16 million Americans live with a smoking related illness. 480,000 die annually from cigarette related illnesses with 41,000 being associated with secondhand smoke. That rounds out to 1,315 deaths a day from cigarettes. More than the total number of people shot by officers in the US, and accounting for roughly 1 in 5 deaths in America.
But six people die from using black-market vaping pens with black market cannaboid products over the period of several weeks and the government and political entities are screaming to ban flavoring and the Center for Disease Control has said vaping should be stopped writ large.
Disregard the millions of users who are ADULTS who use these products, purchase them from reputable sources and businesses who operate above board, who post chemical test reports of what is in their vape juices just so the consumers can make informed decisions. Let’s talk about the fact that those who are currently sick were using products that were purchased on the black market, or not initially designed to work with vaping hardware, or they looked up a tutorial by a questionable source on YouTube and tried to make their own juice. Disregard the fact that it appears that the solutions that were purchased by the 450+ affected users (but by god we’ll use “think of the children” as an excuse to punish all consumers) had a chemical that is known to be dangerous by the legitimate vaping community and is widely avoided specifically because of the medical conditions we are seeing.
That chemical, a medically dangerous high does of vitamin E, just happens to have fuck all to do with the flavoring by the way, but, remember, “think of the children”.
Disregard the fact that some of the victims have long standing health issues and that their onset of lung failure was not possibly in part due to their lifetime history of abusing their lungs with traditional cigarettes.
Six….six dead in the period of weeks when 22 veterans end their lives every day, when roughly 100 people die a day in preventable car accidents, when 1,300 die from cigarettes (which has been a known carcinogenic killer for the better part of seven decades), and this is where our government stands. This is where our energy is being focused. On condemning a tool that has been used by tens of thousands to quit smoking, remove the tar of traditional cigarettes from their lives when they can’t kick the nicotine habit, and a slipshod condemnation when a proper investigation into who sold the bad product and what the bad product is. The vitamin E is a shared vector, but possibly not the cause.
Quality control and government regulation is non-existent, but the leaders of moral busybodies of physical purity moved forward to say that something should not be used to sate the craving of nicotine, but, hey, those cigarettes over there with the smooth Virginia tobacco taste are still approved (even with the warning label and decades of research saying they cause nothing but death and financial strain). As Rham Emmanuel said, “you never want a serious crisis to go to waste”. When you don’t have a crisis available you just manufacture one and try to scare Americans. I’m not surprised. It’s standard practice.
Old Jeffersonian 