Good research get peer reviewed and accepted before its considered valid and part of that review is who footed the bill but how many people know that - not many not even those proposing that legal steps one way or the other or those deciding on what law should be enacted.
Many many times those sponsored research reports - like you see in a magazine with some 'expert' with letters after his name and his 'results' and 'advertisement' written in the border has made its way into supporting documents that have come down to banning something or allowing something that should not have been had there been real honest and valid research been done.
But get enough of this 'advertising research' out in the public and people start to catch on - then when the real research comes out its ignored as the same thing.
I guess we know tobacco companies see e-cigs as a direct attack on their profit line - even more so than legislation, taxation and regulation against them. No alternative to their product makes legislation, taxation and regulation moot - people will still smoke not mattr what. They have them hooked.
There is question now even of the impact of influence on what was finally developed as cessation support before e-cigs. Tobacco companies knew there was more to the addiction then just nicotine or other chemicals and they knew it because some of their research was more advanced than what was being done to prove to the public the danger. For example, it was tobacco company research that started to key in on many of the psychological addictive components like the oral fixation additions, the mechanical additions and so on. Hence, tobacco companies (maybe not in direct methods but in many ways) supported replacement medications, not smoking alternatives even though some early independant research was showing that alternatives were better than nic replacement. They knew that everyone who failed because solving the nic craving alone was not enough would still be addicted to nicotine and the cheaper source when replacement did not work were back to their product, plus their product had other addictive qualities.
One also wonders why nic replacement costs that much when the ingredients don't and are made in very large bulk and now in generics and price is still high - if you want someone to kick smoking is the nicotine replacement often more expensive than what its supposed to replace? You want people to find the alternative easy and easy to get so they move to it. How many people have you heard say they quit the patch/gum because of cost. Makes you wonder what keeps the cost so artificially high.
They are fighting for their product by fighting against any other alternative or making sure the alternatives is difficult or unacceptable because, at this point they can't support their own product.
If you look back in early literature whe e-cigs started showing up Tobacco Companies were somewhat quiet and maybe even a but supportive. Now a days getting new smokers started with analogs is much more difficult than it was and there was some thinking that some might start with e-cigs and graduate to analogs and be new customers. Thats not how it turned out between early e-cig communities and e-cig companies and the FDA making sure it was 'alternative' and not 'replacement' and helped to keep pepole from being vapers when they never smoked before.. and so on.
There certainly are not the community activist against vaping the way there were about analogs. No one is going to the capital yelling about being exposed to vapor on the streets but its coming from lobbyists with unreviewed studies that a someone times no more then scare tactics.
Did you know that many secession 800 lines are paid for or supported by tobacco companies? In some of the lawsuits over tobacco part of the concessions that these companies made were to fund ways to help people who wanted to stop smoking to stop smoking and cessation lines were one of them. Now I am not saying that these lines have ulterior motives or are not really ying to support people in stopping but it makes me wonder why they have the attitude towards e-cigs that they do when they have an arsenal of alternatives (abet poorly working ones) and you would think they would jump to joy with an alternative they could use and start counting up those who stopped smoking. Especially when we know of physicians who recommend it when recommending other alternatives like patches, gum etc. No tobacco company is stepping up saying 'we pay for part of call line so you can't recommend or say its okay to do this or that but no call line worker is going to question a policy that comes down from someone that says we won't recommend it as an alternative or support someone taking that route because its too much like smoking or its not really the same as other nic replacement tools, or just play dumb and say we can't because we don't know anything. "
Bottom line, it's going to take a lot of education in the public, with legislatures, with the medical establishment more outreach to smokers about to push back against this sort of 'research' showing where it comes from and that its not been accepted by the research or medical community. And so on. If a person knows it was what made them reject analogs, if it keeps them off and does it without misery then they need to educate others like that. You know how skeptical a smoker can be about anything that will get them off analogs - you have been there - and how much easier it is to believe it does not work when they see a report that it does not then believe it does. ANything else that was supposed to work failed, why would this 'research' be wrong in saying e-cig don't work or aren't any safer... in a smokers experience everythng else they tried to believe in and help them get off cigarettes turned out to be a big lot of stuff over nothing that worked.
Just food for thought - what would happen to tobacco companies in the us if every current smoker was given a basic vaping start up kit and some e-juice, easy access to buying more at a reasonable price that saved money over analogs (don't worry this would not kill e-cig companies - we all know everyone would have to buy a backup and most would not settle for just the basic for long). I did not think of that myself - someone asked it in comments on my blog. I don't have an answer to whether they would go out of business or just faint from fear of that but I would bet my last dollar that tobacco companies would fight tooth and nail to make sure that was never allowed to happen. I bet that if even one vapors group gathered enough donations to afford to do a 'swap your pack for an e-cig' drive in some out of the way small town somewhere big tobacco would be there fighting the permit to allow the giveaway in some public place before the ink was dry on the permit application. (and waving 100 un validated or review reports of studies saying bad things).
