You see, e-cigs are a great tool for many who wish to quit smoking. It is also unarguable that they are safer than cigarettes so offer harm reduction potential. Unfortunately, though, they are not - tut, tut -manufactured by public health's chums in the pharmaceutical industry, plus e-cig users look like they're smoking. And that is just too offensive a sight for the righteous.
Still, e-cig users continue to fight for their right to 'vape' and, on Wednesday, delivered a hefty petition to Downing Street as a reminder that there are many who are quite happy to risk the non-existent dangers.
I wish them the very best of luck.
It will be interesting, in this new 'enlightened' era of the coalition, to see if the government are serious about personal liberties and decide to kick this ban proposal into the long grass, or whether they will continue with serially-proven public health policy failures like Labour.In March 2011, after they bombarded the MHRA consultation into submission, I said that this steamroller would take some stopping.
As user numbers swell, government's enforcers in Whitehall are going to find it increasingly difficult to cut off vapers from an alternative to tobacco which offers massive harm reduction potential, without showing themselves up as vested interest stooges (if they haven't already, natch).In October the same year, I predicted the e-cig user revolution.
Just as Tom Robinson famously derided gay detractors with the line "the buggers are legal now" when it was clear that the more unbalanced arguments against homosexuality had all but been defeated. For vapers, a tipping point is fast approaching, and it won't be long before they'll be able to give a similarly proud V sign to the intolerant animals who insist on a quit or die approach to the practice of recreational - as opposed to pharmaceutical - nicotine use.The UK couldn't contain them, so deferred to the greater power of the EU, complete with the most dangerous living European and her desperately flawed pharma salesmanship..
Today, they embarrassed the massed ranks of state-funded prohibitionists in a decision which will send shock waves around the world.
STRASBOURG, France — In a decision likely to resonate in the United States and other countries struggling to get a grip on a galloping market for e-cigarettes, the European Parliament on Tuesday scrapped health officials’ proposals that the nicotine-delivery devices be tightly regulated as medical devices.
Instead, lawmakers endorsed a more permissive approach to their sale and use, although the products could not be sold to anyone younger than 18.You simply don't mess with these guys and gals. They are a lobby which no amount of idiot politicians and junk science-touting tobacco control dinosaurs are equipped to handle.
There is much devil in the detail (for example see here for advertising restrictions, plus vapers being described as tobacco lobyists) but e-cigs are here to stay. And Linda McAvan's sad, tired, and desperately defeated face is a joy to behold.
The massively-funded European anti-smoking cartel fought against something which has been proven to reduce smoking ... and lost. We are truly living in historically interesting times.
Bravo vapers, bloody noses don't get better than this.
