Fully Aware | Health Canada Pushes People Back to Smoking | RegWatch

It’s inexplicable. The Canadian government appears hellbent on destroying the health and wellbeing of over one million citizens in a misguided, ill-conceived effort to eradicate nicotine use in the country.

Now the feds are not attempting to eradicate smoking, the habit that kills tens of tens of thousands of Canadians each year. No, it’s nicotine vaping products that the government is poised to ban, which are a vastly safer source of nicotine, and the very same products the Liberal-led Canadian government legalized only three years ago.

Joining us today on RegWatch is Janine Timmons, a concerned Canadian user of nicotine vaping products and long-time supporter of the federal Liberals. Timmons is shaken by Health Canada’s “absolutely reckless” move to ban flavors, which the regulator acknowledges will push some people back to smoking.

What’s going on here? Find out only on RegWatch by RegulatorWatch.com

Released: July 12, 2021
Produced by Brent Stafford

This episode is supported by SELECT VAPES – LUCKY 8 VAPES – MISTER VAPOR

Part of our “Last Stand” coverage

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4 COMMENTS

  1. Very moving interview describing the anxiety of mature smokers facing a de fact prohibition of vaping (no flavors is such a degradation of the product that many or most users will stop using it). Many vapers will revert to smoking, and as Janine Timmons says, Health Canada knows it. Many anti-tobacco NGO’s know it. So, why are they doing it? Janine mentions that is because of money, at least for the NGO’s which need to keep people smoking to justify their budgets and jobs.

    While all this is true, there is another important reason: identity and ideology of the medical establishment associated with tobacco control, for whom vaping is extremely disruptive. For this technocracy the desire to eliminate vaping is a powerful nostalgic desire to go back to pre-vaping days when they were riding on top of a high wave crusading against smoking and the tobacco industry, without anybody ever contesting their means and goals. Between the 1980’s until 2010 they conducted a full anti-smoking campaign based on rising taxes, “denormalizing” smoking behavior, stigmatizing smokers, offering only NRT’s and medication to help smokers quit and building up a narrative of a great battle against the industry. This was a vertical top down approach to smoking and smokers, who were never consulted (why? they are “addicts” or victims of an evil industry, we are saving them, they should be grateful).

    While these technocrats were initially successful, smoking prevalence fell from near 50% to about 20% between the 1980’s and 2010, but since 2000 the drop stalled. Nevertheless, for them the solution is (and has been) to do more of the same more intensively, higher taxes, more bans, more stigma, more battling of the industry. Since they have never been questioned nor scrutinized, they have come to believe that only they can address, with their methods, the smoking problem. Their identity, status, sense of mission, political power, social influence, and even their jobs, depend on achieving this crusade towards its goal (the so called “endgame”).

    Then came vaping, which they fear and fail to understand, it disrupts this process. It is not top down (top “experts” changing bad lifestyles of common “addicts” or “victims”), it is now the common “addicts” or “victims” taking the initiative. For tobacco control medics married to a medicalized view of smoking as a desease (“addiction”), this is like patients deciding their treatment without consulting their doctors. Their whole world view (identity, sense of mission, entitlement, importance, social value, power, etc) is threatened by this disruption, but also, they fear that the whole process will be a health disaster because they (who are the “experts”) cannot control it. It is very hard for technocrats riding on top of the high waves of a health crusade to recognize the need to change methods and approaches, though in the UK that change happened.

    So, what are the plans of the tobacco control technocracy running Health Canada for smokers like Janine (or myself)? It is very simple, they consider us collateral damage worth paying for the continuation of their crusade, which now is refocusing on nicotine and on eliminating the entrance of new generations to nicotine consumption (which in their eyes will lead back to smoking). They know that many mature vapers will go back to smoking, but they feel confident that higher taxes and more stigma will get these smokers to quit, and if they don’t quite, they are collateral damage. Their only concern is youth taking up smoking, which they know will happen, but this can be the subject of a new crusade, a crusade that will not be disrupted once vaping has been eliminated or marginalized. They’ll be back in the glorious days when they were riding on a high wave, feeling they have full control of the situation and believing they are working for the common good.

    Sooner or later this plan will fail. Crusades cannot be going on too long (McCarthyism lasted 10 years). Nicotine vaping among youth might become replaced by cannabis vaping, which might force Health Canada to hit cannabis users (ban flavors, etc). The post COVID world has shown the world that health technocracies are not sacred, they can cause harm in spite of good intentions, but the most orthodox and fanatical technocrats are not going to go down without a fight.

  2. Health Canada clearly wants people sick and smoking. Illness is big business so people being healthier, or making healthier choices is being taken away. Harm reduction is being taken off the table. They don’t care if we die. They want their money from tobacco taxes, big pharma funding, etc. Is it any wonder that so many people no longer have trust in Health Canada or any of the so called health agencies. Look at the suspicions around covid…..smart people know that the words of their own goverment can’t be trusted…..for anything.

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