General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: pilot study on nicotine residues in houses of electronic cigarette users, tobacco smokers, and non s [View all]meow2u3
(24,761 posts)masquerading as a public health campaign. The real reason for attacking vapers is that we decided to quit smoking not through Big Pharma approved methods, but rather vaping looks like smoking and is vilified--and vapers are being attacked as if we were criminals instead of doing something to improve our health--in part because drug and tobacco companies are losing money, and so are pushing back by a relentless hate campaign against vapor products and those who use them; in part because tobacco control freaks have become "addicted" to telling people how to live and are lobbying the government into making their personal opinions the law of the land; and in part because governments have become addicted to gouging a despised minority instead of who they should really gouge--billionaires!
This knee-jerk hatred of vapers has to stop; it's unbefitting a liberal to attack people who've quit smoking by vaping instead. If only we can take a look and see through the anti-vaping propaganda, we can see that the nicotine prohibitionists are making no sense and the real reason they're pushing for punitive taxation is not health, but rather money and power. Nicotine prohibitionists are just as intractable and blinded by puritanical ideology that makes them immune to reason as were alcohol prohibitionists in the era leading to Prohibition. They're as fanatical as the "religious right" nutjobs who not only push abstinence-only sex eduction and seek to outlaw birth control and safer sex. They're as blind as the drug prohibitionists who pushed for severe criminal penalties for possessing small amounts of pot. Anti-drug hardliners won't even think of needle exchanges; they'd just rather see junkies die of HIV, Hep C, and other diseases that can be prevented. Vaping is a form of tobacco harm reduction which works with the same principle as safer sex, seatbelts and airbags in vehicles, and needle exchanges, for example. So why is it so many Democrats support sex, car, and drug harm reduction, but despise tobacco harm reduction? Be consistent.