A Whole New Level Of Denial

Regular visitors here will be aware that I've often remarked on the marvellous capacity of e-cigs to expose irrational hatred from condescending, anti-social, psychotic smoker-haters, as exhibited nicely by Duncan Bannatyne in 2010.

Of course, he didn't know exactly why he despised e-cigs back then because he knew absolutely nothing about them and probably still doesn't. He just despised them. I theorised as to why at the time.

I can now understand why they boil anti-smoker piss so much. After nearly three decades of fabricating a scare story to eliminate others enjoying a substance (nicotine) of which they personally disapprove, the righteous have next to nothing on the e-cig, and it must really - no, I mean really - grate. 

Having dreamed for years of that orgasmic final boot in the face of those they jealously hated for enjoying a benign pleasure, they can see a few wriggling free, still putting hand to mouth, and with the two fingers still defiantly up. 

Some have found that vaping is a way of ditching tobacco for good; anti-smokers would prefer to ban e-cigs to force them back to being smokers where they are easier to hit. As Bannatyne shows above, they're not really bothered about health, or the chiildren, or harm reduction - they just enjoy the hunt, the superiority, and the self-righteousness. 

E-cigs threaten to deprive them of that, all of it - after 30 years of intense obsessive effort - and the psychos don't like it one bit.

Since then, though, e-cigs have also exposed the cant, hypocrisy and methodological lying of many in the 'public health' and tobacco control trough-slurping industries too. The huge surge in e-cig popularity in the past five years has been matched only by the surge in ever more desperate - and almost proudly corrupt - junk science from researchers who care not a jot about health if it threatens their grants and/or salary and state-funded Merc.

Just in the past couple of months, for example, we've seen baseless smear-jobs to undermine a favourable government review, along with appalling, easily-debunked junk-science-by-press-release designed specifically to create hysterical anti-vaping headlines all around the world.

This, remember, from the same people who have condemned 'Big Tobacco' for decades for misleading smokers, perverting science and putting personal gain over health. Their hypocrisy really is quite staggering, isn't it?

However, even I am now becoming amazed at how far these arrogant establishment liars are prepared to go to put a positive genie back in its bottle and get back to their comfortable state of smug, self-centred finger-wagging. The latest development - and the reason for the blatant mendacity being stepped up to a whole new level - is the recent approval by the MHRA of an e-cig which could, theoretically, be prescribed on the NHS.

This has caused a bit of a problem in Wales.

The path has been laid for e-cigarettes to be potentially made available on free prescription in Wales after a brand was granted a licence by a UK medicines body. 

The decision by the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency on the e-Voke e-cigarette applies across the UK and includes Wales.

This is the same Wales where - despite not a shred of credible evidence in its favour - the assembly is still planning to impose bans on public use of e-cigs. Awkward, huh?

Well apparently not, because like a teen caught doing something they shouldn't, a weak excuse has been cobbled together.

But the Welsh Government says the Public Health Bill which would put the ban into law doesn’t prevent the use of e-cigarettes as an aid to stop smoking. 

A Welsh Government spokeswoman said: "The Bill proposes to restrict the use of e-cigarettes in certain enclosed public places because we are concerned about the risk they pose to children in terms of normalising smoking behaviours."

And what of these medically licensed e-cigs, what are they like?

[A spokeswoman for the MHRA] added: “The e-Voke is the second product that looks like a cigarette meeting the definition of an e-cigarette to receive a marketing authorisation"

Oh I see. So to stop the "risk they pose to children in terms of normalising smoking behaviours", Wales will now have a law which allows e-cigs "that look like a cigarette" but will ban those which look absolutely nothing like one. Those funny provincials, eh?

I'd say you couldn't make it up, but ignorant, vapid, ideological establishment bansturbators and their useful idiots are doing exactly that almost on a daily basis about e-cigs now.

By way of exhibit B, consider this from the weekend as well.

Dr Tim Ballard, the vice-chairman of the Royal College of General Practitioners, called for more research to be carried out before patients are told they can get e-cigarettes on the NHS. 

"Potentially, there may be a place for the prescription of e-Voke as part of a smoking cessation programme, but GPs would be very wary of prescribing them until there was clear evidence of their safety and of their efficacy in helping people to quit," Dr Ballard said.

This is stunning! For years those ranged against vaping have clutched at the straw of there being no medically-licensed e-cig as a reason why their use can't be trusted and why bans are justified, but now there is a medically-licensed e-cig - even an intangible one which isn't yet on the market - they don't like that either!

The entire point of MHRA approval is that evidence of safety and efficacy must be established before it is given a green light.

A spokeswoman for the MHRA [...] said the licence “means it is a product of acceptable quality and can be an effective aid to smoking cessation.”

So what we are now seeing, believe it or not, is entrenched ideologists in the medical establishment effectively implying that the MHRA is incompetent; that medical approval is no guarantee of safety; and appearing quite willing to throw the entire British medicinal classification regime under the bus to defend a stance opposed to vaping based on nothing but a whim and a smile.

I really don't know how much further these weird people can go with such astounding denial, my crystal ball is all burned out. Five years ago, I predicted a very optimistic scenario where anti-smokers would be shown up by e-cigs to be absurd for adhering to hatred and baseless belief systems rooted in bigotry. This, however, has gone beyond my wildest dreams, the medical establishment transparently and publicly illustrating that it doesn't give a llama's spit about its own integrity and collective competence on the back of dogma and rumour-mongering is entirely unexpected.

The only thing we can be absolutely sure of, again, is that it's never been about health.