"There is no more reason to treat e-cigarettes as medical products than there is to treat alcohol-free beer or chewing gum as pharmaceuticals. They are emphatically not medicines and they make no claim to treat any disease. They are alternatives to smoking which many smokers have found to be effective substitutes for cigarettes.
E-cigarettes have the potential to make conventional cigarettes obsolete, but only if they are allowed to flourish in a free market. The medical establishment has played no part in the rise of this remarkable product and, shamefully, many anti-smoking campaigners want them banned.
The MHRA's decision will stifle innovation, raise prices and lead to a black market in potentially lethal nicotine fluids amongst existing e-cigarette users. In the short term, e-cigarettes will have to be taken off the market, potentially for years and possibly forever. In the meantime, most of the UK's one million e-cigarette users will return to smoking cigarettes. The only winners will be the tobacco industry and the pharmaceutical industry.”
I'll write more about this as soon as I get the time, but I recommend you read Dick Puddlecote...
Today is the apex of tobacco control industry stupidity. Ultimate and resounding proof of what I have been saying for years. It has never, ever, been about health. And now they have illustrated it beyond reasonable doubt.
And Clive Bates...
Medicines regulation involves disproportionate costs, compliance burdens and restrictions – none of which apply to cigarettes. So this is a good day for the cigarette makers, and their competition will be weakened. We need regulation to encourage these products to compete with cigarettes, not smother them with red tape.
What the e-cigarette sector doesn’t need is ‘boring’. That has been tried and failed with NRT. It needs marketing verve, style and buzz, not the dull deadening hand of bureaucratic approvals. That applies to product design, packing, marketing, sponsorship – the works… the public health challenge is to get as many smokers to switch as possible, not to make perfectly safe products that no-one wants.
And, most cathartically, Longrider...
Scum, the lot of them. They should be taken out and strung up from the nearest lamp post. Then their heads put on spikes outside Traitor’s Gate, while the ravens peck out their eyeballs. These evil people are trying to effectively ban a product that is less harmful than tobacco and is helpful to people trying to give it up. It isn’t about health. It was never about health. It is and always has been, about control.
Let the battle lines be drawn. These people are not only the enemies of liberty, they are also the enemies of the one thing they claim to be advocating for—health.
Tobacco control. It's not about tobacco, it's all about control.
