The international health profession is rightly focused on the SARS-CoV-2 virus threat at the moment.
Meanwhile, another multinational threat has insidiously spread: Alarmism about nicotine vapor products (aka e-cigarettes) has infected a growing number of governments around the world, causing authorities to eschew science, logic, and human nature. Out of blind panic, they are disregarding the indisputable evidence that giving smokers legal access to nicotine vapor can save millions of lives. Instead, they embrace prohibitionist policies that will keep people smoking and dying. The main culprit behind spreading this mass psychosis is, sadly, the United States.
I have written extensively about agencies, health charities, and activists who have orchestrated the campaign of fear and doubt around e-cigarettes—products that even notorious anti-vaping advocates, like University of California San Francisco Professor Stanton Glantz, admit are substantially less toxic than smoking. I and others have dissected the financial and professional benefits that drive the campaign to ban nicotine vapor products even while deadly cigarettes remain freely available. Here, I will discuss the methods by which these entities cultivate and export e-cigarette alarmism worldwide.
The three main players in the tragicomedy public discourse on e-cigarettes are: representatives of government agencies, public health activists, and the media. The media has acted mostly as a megaphone for government agencies and activists, parroting and amplifying the narrative disseminated by government actors and activists. This post will focus primarily on how anti-tobacco activists, in and outside of government, created and sold those narratives.
Michelle Minton – Competitive Enterprise Institute – July 21, 2020.
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