I've never really been one for politics, but due to the potential impact of the current path politicians are going down in an attempt to pressure the FDA to ban flavors and how passionate I feel about vaping, earlier today I decided to write one of my state's senators.
I felt like sharing it with the forum so I've included what I wrote. The only thing I changed from the original is my name.
Warning: It's really long.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Hi Senator Durbin,
I read your statement and wanted to address it. Below I've included your statement in that NBC news article.
**The vaping industry says its flavors are meant to appeal to adults but anti-tobacco advocates, medical groups and even politicians reject this argument. "It’s ludicrous to think flavors like bubble gum, cotton candy, or tutti frutti are meant for adults," senators Dick Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, and Lisa Murkowski, an Alaska Republican, said in a joint statement.**
Source- With teen vaping up 78 percent, FDA gets tougher
I'm a 36 year old male. I smoked cigarettes for a vast majority of my life between the summer of 2000 to April 2017. I tried quitting numerous times using a variety of methods ranging from nicotine gum to patches to attempting to taper down the number of cigarettes a day.
The longest period of abstinence from my habit before once again relapsing back to smoking cigarettes was a couple months.
I knew smoking wasn't good for me and it was affecting my health. On top of that my grandfather had been a two pack a day smoker, developed lung cancer in his early forties and died before I was born. Still even with knowing that and feeling the effect it was having to my health, my habit remained undeterred.
I was getting sick all the time and causing my depression to get worse. I'll paint a picture of the insanity of the situation I was living in for you. I'd wake up in the morning and would immediately head outside so I could have my first cigarette of the day. The walk to my front door was filled with dread because I knew what was in for. I'd light a cigarette, smoke the whole thing and usually light up a second one. All the while hating the experience. There would be an immediate change come over me. My breathing would feel labored, my energy level would diminish and this sickly feeling would come over me. Through out the day this would stay with me and be perpetuated over and over by smoking more cigarettes. In an average week, I was smoking in between a carton to a carton and a half.
This all changed for me when I discovered vaping in 2015. I was watching something on youtube and saw the person speaking in the video pull out a device and inhale vapor from it. I immediately was curious about what I had just seen and extensively researched it over a week to educate myself. After emerging myself in a tremendous of information and reading countless stories of other people experiences, I decided to once again try to quit smoking with the assistance of vaping.
Within two days, I had cut my daily cigarette use in half. By the fifth day, my tobacco consumption had dropped to zero. I remember this because sometime after dinner it occurred to me that I had gone roughly twenty four hours without a cigarette. Not only that, but due to the enjoyable experience of vaping, the thought of lighting up a cigarette was an immediate no from me.
A couple weeks later, I was hanging out with one of my friends and had forgotten to bring my vaporizer. My friend was an avid smoker and after a few times of him smoking a cigarette I asked him for one. I took one drag of it and it was absolutely disgusting. I immediately put it out and beelined to the bathroom for some mouthwash.
That was 21 months ago and I haven't gone touched a cigarette since. Fast forward to today, my immune system has drastically improved so much that I can't even recall the last time I've been sick.
I felt it was necessary to give you that backstory into my experience because my experience is very similar to millions of other vapers worldwide.
To take things even further, I'm a DIY'er when it comes to e juice. You singled out bubble gum, cotton candy and tutti frutti flavors as being ludicrous to think being meant for adults. I'm going to assume this was in reference to some of the brand name e juices on the market.
Regardless, what commercial e juice companies are doing are the same thing DIY'ers are doing. We are after an enjoyable experience that's based on our flavor and sensory preferences, interests and curiosities.
We do this by crafting our flavor profiles through the use of flavor ingredients and techniques in a fashion that could be compared to efforts in culinary arts or craft brewing beer.
These flavor ingredients are primarily made from food grade Propylene glycol (PG) and Vegetable Glycerin (VG), which are deemed safe for human consumption by the FDA.
I also fall into the category of being a millennial. Right now, as a generation we have massive amounts of influence on the consumer market. I base that statement on data analysis in regards to millennials:
**Millennials account for a quarter of the population of the United States.**
Source- https://www.bizjournals.com/phoenix...-to-understand-and-market-to-millennials.html
**Millennial shoppers spend $600 billion in the United States each year.**
source- Who are the Millennial shoppers? And what do they really want? | Accenture Outlook
Here's an example of what I'm talking about in terms of influence:
**In 2018, bartenders swap out the sugar with salt to give more complex and sharper cocktails to their patrons. Vegetables no longer have to wait for a Bloody Mary or Gibson when there are options like carrot mimosas or kale martinis out there during happy hour. There’s a growing number of savory cocktails that push the boundaries as well with mixologists opting for more unique ingredients such as squid ink, beef, or peanut syrup.**
Source- The Most Popular Alcohol Trends Seen so Far in 2018 #oldliquorsmagazine
Here's more things in regards to the effect that millennials are having on the food and beverage industry.
The 109 Hottest Food Trends for 2018
Spirits trends: five key innovative themes leading the drinks industry
2018 flavor trends- https://downloads.mintel.com/private/wroEg/files/678021/
As for vaping, a lot of misinformation on is out there and due to the nature of human beings when it comes to making automatic assumptions about things they are ill-informed on, the thought is that since e juice may contain nicotine and when vaped it looks like you are smoking, it must have simliar if not the same effects on the body as smoking cigarettes.
Now I'm not saying this aspect of our human nature is wrong at all, it's one of the factors that contributed to our survival as a species.
Here's some more info in regards to vaping:
**Public Health England's latest report on vaping highlighted evidence that e-cigarettes are less harmful than regular cigarettes, and that there was no evidence so far to suggest that e-cigarettes might encourage young people to take up smoking.** (Credit: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-44295336)
Public Health England's report:
https://www.gov.uk/government/publi...ecutive-summary#use-of-e-cigarettes-in-adults
**The 20% of young people who vape is now on par with this age group's use of conventional cigarettes. It's possible that one cause of the drop in cigarette smoking among young people is the development of vaping as a new nicotine delivery method.**
**These current data show a significant overlap in the two smoking behaviors -- people who smoke conventional cigarettes are by far the most likely to be vaping. And vaping has become particularly prevalent among young people, even as their rate of smoking cigarettes has plummeted. Thus, it seems possible that the advent of electronic cigarettes could, on balance, be having an overall positive effect on the health of the American population.
Public health researchers clearly would prefer that Americans, particularly young people, don't use nicotine at all because its addictive nature leads to negative effects associated with the ways in which it is ingested into the system. But as smoking expert Dr. Kenneth Warner of the University of Michigan School of Public Health said in a recent Gallup podcast, "I personally believe based on my research that e-cigarettes are more beneficial than harmful to the public's health because research suggests that vaping is helping at least a subset of smokers to quit smoking.**
https://news.gallup.com/poll/237818/young-people-adopt-vaping-smoking-rate-plummets.aspx
Here's an example of benefits in terms of Nicotine and ADHD:
**We began to look into what were the potential effects, neural effects of nicotine on cognitive processing in ADHD. We knew that amphetamines for example were used, they helped … stimulants helped patients with ADHD and what we found by actually taking this into the lab was that there was a cognitive process of what we call behavioral inhibition that nicotine really seems to help in these patients. In other words, it kind of slows down their brain a little bit and reduces impulsive responding in the lab. What we showed in a paper some years ago was that you could actually use this lab measure to predict how effective a nicotinic treatment might be in a real world test.**
- Dr. Paul Newhouse
Director of the Center for Cognitive Medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center
Source- https://blog.bulletproof.com/paul-newhouse/
Here's from a study that "sought to examine the potential adverse effects of e-cigarette vapor and conventional cigarette smoke on lung surfactant interfacial properties."
**Results
E-cigarette vapor regardless of the dose and flavoring of the e-liquid did not affect surfactant interfacial properties. In contrast, smoke from conventional cigarettes had a drastic, dose-dependent effect on Infasurf® interfacial properties reducing the maximum surface pressure from 65.1 ± 0.2 mN/m to 46.1 ± 1.3 mN/m at the highest dose. Cigarette smoke and e-cigarette vapor both altered surfactant microstructure resulting in an increase in the area of lipid multilayers. Studies with individual smoke components revealed that tar was the smoke component most disruptive to surfactant function.
Conclusions
While both e-cigarette vapor and conventional cigarette smoke affect surfactant lateral structure, only cigarette smoke disrupts surfactant interfacial properties. The surfactant inhibitory compound in conventional cigarettes is tar, which is a product of burning and is thus absent in e-cigarette vapor.**
https://respiratory-research.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12931-017-0676-9
My concern with everything that is currently transpiring when it comes to vaping is the potential devastating effects this path may lead to for the industry, for the advancement of medical science and the real possibility that this effective method to quit smoking.
I want to make it clear that I am not advocating underage nicotine usage.
This is purely about the fact that vaping and smoking cigarettes are different. One main reason is because of the method it's consumed.
Comparing these methods and assuming the outcome will be the same is akin to assuming that if someone filled their gas tank with water it should have the same effect as gasoline because they are both liquids.
With them being different, they should be treated differently than cigarettes.
This is from a press release on your website:
**In April, Durbin and his colleagues sent a letter to the FDA pressing them for swift action on e-cigarette regulations and urging the agency to take immediate steps to ban kid-friendly candy and fruit flavorings that are used with e-cigarettes and cigars.**
Source- https://www.durbin.senate.gov/newsr...otect-children-from-addictive-vaping-products
I strongly oppose this action to ban candy and fruit flavorings that are used in the production of e juice.
A more appropriate action would be to simply make acquiring them harder for people under the age of 18.
Please cease and desist this crusade to ban these flavorings and instead pursue alternative solutions to achieve the end goal you've stated in terms of protecting children from vaping products.
Thank you for your time.
Sincerely,
Morgan_Drury
I felt like sharing it with the forum so I've included what I wrote. The only thing I changed from the original is my name.
Warning: It's really long.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Hi Senator Durbin,
I read your statement and wanted to address it. Below I've included your statement in that NBC news article.
**The vaping industry says its flavors are meant to appeal to adults but anti-tobacco advocates, medical groups and even politicians reject this argument. "It’s ludicrous to think flavors like bubble gum, cotton candy, or tutti frutti are meant for adults," senators Dick Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, and Lisa Murkowski, an Alaska Republican, said in a joint statement.**
Source- With teen vaping up 78 percent, FDA gets tougher
I'm a 36 year old male. I smoked cigarettes for a vast majority of my life between the summer of 2000 to April 2017. I tried quitting numerous times using a variety of methods ranging from nicotine gum to patches to attempting to taper down the number of cigarettes a day.
The longest period of abstinence from my habit before once again relapsing back to smoking cigarettes was a couple months.
I knew smoking wasn't good for me and it was affecting my health. On top of that my grandfather had been a two pack a day smoker, developed lung cancer in his early forties and died before I was born. Still even with knowing that and feeling the effect it was having to my health, my habit remained undeterred.
I was getting sick all the time and causing my depression to get worse. I'll paint a picture of the insanity of the situation I was living in for you. I'd wake up in the morning and would immediately head outside so I could have my first cigarette of the day. The walk to my front door was filled with dread because I knew what was in for. I'd light a cigarette, smoke the whole thing and usually light up a second one. All the while hating the experience. There would be an immediate change come over me. My breathing would feel labored, my energy level would diminish and this sickly feeling would come over me. Through out the day this would stay with me and be perpetuated over and over by smoking more cigarettes. In an average week, I was smoking in between a carton to a carton and a half.
This all changed for me when I discovered vaping in 2015. I was watching something on youtube and saw the person speaking in the video pull out a device and inhale vapor from it. I immediately was curious about what I had just seen and extensively researched it over a week to educate myself. After emerging myself in a tremendous of information and reading countless stories of other people experiences, I decided to once again try to quit smoking with the assistance of vaping.
Within two days, I had cut my daily cigarette use in half. By the fifth day, my tobacco consumption had dropped to zero. I remember this because sometime after dinner it occurred to me that I had gone roughly twenty four hours without a cigarette. Not only that, but due to the enjoyable experience of vaping, the thought of lighting up a cigarette was an immediate no from me.
A couple weeks later, I was hanging out with one of my friends and had forgotten to bring my vaporizer. My friend was an avid smoker and after a few times of him smoking a cigarette I asked him for one. I took one drag of it and it was absolutely disgusting. I immediately put it out and beelined to the bathroom for some mouthwash.
That was 21 months ago and I haven't gone touched a cigarette since. Fast forward to today, my immune system has drastically improved so much that I can't even recall the last time I've been sick.
I felt it was necessary to give you that backstory into my experience because my experience is very similar to millions of other vapers worldwide.
To take things even further, I'm a DIY'er when it comes to e juice. You singled out bubble gum, cotton candy and tutti frutti flavors as being ludicrous to think being meant for adults. I'm going to assume this was in reference to some of the brand name e juices on the market.
Regardless, what commercial e juice companies are doing are the same thing DIY'ers are doing. We are after an enjoyable experience that's based on our flavor and sensory preferences, interests and curiosities.
We do this by crafting our flavor profiles through the use of flavor ingredients and techniques in a fashion that could be compared to efforts in culinary arts or craft brewing beer.
These flavor ingredients are primarily made from food grade Propylene glycol (PG) and Vegetable Glycerin (VG), which are deemed safe for human consumption by the FDA.
I also fall into the category of being a millennial. Right now, as a generation we have massive amounts of influence on the consumer market. I base that statement on data analysis in regards to millennials:
**Millennials account for a quarter of the population of the United States.**
Source- https://www.bizjournals.com/phoenix...-to-understand-and-market-to-millennials.html
**Millennial shoppers spend $600 billion in the United States each year.**
source- Who are the Millennial shoppers? And what do they really want? | Accenture Outlook
Here's an example of what I'm talking about in terms of influence:
**In 2018, bartenders swap out the sugar with salt to give more complex and sharper cocktails to their patrons. Vegetables no longer have to wait for a Bloody Mary or Gibson when there are options like carrot mimosas or kale martinis out there during happy hour. There’s a growing number of savory cocktails that push the boundaries as well with mixologists opting for more unique ingredients such as squid ink, beef, or peanut syrup.**
Source- The Most Popular Alcohol Trends Seen so Far in 2018 #oldliquorsmagazine
Here's more things in regards to the effect that millennials are having on the food and beverage industry.
The 109 Hottest Food Trends for 2018
Spirits trends: five key innovative themes leading the drinks industry
2018 flavor trends- https://downloads.mintel.com/private/wroEg/files/678021/
As for vaping, a lot of misinformation on is out there and due to the nature of human beings when it comes to making automatic assumptions about things they are ill-informed on, the thought is that since e juice may contain nicotine and when vaped it looks like you are smoking, it must have simliar if not the same effects on the body as smoking cigarettes.
Now I'm not saying this aspect of our human nature is wrong at all, it's one of the factors that contributed to our survival as a species.
Here's some more info in regards to vaping:
**Public Health England's latest report on vaping highlighted evidence that e-cigarettes are less harmful than regular cigarettes, and that there was no evidence so far to suggest that e-cigarettes might encourage young people to take up smoking.** (Credit: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-44295336)
Public Health England's report:
https://www.gov.uk/government/publi...ecutive-summary#use-of-e-cigarettes-in-adults
**The 20% of young people who vape is now on par with this age group's use of conventional cigarettes. It's possible that one cause of the drop in cigarette smoking among young people is the development of vaping as a new nicotine delivery method.**
**These current data show a significant overlap in the two smoking behaviors -- people who smoke conventional cigarettes are by far the most likely to be vaping. And vaping has become particularly prevalent among young people, even as their rate of smoking cigarettes has plummeted. Thus, it seems possible that the advent of electronic cigarettes could, on balance, be having an overall positive effect on the health of the American population.
Public health researchers clearly would prefer that Americans, particularly young people, don't use nicotine at all because its addictive nature leads to negative effects associated with the ways in which it is ingested into the system. But as smoking expert Dr. Kenneth Warner of the University of Michigan School of Public Health said in a recent Gallup podcast, "I personally believe based on my research that e-cigarettes are more beneficial than harmful to the public's health because research suggests that vaping is helping at least a subset of smokers to quit smoking.**
https://news.gallup.com/poll/237818/young-people-adopt-vaping-smoking-rate-plummets.aspx
Here's an example of benefits in terms of Nicotine and ADHD:
**We began to look into what were the potential effects, neural effects of nicotine on cognitive processing in ADHD. We knew that amphetamines for example were used, they helped … stimulants helped patients with ADHD and what we found by actually taking this into the lab was that there was a cognitive process of what we call behavioral inhibition that nicotine really seems to help in these patients. In other words, it kind of slows down their brain a little bit and reduces impulsive responding in the lab. What we showed in a paper some years ago was that you could actually use this lab measure to predict how effective a nicotinic treatment might be in a real world test.**
- Dr. Paul Newhouse
Director of the Center for Cognitive Medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center
Source- https://blog.bulletproof.com/paul-newhouse/
Here's from a study that "sought to examine the potential adverse effects of e-cigarette vapor and conventional cigarette smoke on lung surfactant interfacial properties."
**Results
E-cigarette vapor regardless of the dose and flavoring of the e-liquid did not affect surfactant interfacial properties. In contrast, smoke from conventional cigarettes had a drastic, dose-dependent effect on Infasurf® interfacial properties reducing the maximum surface pressure from 65.1 ± 0.2 mN/m to 46.1 ± 1.3 mN/m at the highest dose. Cigarette smoke and e-cigarette vapor both altered surfactant microstructure resulting in an increase in the area of lipid multilayers. Studies with individual smoke components revealed that tar was the smoke component most disruptive to surfactant function.
Conclusions
While both e-cigarette vapor and conventional cigarette smoke affect surfactant lateral structure, only cigarette smoke disrupts surfactant interfacial properties. The surfactant inhibitory compound in conventional cigarettes is tar, which is a product of burning and is thus absent in e-cigarette vapor.**
https://respiratory-research.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12931-017-0676-9
My concern with everything that is currently transpiring when it comes to vaping is the potential devastating effects this path may lead to for the industry, for the advancement of medical science and the real possibility that this effective method to quit smoking.
I want to make it clear that I am not advocating underage nicotine usage.
This is purely about the fact that vaping and smoking cigarettes are different. One main reason is because of the method it's consumed.
Comparing these methods and assuming the outcome will be the same is akin to assuming that if someone filled their gas tank with water it should have the same effect as gasoline because they are both liquids.
With them being different, they should be treated differently than cigarettes.
This is from a press release on your website:
**In April, Durbin and his colleagues sent a letter to the FDA pressing them for swift action on e-cigarette regulations and urging the agency to take immediate steps to ban kid-friendly candy and fruit flavorings that are used with e-cigarettes and cigars.**
Source- https://www.durbin.senate.gov/newsr...otect-children-from-addictive-vaping-products
I strongly oppose this action to ban candy and fruit flavorings that are used in the production of e juice.
A more appropriate action would be to simply make acquiring them harder for people under the age of 18.
Please cease and desist this crusade to ban these flavorings and instead pursue alternative solutions to achieve the end goal you've stated in terms of protecting children from vaping products.
Thank you for your time.
Sincerely,
Morgan_Drury
