It's an extremely complex issue. It's much more than a Trump or bipartisan political thing. There are a lot of hands in the pie with this issue.
The vaping community wants reasonable regulation to ensure its safe and to allow for innovation of future technology. They see vaping purely as "harm reduction" that is 95% safer than smoking and twice as effective to stop smoking as pharmaceutical nicotine gum or patches. Flavors are considered essential to vapers because it differentiates vaping from smoking. Forcing a smoker / want-to-be vaper to vape a tobacco flavor is like asking an alcoholic to come to an AA meeting in a bar.
The vaping industry was created by adult consumers for adult consumers. Vape shops have always used photo ID age verification.
The anti-smoking and anti-vaping community hate vaping because it "looks like smoking". They have an unreasonable fear of nicotine and fear that youth who vape are setting themselves up for a generation of lifelong addiction.
Big Tobacco and Big Pharma have huge stakes into the future of vaping, as it has an indirect effect on their future profits.
Juul, Vuse, Blu (Big Tobacco) marketed to the youth and ensured their products were available to youth who had access to businesses with poor age verification processes. Yet the entire vaping industry is blamed for these bad actors when youth abuse their products.
Big Pharma sponsors "bad science" studies that cherry pick any negativity they can find about vaping and suggest click-bait headlines for news and social media stories.
Politicians have multiple reasons to negatively effect vaping. Start out with the tobacco Master Settlement Agreement. The more money Big Tobacco makes, the more money that the States get; the less money that BT makes, the less money the States get. The sale of tobacco has steadily dropped since vaping became available 10 years ago. Therefore, vaping has had a negative effect on tobacco and government profits and is therefore declared the enemy.
We've seen so-called US medical experts claim that the respected UK Medical Association is a bogus medical community after it declared vaping to be safer than smoking, because that doesn't fit into their narrative. There are actually physicians saying smoking is safer than vaping. "We don't know what chemicals are in e-cigarettes" is being shouted out to the media, yet all of the main ingredients in e-liquid (propylene glycol and vegetable glycerin) has been in use (inhaled) by the medical community for decades. Many so-called experts say vapers haven't really quit smoking, its all bad if its inhaled into the lungs. They have no concept of "harm reduction".
Then there are policy makers trying to regulate a product that they don't understand the science or the social implications of the products. Parents are demanding that the goverment "do something" because their kids are vaping in the school restroom. They mistakenly believe they are vaping because of sweet flavors when in reality they are "Juuling" for the head rush. Thus the intended ban on flavors. Vapers and the industry say flavors are essential and a flavor ban will put most vape shops out of business, force some vapers to return back to smoking, or create a black market for flavored vapes.
I'm an admitted conspiracy theorist, and believe there are those in the FDA and CDC who are in collusion with Big Tobacco and Big Pharma and have covert plans to keep the vape industry down. I see a huge conflict of interest when directors for the CDC and the Surgeon General all own stock in tobacco.
The general public and mass media have little true knowledge of vaping and how it could be the greatest godsend for public health in a century.
Frankly, I'm shocked that vaping is still in existance after the clusterfock of the black market THC crisis and the hysteria caused by the way the media and CDC handled the situation. So much misinformation it was criminal.
Add to these factors that our First Lady has her own campaign to ban vaping. It's her "war on drugs" to "save the kids".
Despite the scientific proof of their relative safety and proven effectiveness of e-cigarettes, the odds have been stacked against us from the beginning.
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), and I donate monthly to CASAA.
