“
“Companies who make and sell nicotine
gum, sprays, patches, lozenges and the
likes are now seeing a steep and very
drastic decline in revenues”
“
We have all seen it all over Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn
and other places … “E-cigs as dangerous as smoking” or,
“Vaping more harmful than we thought,” or the new one,
“Vaping a teen gateway to smoking.” Now, me, you, the
folks who are casually glancing over this article in your
vape shop, we all know that these kinds of articles can be
taken with a grain of salt, and there’s a reason for it. It’s
funding.
Lately, on the Nicotine and Tobacco Research Journal,
another one of these research papers was published
which had that same old line of, “Vaping is a gateway to
teen smoking.” The teen gateway phenomenon is nothing
new. It’s been dragged out time and time again, especially
over in the US where vaping and its industry is under
constant attack.
As some of you may know, very recently over here in the
UK the Science and Technology Committee produced a
dossier which fully backed up e-cigarettes under a cross
party (Labour, Conservatives etc) committee and even
suggested to the government that current laws in the UK
under the TPD/TRPR should be looked at again.
Are kids using e-cigarettes as a gateway to smoking? Not
according to the aforementioned Science and Technology
Commission which stated there is no tangible evidence
that this is happening at all, at least in the UK, and let’s
face it folks, the UK has far, far more lax laws about
e-cigarettes than the US. If there was a so-called epidemic
of teens vaping as a gateway to smoking, then it should
have appeared here in the UK first. The fact is it didn’t,
and it never has.
The problem is research has been cropping up time and
time again, with papers from the US, lately from Greece
and from Australia all saying the same tired old lines of
e-cigarettes are dangerous or running out with the gateway
to smoking line. Dig deeper though, much deeper, and
you can kind of see why the paper went in that direction.
Let’s take the one that was printed in the Nicotine and
Tobacco Research Journal. The paper itself was well
written. It didn’t go down the road of hyperbole and buzz
words, but the overall fundamental premise of the paper
is put on shaky ground when you find out who one of the
main corporate backers are. Pfizer.
Pfizer, if you have not heard of them, are a pharma
company who make and sell Champix which is a stop
smoking aid, and Pfizer are not the first, or the last pharma
company to put big money behind research which paints
e-cigarettes in a bad light, or an even worse light than they
painted before.
The problem with these papers is not you or I reading
them. The problem is the mass media, and the general
public. Over the course of three years in the UK, the
general public’s overall thoughts on e-cigarettes went from
good to neutral, and then to bad. The same can be said
for the US. When e-cigarettes first came out, no one was
sure how to treat them. It was blatantly obvious that they
are less harmful than smoking. However, as the years
have rolled on, the one major obvious factor is the sheer
amount of money that e-cigarettes is costing the pharma
companies. Companies who make and sell nicotine gum,
sprays, patches, lozenges and the likes are now seeing a
steep and very drastic decline in the revenues being made
from their stop smoking aid.
Big Tobacco get around the loss by simply taking over and
buying up companies in the starter end of the market –
like blu and MyVonErl for instance – the problem is, Big
Pharma can’t really do that. So instead, they back up
papers painting vaping in a bad light.
This is a problem that vape shops in the UK have started
to see. A smoker walks into a vape shop, smoker says they
want to give up smoking, but the smoker isn’t sure about
e-cigarettes because he had read that “it was worse than
smoking” and this, right here, is the major issue that we as
an industry and a community now face.
All I can say is this. As a shop owner, being prepared for
something like this is crucial. Mentioning the 95 percent
safer than smoking by the Royal College of Physicians is
a good start, also mentioning that a cross parliamentary
body has found no evidence of the mass scare tactics
of some papers is another way. Having clippings from
journals by Dr Farsalinos, clippings from the Science and
Technology Committee is another way, providing evidence
from multiple sources that discredit what’s being seen
on the mass media is the sure way to turn a smoker who
walked into your shop who is unsure about vaping, into a
vaper who will see real life benefits of giving up smoking.
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