Saturday 18 June 2011

E-Cigs More Harmful Than Tobacco?

Yes. According to EU Health Commissioner John Dalli, they are.

"We are revising our tobacco legislation to make sure that we expand their scope – not just to tobacco – because there are other products which are more harmful, and also on packaging, advertising and access to cigarettes in shops, which can all help people to give up," Dalli told EurActiv.

He explained: "Electronic cigarettes are an example. They are outside the scope of existing legislation, but if you go up on certain aeroplanes they are marketed all the time. This is the sort of expansion of legislation I am are (sic) talking about"
While we've always known that the anti-tobacco debate is rooted in fantasyland, it's only recently that those leading the campaign have begun to make patently absurd statements like this based on no evidence whatsoever.

To say e-cigs - which are proven to be 90% safer than cigarettes - are more harmful than smoking tobacco is not only astonishingly transparent bullshit, but also reckless in the extreme if it leads to a ban on the devices.

Here's what Dalli said in a Brussels speech last year.

Tobacco is still visible in shops and other points of sale. Children and young people get the wrong impression that tobacco is like any other product. And yet it kills half of its users.
Yet he is now hinting at laws to force people away from e-cigs and back to tobacco which, by his own admission, will account for the deaths of half of them.

I wonder. Is that murder? Or manslaughter?


10 comments:

Anonymous said...

"tobacco which, by his own admission, will account for the deaths of half of them."

Blathering idiocy!

In the USA there are about 94 million ever-smokers and half would be 47 million. The govt says that there are 400,000 of them dying from smoking every year.

At that rate it will take 117 years for those 47 million to die.

Thus, the average ever-smoker lives to be about 117 years of age.

Gary K.

Ivan D said...

The real tragedy is that we are paying for this unnacountable autocrat along with the spin doctors at ASH and the zealots at The Royal College of Physicians.

The public health industry continues to grow fat on the cowardice of those we elect to represent us. It has created nothing but strife and social division for decades but still the gutless political elite continue to laud it and fund its ever expanding budget.

What possible excuse is there for wasting 16 million a year on targeting things that are not in themselves harmful? This is total madness.

I think that I preferred the old religions.

Dick Puddlecote said...

Anon: Just quoting their own spin. If just one former e-cig user is forceed back to baccy and contracts lung cancer, let's hope they sue the fuck out of Dalli.

Sam Duncan said...

Hmm. Different spelling. I wondered for a moment if he might be related to Salvador.

Anonymous said...

Saying e-cigs are harmful is akin to saying tea kettles are harmful. Since e-cigs may contain a small amount of vegetable glycerin mixed in with the water, it's also like saying boiling veggies in an open pot on the stove is harmful. If that is the case, then boiling should be outlawed as a form of cooking.

Anonymous said...

It about time this anti tobacco
hysteria was given a serious dose of ass kicking.
Not only is it costing £billions
and thousands of jobs and
thousands of businesses,it
has become a pathetic well funded neurosis.A very serious spell of
uncomfortable attention needs urgently to be directed to the
pushers of this pathological
jamboree.
Tittle Tattling on on the Ether
has had its chances and failed miserably.
Time is ripe for collars to be felt,whose collars and shawls
is well documented

Last Orders

James said...

I haven't got much hope. This is the same EU which banned the safest form of smokeless tobacco, Snus, while leaving much more dangerous ones perfectly legal.

Peter Thurgood said...

They could be right Dick - after all, have you ever stopped to think that when you plug your E-Fag into the mains, you run the risk of electricution as well as riddiculisation. Not for me I'm afraid - I'll stick to the good old fashioned Gas-Fags.

J Bonington Jagworth said...

"they are outside the scope of existing legislation"

I think that's what really upsets him.

Starship Fighter said...

I've been using my Ecig for the last 3 months. I can now claim to be that most elusive of beasts - a truly social smoker. If I want a ciggie, I have one but I don't need to leave the house with a packet of fags as long as I have my trusty Zeus!
Since then I have noticed my breathing is vastly improved - I don't black out if I jog to the car in the rain and I no longer have to dispose of a good few hankies full of thick green mucus every morning. Worse than cigarettes? Not in the opinion of this user with first hand experience and no agenda to promote the pharmaceutical industry...