Opposing Tobacco Control Dogma Means You Must Be a Paid Industry Hack

The above headline comes from a recent Michael Siegel posting (see here).

It also demonstrates that many anti-smoking advocates are willing to make personal attacks, accusations, and insinuations — even against their own colleagues — without any evidence whatsoever to support these insinuations. The colleague in question has provided not a shred of evidence of my funding by electronic cigarette companies. He has provided no documentation that I have received payments from the electronic cigarette industry and that these payments have influenced my opinions about the issue of the relative safety of vaping versus smoking.

This is one of the reasons why so many of us in tobacco harm reduction end up defending smokers and even tobacco companies. The anti-smoking lobby is the major group standing between smokers and safer alternatives. What is even more morally reprehensible is that they are using tobacco levies and money from the tobacco settlements to keep smokers from improving their odds. Though not every anti-smoking advocate is anti-smoker, most certainly seem to be when they approve of smokers being denied jobs or losing child custody battles.

Consider that in any other similar issue, the affected parties are represented. If you were looking for ways of dealing with diabetes, you would not deliberately keep diabetics out of the decision making process but smokers are considered an impediment to finding solutions to their predicament. Consider also that in the safer alternative debate, it is non smokers and anti-smoking activists who are arguing that the safer alternatives are too dangerous; you would think that smokers should be the ones determining that.

-PLB