Ashtray Blog: An Electronic Cigarette Blog

A blog well worth of your support/ audience/ links is Smokles.

This is the blog written by the staff of the Tobacco Harm Reduction organisation.

Like Professor Siegel, this is an organisation which promotes and defends smokeless tobacco and electronic cigarette not because they want to make money, but because they believe it is the right thing to do.

As an ethical organisation, they also defend the right of smokers to smoke, should that be their choice.

As they wrote in their most recent blog post, Why Tobacco Harm Reduction Defends Smokers:

“Ultimately whether or not you smoke, or whether or not you choose healthier alternatives is less important than whether or not you have the right to make that decision for yourself.”

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This is quite a hard blog post to write.

At least, I have started to write it several times and got nowhere with it.

Yet, I think it needs to be said that sections of the electronic cigarette community are defeating themselves with anger.

Anger on the Net

I’ve seen it before on the net.

A person loses his temper – and loses the argument.

You don’t think well when you are angry.

It’s better to go away, calm down, come back and then write your response.

You then need to rewrite it about ten times, get someone (or, even better, several people) to check it, and then publish it.

Your response wins not through anger, but through a cool detached anaylsis of your opponents arguments.

ASH International gets Angry

I firmly believe that ASH got angry at our exposure of their nature, and that is why they released an open letter critical of us.

Up until that time they hadn’t responded directly to any e-cigarette company, probably because they knew their arguments were too weak.

If they hadn’t attacked us directly, we wouldn’t have investigated them further.

We wouldn’t have found out that they were being funded by pharmecutical corporations.

We wouldn’t have invited three scientists to analyse their health claims.

We wouldn’t have challenged them to respond directly to the issues.

And they wouldn’t, again through anger, have asked newspapers not to retract proven lies.

Getting Taken Seriously

Anger may contribute to the low quality of some of the press releases out there.

Many are filled with grammatical errors and even swear words.

No one is going to take these seriously.

We E-cigarette smokers have a lot to get angry about.

After years of abuse and discrimination, we finally get an alternative to smoking – and then the same people who hurled the abuse at smokers try to ban it. And they do so with exagerations, misfinormation and lies.

Yet it is best to put this anger aside.

Otherwise, we are just playing into the hands of our opponents.

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An Ignored Study

In 1959 a huge study was initiated by Cancer America into the effect on living with people with cancer.

With a huge sample of 100,000 people it was to give the answers other studies had failed to give.

By the late 1990’s, when it became obvious what the answer was going to be – that passive smoking did not pose a significant risk.

Cancer America pulled the funding.

As the only organisations that would continue the funding were tobacco companies, the study lost all credibility in the eyes of anti-smoking campaigners.

Politics or Science

For the purpose of this blog, the point is not whether passive smoking is dangerous or not.

I am still in two minds myself, if only because scientists I respect still believe passive smoking is dangerous for us.

What scares me, though, is the refusal of non-smoking bodies to accept any scientific studies which might contradict their own stance.

This refusal was so strong that they lambasted no less austere a publication than the British Medical Journal for publishing a study on passive smoking.

We are fortunate that some organisation still respect science above politics – the BMJ calmy responded:

“The decision to publish a paper is only taken after careful consideration. It is inevitable that some research may at times be regarded as controversial.”

(Source: New Scientist)

For the Greater Good

The argument given by some, if only in private, is that it is worth brushing up over some weaknesses in the case for passive smoking, as it is all in a good cause.

This is dangerous for two reasons.

First, in peddling exaggerations or outright lies the anti-smoking movement may lose all respect, and invite ridicule – as has already happened with ASH US.

This is a reason we have covered before, many times before.

Secondly, and perhaps worse, is a danger which scientists Robert J. Mathews pointed out in an article on the topic.

“…despite all the efforts of campaigners and governments, around one in five people on the planet are smokers. Passive smoking is thus ubiquitous, and its effects must be taken into account in any study into potential causes of cancer or heart disease. If the risks from passive smoking have been exaggerated, there is a real danger that the risks from other causes will be underestimated – with untold consequences for human health.”

(Source: The Telegraph)

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An Englishman’s home is his castle, the old saying goes in the UK.

One’s right to privacy, and one’s own property, is paramount.

And that may still be the case in the UK – but it may not be the case for very much longer in Canada.

New plans in Canada may see government officers bursting into the ‘private’ homes of smokers, to enforce the bans of smoking not just in the public places but in the freedom of our own homes. (See: The Smoking Police are Now Barging into Your Home!)

This is due to the ridiculous idea that small amounts of drifting tobacco smoke can cause major harm to passive smokers.

Increasingly, we are seeing spurious health claims being used to effect major intrusions into people’s rights.

Thirdhand smoke, a claim which has been attacked by three medical proffessors as junk science, has been used to seperate children from parents and to bar smokers from waiting rooms.

It’s something which can concern us all, as an attack on the rights of one group of people can easily turn into an attack on the rights of other groups of people.

According to a mass email from Vapour Talk, Arnold Schwarzenegger has terminated moves to make the electronic cigarette illegal in California.

Initially, the bill planned to restrict children from buying the electronic cigarette, a move which the Electronic Cigarette Associationa and most E-Cigarette retailers supported.

It was then extended to ban electronic cigarettes.

Having been passed by the Californian senate, only Arnie had the power to change the course of events by vetoing the bill.

Which is exactly what he did, writing:

To the Members of the California State Senate:

I am returning Senate Bill 400 without my signature.

While I support restricting access of electronic cigarettes to children under the age of 18, I cannot sign a measure that also declares them a federally regulated drug when the matter is currently being decided through pending litigation.

Items defined as tobacco products are legal for anyone over the age of 18. If adults want to purchase and consume these products with an understanding of the associated health risks, they should be able to do so unless and until federal law changes the legal status of these tobacco products.

For this reason, I am unable to sign this bill.

Sincerely,

Arnold Schwarzenegger

Ready to switch? Check out the e-cigarette store.

Enough is enough, the Danish have said in response to calls for a total smoking ban in Holland.

The government has denied attempts to extend restriction on smokers.

This came about as a response to a suggestion to ban smoking rooms in hospitals.

According to the blog Velvet Glove Iron First, Danish health speaker said smokers were being harrassed and;

“Nobody is going to die, because they smell a little smoke. We must have places for the Danish smokers.”

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In a new press release Ash is calling all smokers throughout the US to pay more money on health insurance than non-smokers.

Smokers already pay more on health insurance in a number of states.

Carolina has just joined those states, forcing smokers to pay 30% of health care costs rather than 20%.

Dodgy Maths

Ash argues that smokers costs the health system more than non-smokers.

What they are leaving out is the huge taxes smokers pay.

While we don’t have exact figures for the US, we do know that smoking taxes in the UK pay for the cost of smoking diseases several times over.

What’s more, smokers cost the country less overall, with smokers dying younger on average and therefore costing the UK less in pensions and less in treatment of old age diseases.

The truth is that non-smokers’ moral judgements on smokers have lead to a situation where smokers already pay more than their fair share of the tax burden.

Discrimination

What is scary is that anti-smoker discrimination in resurging in a country which has worked so hard to get rid of other forms of discrimination.

Let’s remember that this is the same anti-smoking lobby which has argued that we should leave smokers to die rather than treat them.

Ash, of course, goes even further than this.

They believe that even ex-smokers should be denied treatment that could save their lives. See “Action on Smoking and Health Suggest that Former Smokers not be Eligible for Heart Transplants.”

More? Check out what three proffessors of medicine have to say about some of Ash’s health claims.

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Well, maybe not in so many words.

But health fascist Ann Gannon, of the Palm Beach County Tax Collector’s office, has certainly made clear that smokers are not welcome.

According to a story on CBS Ann states that smoking contributes to increased insurance costs for her office and ultimately tax payers.

Which, by the way, is bullshit.

In the UK alone tobacco tax revenues pay for the cost of smoking several times over.

And since the US is too tight to treat its sick citizens (preferring to spend more than the money needed killing the citizens of other countries) the huge revenue from tobacco taxes can go even further.

In fact smokers’ taxes subsidise the so called servants of the public’s offices.

Despite this, they are now being barred from the very offices they pay for.

Maybe this rant seems an over the top reaction.

Yet discrimination in any form is dangerous, and can quickly grow.

And I’ll finish this post with a quote from another time and place in which discrimination ran rife.

“Brother national socialist, do you know that our Führer is against smoking and think that every German is responsible to the whole people for all his deeds and emissions, and does not have the right to damage his body with drugs?”

Source: Constitutionalist NC

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