Cigarette smoking is unquestionably dangerous, the world's top lifestyle killer. Because nicotine is addictive it is hard to quit. Because it is an addiction there are also psychological hooks, behavioral aspects, and that is why no one product works for everyone. Nicotine patches and gums are great, if they work, but they often don't because they only replicate the nicotine. If you want someone to give up caffeine, for example, you wouldn't give them a caffeine patch and assume it will work when they associate Coca-Cola with baseball games or cookouts with family, you'd give them a product that tastes like Coke but has less caffeine, and eventually none at all.
That is the issue with cigarettes and why vaping works better for quitting than gums and patches. Nicotine is only the addictive chemical, not the harm. We don't demand soda companies remove caffeine because too much of their products make people fat and 200 chemicals in cigarettes create the carcinogen, not the nicotine. Smoking therefore has psychosocial aspects as well, so to try and mitigate the mannerisms or social aspects of it, capitalism came up with vaping. Vaping was not a Big Pharma idea, they instead engaged in top-down marketing, like throwing a fortune at University of California San Francisco professor Stan Glantz to undermine their competitors, who were independent people showing that a nicotine device that acted like a cigarette led to more declines in smoking than a patch or gum, which was only a substitute for the chemical.
The term that got popularized was stupid - "e-cigarettes" - and so was the Obama administration decided to run small companies out of business, leaving only Big Pharma with the money to go through his new regulatory process, the same Byzantine maze you need if you claimed you cure cancer.
To accomplish feeling science-y, they had CDC - the same group that denied COVID-19 should be tested for unless hospitals proved the patient had COVID-19 - use surveys to claim that any person who had tried vaping in the last year(!) was an addict. Suddenly, we had an epidemic of vaping in youth. And it needed to go through FDA, and anyone who didn't was banned.
Which was every product not produced by Big Pharma.
There was no vaping epidemic, it was a fad outside the real smoking cessation and harm reduction community. If anything government going "Reefer Madness" about it - actual taxpayer-funded commercials of young people looking like zombies - made it into a bigger fad than it would have been.
The numbers were and are clear, in that the number of "nicotine-naive" people who took up vaping and then began smoking was statistical noise. Meaningless. And nicotine vapor can't harm anyone, even in a culture where government promotes virtual pollution - PM2.5 - to keep people feeling like they need protected, they can't show it causes harm, so they instead conflate absolute and relative risk and claim if you vape you are ingesting embalming fluid. Except conflating absolute and relative risk shows the community you don't care about them, it is instead a political agenda (or a way to protect large companies like Johnson& Johnson) because pears and apples also contain formaldehyde, except in higher doses - and government isn't warning parents about those.
Yet the Biden administration, with an approval rating so low even Nate Silver can't find a way to massage the numbers, is doing what he has done for three years and uses agencies that created regulations that act as laws, and then uses heavily-armed U.S. Marshalls to enforce the regulations while claiming the law makes him do it. So FDA is asking armed federal agents and the Justice Department, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, and the Federal Trade Commission to kick in doors of anyone who has a device that heats up diluted nicotine juice.
“The Justice Department is committed to enforcing the laws that prevent the sale and distribution of unlawful e-cigarettes,” wrote Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Brian Boynton, head of DOJ’s Civil Division.
Because they made those illegal with a sweep of the pen and called it public health.
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