A Lie A Day: Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids Wrongly Accuses Tobacco Companies of Marketing Gummy Bear E-Cigarettes

In what is rapidly becoming a tragic farce, anti-nicotine groups are now lying at a rate of at least one per day in a deliberate attempt to demonize electronic cigarettes.

Today's liar is the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, which claimed in a press release that the tobacco companies are marketing gummy bear-flavored electronic cigarettes to youth. The Campaign asked: "Why in the world is Congress helping tobacco companies lure kids with gummy bear-flavored e-cigarettes?"

The Rest of the Story

The rest of the story is that, as I said yesterday, you simply cannot trust anything you hear from anti-nicotine groups these days about electronic cigarettes. They are incapable of simply telling the truth.

Here, the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids falsely claims that Big Tobacco is marketing gummy bear e-cigarettes to youth. But the truth is that the tobacco companies do not even produce gummy bear e-cigarettes. Those products are being marketed by independent vaping companies that are not associated with Big Tobacco.

In the U.S., here are the flavors being sold by the major tobacco companies:

Mark Ten: Classic, Menthol, Fusion, Winter Mint
Vuse: Tobacco, Menthol, Mint, Chai, Berry, Crema
Blu: Tobacco, Menthol, Cherry, Vanilla, Pina Colada, Peach Schnapps, Carolina Bold

You'll notice that Gummy Bear is not a flavored being marketed by any tobacco company in the U.S.

So why is the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids lying?

Simply put, because the actual facts do not support the pre-written script that the Campaign has created. They want to be able to attack Big Tobacco for targeting kids with outrageous flavors like gummy bear and cotton candy, yet these companies don't even make products with such flavors. So there's only one way out of this conundrum, and that's to lie.

And that's something the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids is doing a wonderful job of.