature with ease, discourse with e-ciggers confidently and discover a new pastime with pleasure.

We have just added a new feature to our shopping cart – a ten percent discount for anyone making purchases over one hundred pounds! We get quite a few large orders, especially from overseas customers, and it seems only fair to give something back.

This also applies with our current reduced price of £34.99 for an Electronic Cigarette Pack (with bonus pack of nicotine cartridges) – an offer which finishes this coming Saturday!

The tobacco industry could potentially face a bill of billions after a court ordered a multi-million payout to a family in Florida.

Philip Morris USA had to pay 8 million to the widow and son of a chain smoker.

Although the court found the smoker 58% at fault, it also found that the tobacco company:

• showed a complete disregard for the smoker’s safety
• intentionally hid the risks of smoking from the public

The plaintiffs had sought 130 million in damages, so with a fine of eight million it might seem the tobacco company are getting off lightly.

However, the real problem for the tobacco companies lies not in this individual case, but in the 8000 pending cases, each of which must be trialled individually.

If this case gives any indication of what will be happening, it is bad news for the tobacco company – if compensation were to continue along the same lines the bill would come to 64,000,000,000 dollars!

Buy now and get five pounds off!

This is just a reminder to everyone that there are only four days left to our Febuary sale.

You can currently buy our electronic cigarette kits at the reduced price of £34.99 – five pounds of the normal price.

For £34.99 you get the:

• electronic cigarette
• a spare battery
• charger
• lead
• selection of six cartridges to get you started
• additional bonus pack of five catridges
• instruction manual

Our offer will be finishing on the 28th February!

Don’t Smoke Here – Free videos are just a click away

A short movie about the electronic cigarette we sell: the Mini-Cigarette.

View the Mini Cigarette movie on E-cigarette Direct
Click here to purchase the mini-cigarette
Watch our other electronic cigarette movies

The Examiner recently reviewed the Electronic cigarette and ended up giving the product their stamp of approval. (See Smokeless Smoking Without Most of the Health Risks for the full article).

Like us he has noticed the forces arrayed against the Electronic Cigarette, in particular:

the fanatic anti-smokers who will attack any options and believe that smokers should either quit cold turkey or just go die (Literally… quite a scary crowd), the government desire for tobacco tax income, and the tobacco industry’s potential opposition to devices that people actually like that will potentially reduce their revenue.

One thing that suprised us was that the reporter, Kit Parenteau, found it difficult to get hold of the electronic cigarette.

When we contacted him he told us that this was not something he had exaggerated, and that he had had problems both getting hold of information and of electronic cigarette kits.

Seems that a lot of folks were willing to try to chase me away when I was expressing intent to make an article, then there are a number of folks crying foul that I didn’t include certain aspects.

At least some of this hostility seems to have been caused by fear – some from retailers but also some from consumers…

You’ve got the “fans”, so to speak, who are trying to protect something very important to them and may overreact if there is any inkling of an attack against it.

Despite these drawbacks, the electronic cigarette kits he was eventually send got his full seal of approval – and that of his colleagues!

A number of my associates have already bought their own because of the testing. The lack of cigarette smell and sudden lack of piles of butts outside has been a great boon. They can say that they are breathing easier and every single one of them is much happier and already most of them have a savings. The general benefits in health and happiness of both the users and people around them outweigh the confusion and any downsides.

You can read the full and excellent product review on the Denver Gadgets Examiner.

An interesting new site that we have noticed is PDX Labs.

The gentleman running the site is a nicotine addict of 20 odd years, and has found the e-cigarette to a be satisfactory alternative to smoking.

On his site he aims to both educate the public about e-smoking and to stand up for smoker’s and addicts rights.

Already he has covered shocking stories, such as Boston employees being fired because they were smokers, and also had an interesting discussion on whether e-cigarettes are safe.

The site is also designed so that readers can contribute directly to the forum, and in addition vendors of the ecigarette can list their sites.

An anti-ban conference was set to be held in the European Parliament conference. Even before the conference was held the pro-banners were worried that anti-banners would prevent their conference from being held, as this slightly paranoid video below, which I found on Pro-Choice doctor, shows.

Or maybe not so paranoid. The conference was banned, and instead of being ashamed of hiding the fact that they were obstructing free speech the European Public Health Alliance actually boasted about it.

I don’t pretend to know either way whether passive smoking can seriously damage health, although I was surprised once to hear the person who discovered the link between lung cancer and smoking, Sir Richard Doll, dismiss the danger of passive smoking in a radio interview not long before his death.

However, I have lost faith in European health advice after their opposition to smokeless tobacco. As Clive Bates says:

no-one seems to think it is important to justify the partial ban on smokeless tobacco in the EU – a bizarre intervention, and utterly without precedent, to ban a much less hazardous product variant than the market leader, in this case cigarettes.

Just to illustrate his point, I have taken an image from his original post and added it below – the graph shows the drop in lung cancer mortality after the introduction of smokeless tobacco in Sweden.

But that’s going way off the point – which is, in a democracy, that you allow people to state their mind even when you disagree with what is stated.

And on that point it is worth recalling another Anti-Smoking campaign which was not in the least democratic – the Nazi’s little known anti-smoking campaign.

(Note – after help from the British Delegation of the Independence/Democracy Group the conference was eventually held under the name “Thinking is Forbidden.”