There’s an old joke about seventh day Adventists (don’t worry it’s not mean);
Q) Why shouldn’t seventh Adventists engage in sex?
A) It leads to smoking.
It’s kind of funny, or, perhaps real funny if you’re a seventh day Adventist. They are very health conscious and less hung up about sex than, say, catholics who figure vows of chastity lead to pureness and not pedophilia. Oh, wait, this entry isn’t about religion, it’s about smoking.
One of the lamer arguments against e-cigarettes (I’m just going to call it vaping from here on out, e-cigs sound too much like those cig look alike things, which, IMHO, taste like crack and suck hind tit) is that it’s a “gateway drug to smoking”. No. It’s the same drug, different delivery system. I don’t recall them saying that shit about Nicorette gum, though I do recall that it was prescription only for a long time.
Yes, it’s a gateway, a gate that swings out as well as in. I’ve yet to actually here of someone going the other way, but I do know every current smoker, including vapers, started smoking the old fashioned way. Obvious and even dumber as it sounds; cigerettes are a gateway drug to cigerettes.
There isn’t any official study out one way or the other, so opponents would like the presumptions of harm to prevail, and a lot of townships and cities have made certain bans and regulations based on said presumption of harm.
What you’ll find on vaping chatrooms/youtube/etc, among the usual riff raff and nonsense that seems to pile in drifts whenever there is a forum people are allowed to make noise on, is that almost all the vapors are using this to quit smoking. Granted, people who fail at quitting smoking are pretty silent about it, but the ad hoc testimonys (that is they weren’t designed as testimonys but come out that way anyhow, ad hoc was the closest latin I could find to that meaning) sure support vaping as a very viable means to quit burning tobacco and all the other weird shit in tobacco.
There’s a reason why people hang pine tree shaped air fresheners from their dash and don’t burn actual pine logs in their cars. Ok, there’s several reasons, but smoke is one of them. The pin smell from a green pine log is pretty dang organic and natural, but the smoke is pretty lethal in, say, a prius. It’s the obvious difference between smoking and vaping. Personally I think when objective tests come out they will find more sublime differences in favor of vaping, but, it seems a bit cruel, a bit villagers-with-torches-and-pitchforks to jump on the fuck e-cigs wagon.
I would understand local governments drooling over the idea of taxing the bejesus out of them to the beat of the same insane drummer that taxes the fuck out of tobacco, according to most sources it’s a multi-billion dollar industry globally (I think Europe and Asia are bigger consumers, but you know us{US} when we get our glutton on …).
Heh, I don’t know. I’m compulsive. If all that shit was outlawed tomorrow, I have enough to last a long time (ejuice, cigars, pipe tobacco, everything but cigs. I have a few (four maybe five) packs in a carton that have sat like that since befor Christmas. During the outage I smoked a partial pack and threw the rest out. For some reason I’m keeping the rest of the carton. It’s symbolic, not paranoid. Like a reformed drinker keeping an unopened bottle of whisky, only less dangerous. I have no craving for a cigarette.)
It’ll be an interesting battle when real push comes to real shove. I guess the mayors of NY and LA have already thrown their hissy fits. Those are elected positions. I don’t live in either place and never plan to live in Ny, but if the dice roll towards vapings favor those guys might be looking for work. If the deal is only not smoking them in public I don’t even care. A ban or a sin tax would piss me off. I guess they banned e-juice sales in “Canada” (Christ American news sources get dumber by the day, it’s an entire fucking country. It’s like a Canadian newsource basing the swing of this country on what the fucking mayor of new york decides) but allow for the sale of the batteries. So I googled that. I didn’t get anything about a ban, I got a bunch of hits for purchasing Canadian e-juice. Neither the black nor the gray markets are that bold with their marketing. Though, honestly, most of the Canadian e-juice companies seemed to be west, Saskatoon the farthest eastern one I found.
So, I don’t know, maybe Quebec has vaping ant’s in it’s pants. There is a tendency in the States to think Quebec IS Canada. Even so, North America has barely dipped their toes in these waters compared to Europe (real big on the vaping) and Asia (who makes most of the Mods). Some of the big tobacco companies are getting into it and so you’ve being seeing the push for certain e-cigs (the disposable cig look alikes). Castrated or not, the American tobacco industry is big money, has been for hundreds of years. They throw their weight behind a product and it will move, and lawyers will say shit. I’m guessing there are some old boys still with big tobacco dying to do in-your-face court room battles. Dying to be on the winning side of a nicotine argument.
I still stand by the idea that if something is so very lethal to my health and me and the 500k that allegedly die a year from smoking are too stupid to quit, take it off the fucking market. It’s not like booze (prohibition didn’t work so well, neither has the marijuana prohibition, odd that no opponent has done a study on second marijuana smoke or, conversely, Marlboro hasn’t come out with nicotine brownies) I mean booze has a social component, smoking not so much, or it’s not as direct, as cause and effect. If you’ve ever stepped outside for a smoke and run into a crowd, you know there’s a social component, but that’s more to do with the ban than the drug.
But hell, even so, 500k die of drinking related causes a year (I just made that up, I think the 500k with smoking is made up. I think both are lethal, but when you toss in “related” you know the stats are padded. I mean in a fire, for instance, a lot of the causualities don’t die by being burnt to death, it’s the smoke inhalation. That is certainly smoking related. Drunk drivers? Very definitely booze related) I mean it’s pretty cynical and hypocritical of the government to regulate something, tell me it WILL kill me, jack up the tax and still profit from it. It intrudes in the free market for alleged health reasons, but doesn’t intrude enough to not profit from it and allow insurance companies to use scare tactics to profit even more. Hate the sinner not the sin, right? Fat smokers is why insurance rates are jacked up, hate those guys. Oh and fucking old people, always dying of old age, smoke related old age, fuck those guys, tax em for every year over sixty; rat bastards.
I don’t know. Vaping is a cure. Ask anyone who is doing it. Is it a safe cure? I’m thinking yes, but what the fuck do I know. I do know that even if I didn’t have a pony in that race I’d make the presumption of positive outcome, the presumption of healthier, if for no other reason than there is no tar; no one is disputing that there is tar, they’d lose that dispute. Being a vaper I know there isn’t. When you quit smoking (whether you quit nicotine or not) a few weeks in you start hacking up gross shit, usually laced with brown or black (docs always ask “what color is your sputum?” expecting clear or green as a diagnostic for whether it’s a cold, the flu or bronchial or more tests needed. A few weeks into quitting smoking you are hacking up loose tar. Brown or black.). A few weeks back I was hacking up gross shit.
I can’t tell you I feel different, but there’s a lot of variables going on in my own life. I can tell you I’ve been under the sort of stress that would have had me chain smoking last year and I am not fighting off the urge to chain smoke, I just don’t have it. And I’ve gone from tobacco flavored juices to weird shit like dragonfruit and raspberry lemonade. It’s that sort of thing that has opponents screaming that this shit is marketed to kids. Every web-site and brick and mortar place I’ve been is real big on the whole You Must Be 18. And sure a website doesn’t really know how old you are. It’s been a problem since the public has been allowed to use the web. A little late to knickers in an uproar now. Most red blooded minors in this country would rather say they were eighteen at a porn site than to have nicotine juice sent to their home address anyhow. There are wine and beer of the month clubs too. Again, a minor would still have to have it mailed to mom and dads address. An emancipated minor can probably get wine, beer and nicotine easier anyhow.
Having been a kid and a smoker, the draw was not taste. Cigarettes taste nasty, by the time you developed the taste it’s too late. First time I inhaled I puked. I hate puking above all else, I’d rather be burned or cut than puke. I’m not sure exactly what the draw was, if there was any peer pressure it was me making my friends join me. It might have been to be cool, I don’t remember, I was one of the cool kids. My high school had a smoking area for kids. There were non smoking cool kids who hung out there too.
I’m almost positive that cotton candy flavored cigerettes would not have been a draw. At the time I started smoking there were lemon flavored cigs (aimed at women for some reason) and certainly flavored cigars and menthols. I don’t even smoke menthols unless I’m jonesing and have to bum one.I certainly didn’t as a kid. The first pack I ever bought (meaning didn’t steal from someones parents) was camel straights. I don’t know, maybe a little kid would be attracted by the idea of cotton candy flavored smoke, but, still more likely to drink it which is really really dangerous. You shouldn’t keep any kind of poison within the reach of kids or critters. Still, a dog, cat, kid is a lot less likely to smoke poison than eat it.
Even retching at the taste, I wanted cigerettes to taste like cigerettes. With the ejuice I seem to moving far from that. It’s on purpose but still I’m surprised that I’m enjoying it. Ginger ejuice is so fucking good I probably would have tried a ginger cigerette. I’m pretty confident that I’ve quit smoking. I have no immediate plans to quit vaping. That’s the only downside my personal experience has shown me. I like doing it. I’m 99 percent sure it’s safer than cigerettes. I’m also pretty sure the FDA will eventually find a way of fucking with it. Though as medicinal marijuana becomes more and more the norm I think the vaping machines will thrive; there’s a whole subsection of personal e-cig shaped things designed for vaping dry herbs.
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