that product much harder to obtain.”
It’s true that many anti-vapers will cite nicotine content as
the reason that e-cigarettes are inherently unsafe, but they’re
completely ignoring the fact that nicotine is never the ingredient in
cigarettes that kills smokers.
Greg believes the mass-media has more of a responsibility to
inform the general public about the harm-reduction potential of
e-cigarettes, instead of getting hung up on their supposed ‘dangers’
with baiting headlines such as: ‘Are e-cigarettes really safe?’
He said: “You expect that the general public are going to fi nd it
diffi cult to understand what harm-reduction is, but you expect a lot
more from the news media.
“You’d think that a journalist who spends more than 30 minutes
looking at the topic would understand that it is a debate about
harm-reduction, not harm-elimination.”
Greg believes that the key to changing this narrative is for vaping
advocates to pitch journalists with their own stories of success or
delicately approach them when they get the story wrong, so they
have the opportunity to learn and get it right next time.
After all, we only want to see the news headlines stop asking
whether vaping is safe, because that’s the wrong question to be
asking. Instead, we should be asking: is vaping safer?
And the answer to that question is, unequivocally, yes.
“In general, many people think
of risk as fi tting into one of two
boxes: safe or not safe.”
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