It's the way the world turns. We have to live with the levers we have. Big Vapor will decide how and when to get involved in legal action. So will CASAA and ACLU. We have to live with that or get involved in those organisations. Or start our own.
A new Vapor Advocacy group like you suggest would need dedicated people to set it up, and a huge amount of money and expertise. And everyone who might have an interest would also have their own opinions on the best way to proceed. Like whether to spend their time and money on fighting every law, or concentrate their fire on a handful of laws as an example. Should it go after public vaping laws or concentrate on laws that will stop vaping completely. A lot of vapers don't care about public vaping laws or think they are the least of our problems. Others think that is the thin end of the wedge and needs to be implacably opposed. Should we fight for a goal of ensuring that some form of vaping survives, or take an all or nothing approach.
There are a thousand opinions out there. People might not give money to a group that didn't take the approach they favor. Do we have a thousand groups representing all the possible approaches?
The good thing about existing groups, like vendor organisations or CASAA is that they have a cohesive agenda. If we want to change their approach then become active in those groups. Or start our own if we feel we can do better.
Just to piggyback on this...
When CASAA first started, we fought all of the local laws, but we became overwhelmed. Right now CASAA is fighting STATE-level laws in over a dozen states. Unfortunately, we are a 9 member board of unpaid volunteers, who have jobs and families that keep us from traveling to every state. It would be a full time job for at least 10 people to go to every state right now, imagine if we were trying to go to every county and town - there are several dozens right now. Even if we could, local lawmakers are generally wary of outside groups. They react far better to their own constituents fighting a law. Just sending an out-of-state "lobbyist" to fight for vapers in an area isn't very effective - locals MUST participate and step up to fight. Our "wins" have all been in places where local vapers stepped up and spoke out. They called and wrote their lawmakers and showed up at meetings. That's far more effective than one CASAA lobbyist calling, writing or speaking.
CASAA tries to empower it's members to fight the local fights. A dozen or more local groups have formed to fight againt both state-level and local-level laws. (I even formed WSAC, which is a group to fight local laws locally in Wisconsin.) This is what vapers need to do, because CASAA cannot do it for them. We'd need millions of dollars to be able to afford to hire and train staff or hire lobbyists in every state, to fight every battle on the state and local level. Most of our donations are in the $5 to $10 range, which results in CASAA having only around $200,000 total. We'd need to get that amount, if not more, every MONTH to fight every proposed law at every level.
It's important to remember that CASAA was formed by vapers right here on ECF. But we weren't formed or set up to be a lobby organization. We were formed to educate people and spread factual information about vaping and tobacco harm reduction. We ended up fighting these laws by default because no one else was. But our process always involved getting local vapers to act and just trying to support THEIR efforts, not be the ones doing the fighting for them. We simply don't have the manpower or funding to act in that capacity and unless we start getting about 10 times the funding and 10 times the volunteers, I don't see us ever doing that.
As a side note, starting an organization is not easy. A lot of people will say they are all for it, but when it's time to do the dirty work, very few can be found or they don't stick around long. It's a huge amount of work. CASAA only stayed together because of a very few dedicated people who were willing to keep it going. We started with 13 elected directors, but only half of them ever did anything. Today, just 2 of the original directors are still involved with CASAA. It takes a lot of personal time and some directors are working 40+ hours a week just to get things done. (We are finally getting to the point where we can afford to be looking into hiring some help. But even that takes time vetting and training people - which we'd have to do.)
Starting WSAC, it's been hard to get people to join. After 2 months we have less than 300 registered members, even though there are at least 4,000 vapers in the Wisconsin vaping groups on Facebook. People are more occupied doing "hand checks," talking about their devices and liquids and posting cloud videos. We haven't even started asking for donations. People just have to fill out a form with their name, email and county and they won't even do that. Unfortunately, people generally don't get involved until a ban or law hits their own town and even then, just 1% will actually step up and do the work that needs to be done.
