I think this is mostly correct:
Hi I'm Dr. Attila Danko
I want to say first of all that I receive no money from any tobacco, pharmaceutical or
e-cigarette companies.
I just want to have a show of hands if I can, of everyone who are vapers, can you put up your hand?
Okay, now what I want to do is everyone, now if you use majority of the time an ecigarette that comes from a big tobacco company, keep your hand up.
Two people, out of all that
I come from Australia where I'm a full time clinical doctor, and it's the land of e-cigarette prohibition.
They often try and make e-cigarettes synonymous with tobacco industry.
Did you know that in Australia the possession of e-liquid with nicotine in it for use in e-cigarettes, is punishable with the same penalties as applied to the possession of {ILLEGAL DRUG}?
I first became interested in ecigs when some of the most hardened smokers in my clinic started giving up by using them. I became fascinated by the idea of turning the whole quitting paradigm on its head. Instead of being about withdrawal and denial, it became something about excitement and enjoyment of something better. Who ever knew that quitting could be fun?
To my dismay most people in Tobacco Control in Australia didn't share my excitement. In fact they seemed disgusted and offended that people could enjoy recreational nicotine without the threat of death. They convinced the government to make nicotine illegal, unless it's within tobacco or a pharmaceutical product.
They are going according to the three P's of Prohibition, Puritanism and Punishment and it's my view that while this attitude holds, there is no h0pe for an end game in Australia.
There are some that do have a different view in Australia but they are very much in the minority and are not as well connected politically. In every other field of drug use we accept the ideas of harm minimization and reduction but somehow in Australia, nicotine and tobacco are seen as different.
Look, I understand their concerns.
They are worried about the entry of Big Tobacco into the market, they're worried about dual use possibly sustaining smokers and people who may have quit otherwise and of course they're very worried about gateway effects on children, but policy needs to be based on evidence not feelings, not concerns, and not worries.
And so far, as the evidence comes in, it just gets stronger and stronger that the population effects they're so worried about are not happening, that the gateway is out, not into smoking, and their concerns take on more and more a quality of magical thinking.
The first magical thought is that the enemy is NICOTINE, that ecigs are a plot from big tobacco to hook children on bubblegum flavored vapor and then transition them to cigarettes. We need a superhero to fight these evil corporations, someone to stand up for the people, for the children. But what if
vaping is actually a genuine people's movement Rejecting big tobacco, rejecting pharmaceutical companies rejecting government control. This misled superhero might find that he's actually just fighting ordinary people who can't quit smoking any other way.
True public health recognizes the enemy is smoke. Three billion of the world's people rely on biomass fuel for their cooking and heating, by dung and wood, in small unventilated places. WHO estimates that over 4 million deaths per year are attributable to this indoor pollution. It's not that different to the 6 million per year attributed to tobacco smoke, and they die from exactly the same causes, from heart attacks, from emphysema, from chronic bronchitis. There is nothing magical about tobacco smoke. It's the smoke.
Imagine public health campaigning against gas stoves, because we're just not sure they're really safe to replace wood fires with gas stoves, we don't know the long term outcome to this. And interestingly gas stoves have about 1% of the emissions of wood fires, just like
vaping has about 1% of the emissions of smoking.
So let's go back to Australia because we have some strange laws here, it's legal to import under federal law, but once you get your package of nicotine out of the letterbox, you are then committing a crime. And in some states they're even banning the hardware. a western Australian guy set up a small business selling second generation e-cigarettes, none from big tobacco, none with nicotine in them. One morning he woke up to a surreal scene, like out of a movie on busting Columbian drug cartels. Three black SUVs turned up at his home. Health department officials came out, forcibly confiscated his entire stock, they dragged him through the courts, they destroyed his business, they made him bankrupt.
And there are health departments, and cancer counselors and other organizations in Australia right now calling for this to happen across the whole country. They want to ban even the hardware, without nicotine.
So the effects of prohibition in Australia, the main one is very limited Brick and Mortar vape shops, you can get the hardware but not the software, you just can't get that same help.
Richard Pelosa shows us just how effective vape shops can be as basically quit smoking centers. You're not allowed to have that in Australia. You have to use the internet to vape, you have to be sophisticated enough to understand youtube and credit cards and all that, and so many of the older smokers just want to go somewhere and get everything they need and get shown how to use it. That's not allowed in Australia, it's very much denormalized. Certainly there are vapers who will vape at home when they can, and when they go out on the street, into town they'll smoke again because it looks so different and so strange in au.
Now let's say the extreme prohibitionists win and they stop all of the imports into Australia, which some are calling for of course. Now they magically think that nicotine isn't like every other drug, every other drug when you ban it, the toxicity goes up the strength goes up. I tell you it will happen 100 times more. Just imagine 1 ml of 100% nicotine in an ordinary envelope, imagine thousands of these envelopes flooding Australia, there is no way that it could be stopped. In essence, what Australia is saying, that if you want to enjoy recreational nicotine, it's the death penalty for you, because you can only use the most dangerous delivery device, in the same way that a ban on condoms would be a death penalty if you wanted to enjoy recreational sex in a place with high HIV prevalence.
So surprisingly, we still have a significant amount of vapers in Australia, but it's about half the rate as in other countries.
I ask you, how long is it going to be before we see smoking rates in other countries, go below Australia’s? Now, we can see it already happening in one group, the most important group. Daily smoking in Australian teens has just stubbornly refused to go down for the last six years. Australia thinks they're so great at Tobacco Control, but in this the most important group, they really haven't done anything at all, despite all the plain packages, gory pictures, increased taxes.
It's really frustrating trying to compare this data because it's very rare for people to report daily use rate data. I want to examine this Hawaii study where I actually did find some daily use data and it's very interesting. So let's say I have a glass of wine a month, am I an alcoholic? In the same way if a teenager takes a puff of an e-cigarette at a party, they're not a dependent vaper, or if they have a puff on a smoke, they're not a dependent smoker. Now this Hawaii study was reported in the media, it was part of the moral panic series of reports. You know, 17 percent ecig prevalence among youth, 12 percent dual use, this is a catastrophe, we must take action now to ban these dangerous things. But, when we have a look at the daily data,
vaping daily, the rate goes down to 2 percent, it's the same as the daily use of {other green stuff}, 2 percent. Now, as the parent of teenagers I tell you I'd be just a little bit more worried, if my teenager was getting stoned every day, than if they were vaping every day, especially if they were vaping to get off of cigarettes.
so, in this population with pretty high levels of ecig experimentation, let's look at the most important figure which is daily smoking rates, less than 1%. So compare that to 3.4% of Australia. Now this isn't just one off. As I said it's very hard to find data but again we get to FLA, and this combines middle school and high school data. 0.6% for middle school 2.7 for high school, combine so it's something like 1.6, 1.7% for the same, pretty similar population range as au is reporting on, so half the rate of daily smoking as au.
What I think is happening, is that the easy availability of ecigs means that when children want to experiment with a smoking type of behavior, they want to do something that is going to piss their parents off, they're much more likely now to try an ecig, often without nicotine. And they'll do this at a party here or there, but because we know that nicotine by itself isn't anywhere near as addictive as with burning tobacco, it's likely that we'll have, even if we end up with a few regular vapers into the future, I think that we'll have lower rates than the overall smokers.
Certainly, it looks to me to be a really powerful diversion away from smoking, in the most important group. I mean if something works to create less than 1%, this is end game figures, this is how smoking ends.
not through prohibition, but through the enjoyment of something better. Not through being controlled, but people taking the power back into their own hands to have recreational nicotine on the terms that you choose. This, our powerful revolution, is shaking the very foundations of the TC establishment. One of these ordinary people, Loren over there, she a waitress from Cornwall, she was published in one of the most prestigious medical journals of the world. she struck such fear into the Tobacco Control establishment that no fewer than four professors from 3 different continents had to band together trembling, to try to oppose her, to try to refute her, but they could not, because she spoke the truth, that vaping saved her life. That vaping saved many lives, and that harm reduction has the potential to save hundreds of millions of lives. Today I call on PH, to talk to vapers, listen to them, understand them. And vapers, I ask of you a much harder thing, but if you can you'll be tapping into the power that broke the British empire in India, the power that destroyed institutional racism in America, and that is: Be kind to Public Health and policy makers, especially those who might just be misled and even your enemies, for by doing so you will be heaving burning coals of shame upon their heads, that they stood in the way of this revolution, and they caused more burning tobacco to be smoked. I have a dream and it is happening now, Public Health and vapers together, we can, we must, and we will make smoking obsolete. Thank you.
