FEATURE
FEATURE
ON BIG TOBACCO , THE ANTI-TOBACCO LOBBY AND THE VAPING INDUSTRY
PART II
I n the last issue , former Winston Man David Goerlitz told how he turned his back on a $ 100,000-a-year career promoting tobacco and then dedicated his life to helping prevent youngsters from starting to smoke in the first place . In the concluding part of this feature , we look at how David turned to e-cigarettes and discover why he is now a passionate advocate for the vaping industry . You might think it takes some doing to fall out of favour with both Big Tobacco and the anti-tobacco movement … but David Goerlitz has managed to do just that . He says things started to go wrong for him with the anti-tobacco lobby when the ‘ stop smoking ’ message actually started to work and have an impact on cigarette sales . David says each was as greedy as the other , with the tobacco companies wanting the income from getting people addicted to nicotine and the anti-tobacco movement wanting the grants and funding
62 ISSUE 09 VAPOUROUND MAGAZINE to stay in business . Obviously if more and more people quit smoking then both the tobacco industry and the anti-tobacco industries would decline . David says both sides were , in fact , working to continue with the status quo and that meant more people would continue to die needlessly each year . He said : “ For 15 years they didn ’ t script me , they let me say what I wanted but now we were making a difference and consumption was going down a little bit things changed . “ By about 2006 the anti-tobacco people didn ’ t want me to say this or didn ’ t want me to say that and I was just as adamant that I didn ’ t want to be scripted . “ We all know that smoking kills and when I said the tobacco industry was immoral it made sense to a lot of people and I wanted to keep on saying it . “ I know a lot of people , including people in my family , who have died from a smoking-caused illness so I wanted to speak out against smoking .
“ In 2006 I pretty much had it with the whole thing because nobody wanted me to tell the truth any more . Big Tobacco and the antitobacco industry were all complicit with each other so I stopped working for the anti-tobacco people . “ I just have to tell my story . I am not going to not go away . The tobacco industry is afraid of me , the anti-tobacco movement considers me a traitor and I don ’ t care .”
David had no real plan for what he wanted to do next until the first e-cigarette devices started hitting the market from China . They looked like normal cigarettes , their tips even glowed red , and they caught on