Dr. Stan Glantz has admitted on his tobacco blog that he opposes an ad campaign in which a vaper truthfully informs the public that thanks to flavored e-cigarettes, he was able to quit smoking. Glantz wants FDA Center for Tobacco Products director Mitch Zeller to refuse to attend the upcoming SFATA meeting because of the group's involvement in this campaign.
The ad features a picture of Stefan Didek holding a vaping device, with the following text: "27 Year Smoker: Smoke and tobacco free for nearly 3 years thanks to vapor products and candy flavors."
Glantz accuses the ad campaign of trying to deceive the public and compares it to historic tobacco industry deception campaigns.
The Rest of the Story
The strategy of e-cigarette opponents is now clear: Suppress the truth! Prevent vapers from telling their real stories about how e-cigarettes and vaping devices have saved their lives by helping them quit smoking. Hide from the public the fact that thousands of smokers who were unable to quit using any "FDA-approved" method were finally able to quit using e-cigarettes and have experienced dramatic improvement in their health because of it.
In many ways, Stefan's story is a lot more sincere than the way the CDC depicted Kristy's story. Kristy is a smoker who failed to quit using e-cigarettes and went on to experience a collapsed lung. The CDC ad is actually somewhat disingenuous because the agency specifically recruited nationally and offered money to try to find someone who failed to quit using e-cigarettes and then experienced a smoking-related consequence. In contrast, Stefan created this campaign on his own, motivated solely by a desire to combat the misleading information being disseminated by numerous health organizations, which continue to insist that e-cigarettes cannot help with smoking cessation.
The facts are now so strongly against e-cigarette opponents that their only resort is to either suppress the facts or to just make them up. In addition to Glantz's attempts to silence the voices of vapers who have saved their lives by quitting smoking, e-cigarette opponents are insinuating to the public that e-cigarettes contain tobacco, that e-cigarettes are leading kids to become addicted to smoking, that e-cigarette experimenters are addicted to vaping, that kids who use e-cigarettes are experiencing serious brain damage, that e-cigarettes are no safer than real cigarettes, and that dual users who cut down substantially on their cigarette consumption experience no health benefits.
Why the need to lie, deceive, and suppress the truth? Because the truth is not on their side.
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