This article was fairly balanced,
Electronic cigarettes have unsafe ingredients, FDA tests find - Cleveland.com
Here is the email I sent to the reporter.
Thank you for a balanced view of the FDA announcement about electronic cigarettes. I am a user of these products, having gone from a 40 year pack a day cigarette habit to less than five cigarettes a day using e cigarettes. Although no product is 100% safe, the electronic cigarette is certainly safer than Marlboros.
I marvel at the choice of language chosen by anti-smokers to describe the chemicals that make up both regular cigarettes and now the e cigarette. The language is carefully chosen to invoke terror and is, in many cases, inappropriate. To describe cigarettes, they always mention arsenic as an ingredient, yet arsenic is not a component limited to cigarettes. It is a component of our very water supply at 8 times the permissable level. It is also present in the soil itself. Yet that word invokes the image of Arsenic and Old Lace....very clever marketing from the anti-smokers. Now, we see the term anti freeze to describe what goes into electronic cigarettes. Cleverly, the headline suggests that the makers of electronic cigarettes go to an auto parts store and secretly dump bottles of anti freeze into the cartridges of electronic cigarettes. Nothing could be further from the truth. Note also that that one chemical compound was found in trace amounts only in 1 of 19 cartridges tested.
Dr. Michael Siegel has written extensively about this insanity to ban electronic cigarettes without justification. I urge you to read his conclusions about the chemical makeup of electronic cigarettes, and to investigate further. You can read about Dr. Siegel, a former member of the anti-smoking cartel, who was expelled from the group for questioning certain conclusions they had reached. His blog and those analyses are at
The Rest of the Story: Tobacco News Analysis and Commentary
Thousands of smokers, like myself, have switched to electronic cigarettes as an alternative to smoking Marlboros. Most of us will return to regular cigarettes should the e cig be banned. Most would agree that even though there may be risks for users of the e cig, those risks are thousands of times less than smoking
tobacco. It is interesting to note that Siegel's column today discusses a study of Nicorette gum and the carcinogens it contains: carcinogens at a higher level than cigarettes in the saliva of users. The FDA encourages the use of Nicorette gum as it villifies the electronic cigarette. Something is very suspicious in the FDA warning and its choice of headline language. Please consider investigating this further and reporting your results. There are hundreds of thousands of electronic cigarette users waiting for someone like you to report the truth. Thank you.
