Via the Financial Times, I challenge any tobacco controller to say that this is a proportionate response to something which is helping hundreds of thousands of smokers to quit tobacco.
Electronic cigarette users are set to be banished to the pavement alongside their tobacco-smoking cousins – and face similar hefty prices – if the World Health Organisation pushes ahead with plans to regulate e-cigarettes in the same way as normal tobacco.
Attendees at the meeting, which included representatives from the WHO’s six global regions, said that e-cigarettes “would be considered as tobacco products as per the WHO FCTC” if they contained nicotine made from tobacco leaves, according to the minutes.
The move would see e-cigarettes face the same advertising bans, public smoking limits and hefty excise duty that apply to normal cigarettes, potentially stymieing the products’ rapid growth.Conveniently, this is just what the pharmaceutical industry needs to halt a dramatic decline in sales of their useless, but expensive, rival products. What a coincidence, eh? And what's the betting that if this is true, the WHO commission 'science' to justify it from someone like, oh I dunno, mad Stan Glantz?
Now, I hate to crow (actually, I don't) but I saw this coming way back in 2008. It has been written in the public health scriptures that the only supplier of nicotine shall be the pharmaceutical industry, even though they too procure their nicotine from tobacco leaves.
Bravo to e-cigs and vapers everywhere for flushing these charlatans out. Their claimed care for health is merely the front for a charade which often resembles a shilling exercise for Big Pharma. If not, I dare ASH and chums to prove me wrong by objecting to these proposals in the strongest possible terms. In fact, scratch that, I double dare you.
Quite how throwing vapers out into the street is supposed to protect those poor choice-free bar workers from the already mythical secondhand smoke terror, the article doesn't say. Just a hunch, but I'd say bar workers have been used like a cheap whore by a tobacco control industry which has never been about health.
The message this is sending is that you may as well carry on smoking - if anyone tries to put you off, just advise them that the World Health Organisation told you to.
