Daily Beast vaping article

[Tezcatlipoca]

A friend of mine just brought this article from The Daily Beast to my attention:

www. thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/01/31/my-electronic-cigarette-addiction.html"]http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/01/31/my-electronic-cigarette-addiction.html
[/URL]

MODERATED by classwife : I removed the [URL="http:// to break the live link[/]

Is it just me, or does it read like a work of fiction? It managed to hit on all of the key words: FDA, antifreeze, and finally, Chinese. And certain elements of the story seemed a bit cliche or fantastic: Hindu doctor named Patel, last cigarette before getting on a train (romantically standing on the platform with his last cigarette, train as a metaphor for quitting smoking, i.e. liminal point between his unhealthy past and healthier future), and the magical place where this guy could vape on a plane, in a restaurant, or in meetings. And has he really been vaping disposables for the last two years (especially as religiously as he says)?! If he has researched vaping to he point where he can pull some quote from a doctor from the Mayo clinic, surely he has stumbled across ECF and would know that there are a lot of devices beyond disposables and plenty of juice that doesn't come from China. I could be totally wrong here, but this struck me as the work of someone who had little to no experience with vaping, and is especially timely given the immanent threat of FDA regulation.

 

[MorpheusPA]

That article was dreadful and managed to hit every single canard thrown at e-cigarettes.

I'd hesitate to ask how much BP paid him to write it, but suspect somebody did pay him off.

Honestly, I can play the game too, if I want to. "Reading that article on your computer will generate light radiation your eyes pick up. Radiation, which includes gamma rays, can kill you in sufficient quantity." So therefore don't read the article, it can kill you.

The fact that visible light and gamma rays have little to do with each other, energy-wise, is of course notwithstanding. Plus the entire quoted statement benefits from being one hundred percent true.

 

[junkman]

Yeah, the guy is a stooge.

 

[Petrodus]

Reminds me of a quote from Beetlejuice
"This thing reads like stereo instructions"

 

[aubergine]

See my thread below on that one. I caught it very early in the morning, as I generally read the beast along with others over coffee every day.
I was actually sorry that it disappeared from the front page at about 4PM - because it DID hit every canard and because the liveliness of that particular comment section would have provided a good, widely read forum for rebuttal. Would have really cooked up in the evening. Odd to think of him as a stooge as he's a good journalist with a serious name brand, but I thought it sounded very disingenuous, too. Strange.

 

[Tezcatlipoca]

Nice to see you, Aubergine! The redundancy was an oversight on my part fueled mostly by my shock and disgust!

 

[mostlyclassics]

Odd to think of him as a stooge as he's a good journalist with a serious name brand, but I thought it sounded very disingenuous, too.

By virtue of that article, Eli Lake has lost any respect I might have had for him as a journalist. After reading that hatchet piece, how can I possibly expect anything that comes out of his word processor to be true? Were he to assert that "white is white and black is black," I'd feel compelled to check it out. And because fact-checking everything a journalist spews chews up my quite limited time, I have permanently struck Eli Lake from my "to read" list of journalists.