I pretty much agree with the consensus here, that there's no way we can really "lose" -- there is always a black market for stuff that people want, I mean just look at how the war on drugs has been going on ad infinitum, but they're still out there, and probably always will be, no matter how many acronymic organizations the stuffed shirts create. They keep raising the prices on cigarettes, I suppose to discourage its use, but hey, I keep finding a way to afford to smoke, no matter how broke I am.
I think it's kinda like when the idiots in Washington (DC -- WA state seems extremely NON-idiotic!) discovered the internet -- approximately 10 years after everyone else did. They were appalled; people were actually saying what they thought, AND GETTING AWAY WITH IT, and that's just offensive to stuffed shirt politicos. And all that sales tax money that isn't being paid, because people are buying online from different states -- how the hell do you police that? YOU CAN'T! It's true that the WWW is a wild and often dangerous place, so the real onus is on the users to learn to protect themselves, because there's only so much that can be done from the outside to make it safer.
Seems quite true of tobacco use, too -- if you smoke it, it's dangerous, and even those of us who've resisted quitting or found it so far impossible to quit have to acknowledge the danger of tobacco smoking, and now a lot of us are trying to do something about it -- it's self-preservation, and getting in the way of people trying to preserve their own lives is a sure way to get trampled! Many if not most of us are already familiar with the uselessness of patches and pills, so the FDA or BP preaching that nonsense is just a lot of "sound and fury" -- no one is really listening, because we already tried that and it didn't work.
I think it's really that government is the ultimate control freak -- it just goes nuts that people are doing something that it can't control, but ultimately, it will have to concede that no control, or at least very little control, is really possible -- this country is what, about 300 million, and growing all the time? There is no way to truly control that many people, unless you just go totally fascist and institute martial law everywhere, and given our 2nd amendment, that doesn't seem too likely to happen in the US. What they're really trying to control at this point is PERCEPTION -- to manipulate people's minds by all this important-sounding jargon into believing that e-cigs are as dangerous as the real thing, and that's where we, as vapers, really come in -- if they keep saying that e-cigs are just as dangerous as the real ones, but we just stubbornly refuse to get sick and die from vaping, well... where exactly does that leave their "party line"?
Reminds me of some book I read about religious zealots, who kept saying that doing thus-and-such would kill you and send you to hell -- and the hero replies, "you keep saying that, and it keeps NOT HAPPENING..."
Andria
