Only days after I suggested we needed a Europe wide campaign to fight an EU ban on safer alternatives to smoking, two French bloggers have joined the campaign to save ecigs, urging French vapers to write to their MEPs.

A EU directive threatens to make electronic cigarettes useless for the majority of electronic cigarette users by:

1. Reducing the allowed level of nicotine to just 0.4%, a level which will not satisfy most smokers or vapers. 2. Sneakily banning flavours (the note referring to this was hidden away, and I did not even notice this until Clive Bates pointed it out.)

Decision time is coming, with EU MEPs meeting to discuss the issue on the 25th February. We are urging e-cigarette users to write to MEPs to protest the ban. The campaign is already seeing results:

• some MEPs have expressed opposition to the tobacco directive
• others are confused about the science behinds e-cigarettes, which gives us a chance to explain it to them

However, to be truly effective I believe a campaign needs to be Europe wide.

Now, in a fantastic post on ma-ecigarette.fr this morning, Luc Dussart (from UnAirEuf.org) and Ghyslain Armand explain:

• The threat to electronic cigarettes
• How hundreds of thousands of smokers have used electronic cigarettes to reduce or stop tobacco consumption
• Why vapers should write to their MPs, with a breakdown of exactly who vapers should write to
• How to organise an email
• How to write the email
• How to promote the campaign

Although the post is in French, there is a translate button on the top of the blog, so you can read it in English.

Both Luc and Ghyslain speak excellent English, so it may well be worth leaving a comment too.

Although the post is aimed at French vapers, we can help by:

• sharing the post
• blogging about it (if you have a blog)
• emailing it on (especially to French vapers)

The more attention the post gets, the higher it will rank, reaching more French vapers.

There's more to come, too - Jacques Le Houezec of JL Hamzer tells me he is writing a draft email for French vapers to send to MEPs (we'll update this post when the draft is ready) while German vapers have published an open letters to EU MEPs.

We also need to encourage more vapers and retailers across Europe to take action. We've emailed our contacts - but if you know and vapers in Europe, please do the same!

A Gift for UK Vapers

Ghyslain not only created an excellent twitter image at the top to promote the campaign, he also kindly translated it into the English above.

More images are available here, courtesy of  ma-cigarette.fr.

Please share ;)

(Again at Ghyslain's suggestion, we are now starting to tweet about the campaign using the hash tag ecigeurope.)