Monday 2 April 2018

None So Blind ...

It's only early April, but we have a contender for the most delusional and ill-judged tweet of the year.
Now, I've always said that new products such as e-cigs had the potential to show up tobacco controllers as the charlatans that they are, but the incompetent behaviour of some in the face of a changing nicotine market has exceeded even my hopeful expectations. That tweet - from an editor of the Tobacco Control comic - says it all.

For the best part of a decade, tobacco controllers have been telling outrageous and blatant lies about e-cigs in order to get them banned. Meanwhile, the tobacco industry has been quietly developing proper science around their products.

Industry has been selling products that consumers like while tobacco control has been issuing junk science study after junk science study which are so lame that they take minutes to see through. 

It takes an incredibly cult-like outlook on life to not understand, then, why vapers trust industry over a bunch of liars who have restricted choice of products in the EU and are still doing their damnedest to either tax e-cigs into oblivion or take them off the shelves globally.

Of course the tobacco industry now has more integrity in the eyes of many vapers than tobacco control, and rightly so.

Incredibly, Ruth "remains mystified" as to why, despite the evidence being all around her, as Mike Siegel wrote in 2014.
When the tobacco industry decided - sometime back around 2000 or so - to stop monitoring tobacco control science and to just let us say anything we wanted to - I thought they had made a poor decision. But in retrospect, I think it may have been brilliant. They apparently knew that before long, without the restraints of having to answer to Big Tobacco's public questioning, our science would deteriorate and we would just start saying anything we wanted to. Unrestrained, the tobacco control movement's scientific rigor would fall to such a low level that we would end up discrediting ourselves and undermining our own credibility. 
Well, we're there. We're officially there.
We are indeed, yet many tobacco controllers just keep digging that hole, oblivious to the harm it is causing them.

Hilarious!  



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