Laying down, trying to sleep, but my mind is racing. I keep thinking, what can we do, besides writing letters to our congressmen and whatnot, for the benefit of the ECO/whatever-the-new-name-is and current and future vapers in general?
And it hit me: the single biggest obstacle we face is
public ignorance. So how do we combat that?
Instead of just advocating and defending
vaping, we should make it a point to educate people on the potential for
harm reduction using nicotine replacement without cessation and the reasons behind it, i.e. "quit or die" dooms those who cannot quit nicotine. We need to separate the wheat from the chaff, the nicotine from the smoke, and make it clear that in normal doses,
nicotine is not much more dangerous than coffee, and that it's only the smoke that people should be afraid of.
Of course, in order to do this we need to create a database of articles and research from credible doctors to support this position, and it should be easily accessible by anyone who visits the site (in a sidebar on the home page, perhaps). I've seen quite a few links on this forum that would be great (my personal favorite is tobaccoharmreduction.org).
This also means we show support for other non-smoke forms of nicotine, ones that have already been heavily researched like snus. Unfortunately this also means big pharma nicotine products, as they are
supplements that replace nicotine and are currently the most comparable FDA-approved products to vaporizers (though obviously to us, less effective
). Giving positive mention to these other products will have a two-fold effect:
1) It shows that we're in this for the public good, and we're not just suppliers doing this for the money (well, they'd be less likely to think that), and
2)
It gets the public closer to seeing vaporizers in the same category as these much healthier products and further from associating them with cancerous cigarettes.
I may be stepping out of bounds a little of the original ECO concept, but we can get such a strong support base by educating and providing people with honest information. Vapers are a little-known minority right now, so we're going to need support from many newly-educated nonvapers to make this work.
Just my two cents (or $200, whatever
). I'm going to bed now so i won't see any replies til tomorrow. Goodnight all
