Is Vaping Safer Than Smoking?

I have been reading several sites today about the’fatal motion’ which has been proposed by Lord Callanon (?) for debate in the House of Lords about the TPD. His objective is to annul Article 20 0f the TPD especially, but the effect of the motion would be to annul the whole TPD regulations. Whether or not ‘their lordships’ have the courage to throw a spanner into the machinery of the EU is open to doubt, but they might just do it.

For the critical thing in that motion concerns the relative safety of vaping as compared with smoking. It has been put about, especially in the USA, that vaping is as dangerous as smoking. Suppose that I suggest that vaping IS as dangerous as smoking in the sense that smoking dangers have been massively exaggerated? 95% of nothing is still nothing, and 5% of nothing is still nothing. Suppose that no one smoked. Would epidemiological studies find some other specific culprit for some people dying before others? What might that be? It could be alcohol, or pies, or chocolate, or fruit. Why not?

I was reading a study tonight produced by some Oz university. Note the department: ‘RMIT University – School of Economics, Finance and Marketing’. Note, NOT public health.

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2780938

It is a messy read, full of jargon, but what it essentially says is that the authors of three papers which were supposed to have proven that PP is working in OZ, were telling fibs; that the public data upon which those papers relied produced ‘statistically INsignificant’ results, and that it was wrong for the authors to claim that their research showed that PP was working.

Is it reasonable to therefore question ANY AND ALL research coming out of those universities? For example, a question on one of their surveys asked if the respondent did not like the new cig packets. If the respondent said they he did not, then that answer was taken as proof the PP was working! I do not like the medical porn on cig packets, but that does not mean in the slightest that I am put off smoking. I would like to say that the opposite is true – that I am even more determined to carry on smoking, but that is not true. The fact is that I do not even SEE the medical porn. How many times have we seen adverts on TV showing horrific scenes from films, which adverts are supposed to persuade us to go and watch the film? Should those adverts not put us off going to watch the film because of the violence, sex, gore, bad language, etc? That is not how our minds work. We know the difference between stories and reality. When my daughters were children, I used to tell them a story at bedtime when they were in bed. My stories were made up as I went along. They were always a bit exciting, but the excitement depended upon dangers. “Once upon a time, some explorers found a new island. It was a nice island. There were lots of apple trees,and things like that, to eat. It was so warm that the explorers could sleep with their tents open. Then, in the night, a horrible thing happened…….” You get the drift. Their eyes were agog, but they slept soundly. Children know the difference between stories and real life. How much more should adults know the difference between stories and real life? That is what bothers me.

There is something about Doll’s Doctors Study which has always bothered me. I can accept the ‘evidence’ that many more smokers die from LC than non-smokers. But I find it difficult to accept that there is, on average, a thirty year delay between starting smoking and getting LC. It is that delay which has no scientific justification whatsoever. As far as I know, no mechanism has been explained which can justify that delay. Could it not be just as real that there comes a point, probably in old age, where a person’s lungs can no longer cope with ANY toxins? In the UK, masses of very old people (over 80 years of age) die from pneumonia. It is reasonable to presume that they are taken to hospital and that efforts are made to save their lives – without success. Why ‘without success’? I would say that ‘without success’ is just not studied, or the results of such studies are suppressed. The simple explanation of ‘without success’ would be that their very old bodies cannot cope with the anti-bacterial drug any more than it can cope with the bacteria. Put very simply, their bodies are so old that their bodies are rotting.

It is an awful thing when a mere blogger has to say that.

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The Tobacco Control Industry depends for its continuance on people NOT stopping smoking. The TCI has said again and again, that it wants a controlled reduction in smoking levels. It does not a want a sudden drop. Livelihoods depend upon that controlled reduction. Thus, according to its own ‘science’, it is prepared to accept the deaths of millions upon millions by not calling for prohibition and the destruction, world-wide, of all tobacco plantations NOW.

Why is that? There are two ways of looking at it: 1) The TCI is perpetuating its gravy train, or,2) that the dangers of smoking have been exaggerated. I know that those two ideas are not really ‘either or’, but that is the state of logic in organisations like the TCI. The ecig controversy is bringing out the illogicalities of TC. If smoking is as dangerous as the Doctors Study said, then smoking MUST BE BANNED. Or rather, the supply of tobacco products, and the growing of tobacco plants must be banned. There really is no half-measure.

Some people might say that tobacco products should be treated like bottles of toilet cleaner. Why not? Should not cigs come in childproof containers?

The proof that the TC Industry is dishonest and corrupt is precisely in that. The TPD requires that ecig liquid comes in childproof containers, but does not demand that cigs, that 95% percent more dangerous product, comes in childproof containers. Therefore, they must regard cigs as not lethal, even though they say that they are.

I read somewhere that the strategy of ‘The Elite’ is to permit discussion, but only within the bounds that ‘The Elite’ decide. There is a phrase for it, but I cannot remember that phrase. Let’s call it ‘The King’s Limitation’. For example, “Processed foods are bad”. In a discussion about that subject, anyone who dared to suggest that ALL foods that we buy are ‘processed’ in one way or another would be shouted down and abused. But the word ‘processed’ would still not be defined by ‘The Elite’.

Thus, no one is allowed to dispute ‘the bible’ of Doll’s Doctors Study. The fact that that ‘bible’ demands the immediate destruction of tobacco plantations world-wide is OUTSIDE ‘The King’s Limitation’.

It is a matter of fact that ecigs have forced a confrontation which has breached ‘The King’s Limitation’. The UN, WHO, EU have lost control of ‘The Limitation’. There is a breech in the foundations of the citadel 0f the TCI. The whole citadel could come tumbling down.

So let not smokers and vapers fall out among themselves. It is a perfectly legitimate weapon to undermine the TCI, which wants to penalise vapers as much as smokers, to claim that vaping is 95%, or 99.9999% safer than smoking. One ought not to say 100% safer because the dangers of smoking have not actually been definitively calculated. On the other hand, you could say 110% ‘better’ than smoking, if vaping is a matter of pleasure. Or 200%, or any other number, because ‘better’ (or ‘safer’, for that matter) are words which are meaningless without context.

It isn’t just the immediate blather of the TPD that needs to be addressed. It is the whole edifice of ‘limitations of discussion’. THERE IS NO PROOF that smoking, in itself, causes LC. That was brought out forcefully in ‘The Mctear Case’:

https://boltonsmokersclub.wordpress.com/the-mctear-case-the-analysis/

The Judge, in that case, said that the witnesses (which included Doll himself) had not produced sufficient evidence which proved that EVEN JUST ON THE BALANCE OF PROBABILITIES that smoking causes Lung Cancer. Note the balance of probabilities rather than proof positive.

Ecigs have thrown the discussion wide open. ‘The King’s Limitation’ of discussion has been dumped, and vapers must take advantage of that. Discussion is wide open. There are no limitations.

Of the greatest importance is to understand that Article 20 of the TPD is renegade, and that only politicians without principles could pass such a directive into the law of England.

Forgive typos. I must to bed.