It’s not the vaping they want to stop, it’s the lack of smoking

Last night I made a decision, as I often do on Sunday evenings, to get an early night and then be up at the crack of dawn to go and punish myself down the gym.      The minor annoyance that getting up early causes is soon dissipated by the day long buzz of having exercised.  Typically a winning situation.

However, last night, having just written the first post for my “vaped crusader” blog, my mind was filled with a myriad of possibilities as to what this blog could potentially achieve and, as a result, rather than drifting off into a blissful sleep, one thought kept running around my head.

“It’s not the vaping they want to stop, it’s the lack of smoking”

I stopped smoking in around 2011 and made the switch to vaping.  Back then it was still a relatively new thing as far as the wider world was concerned.  There were no vape shops, every pub – even Wetherspoons – seemed to allow vaping on their premises and there were no lurid headlines in the “popular” press that, incorrectly, screamed of the dangers to society that electronic cigarettes posed.

Unknown as they were, most articles you would have seen at the time would have been positive, after all, this was an invention that mimicked the effects of smoking without many of the downsides.   It was something that, in theory, the world had been waiting for.  Tobacco, after all was and still is the biggest preventable cause of death on the planet.

Now, we live in different times, times which are about to get even worse as far as vaping is concerned.   Not because new evidence has emerged that shows how evil and dangerous these things are but because the public perception has been altered by mass produced lies, written and distributed by those with a vested interest in keeping the world smoking.

And this is where the basis of this thought came from.   Vaping is not the problem.   It wasn’t the problem in 2011 and, despite a few minor incidents of exploding mods or nasty chemicals being found in certain brands of e-liquid, it certainly doesn’t pose any greater a threat to our society now as it did then and certainly offers all of the benefits of tobacco harm reduction as before.

We, as human beings, do far many more damaging things to ourselves – and our planet – than vaping and I don’t see anywhere near the level of antagonism from politicians and the media towards, say, hand gliding, fast food, alcohol or the burning of fossil fuels.

The problem is that, due to the popularity of vaping, tobacco sales have dropped below any previously recorded level.   Tobacco brings in a lot of tax.    It also causes a lot of diseases, diseases which have to be treated with expensive medicines.   Expensive medicines that make large pharmaceutical companies a lot of money.   And therein lies the problem.

Governments are perfectly ok with people “trying” to stop smoking by using “medically approved” nicotine replacement therapy which they know doesn’t work but, because e-cigs (in the main) aren’t produced by their tobacco and pharma buddies, they must be stopped or must be cast in such a bad light that demand for them drops.

The bigger picture is that governments couldn’t care less what you do to yourself as long as your actions don’t upset the status quo. (we all know Rick Parfitt gets a bit touchy).   If a few thousand people vaped, as was probably the case in 2011, it’ll be ignored and classed as a fringe activity.  Now that few thousand has turned into a couple of million, suddenly there’s a problem, not because of what they are doing (vaping) but because of what they’re not doing (smoking)

It’s not the vaping they want to stop, it’s the lack of smoking!