Here we are, in the dying months of 2019, and we continue to face more backlash. Oftentimes, the missing link between truth and deceit is a thoroughly concocted fluff piece. Recently, though, the relentless barrage of said fluff pieces are laminating the surface of the discussion – keeping it slippery in a gray enough area so they can get away with unsubstantiated claims. By the time the Devil’s Advocate stumbles into the room, they’ve already snuck their coveted prize and scampered out with fat wallets bursting with ad-revenue gold. In a moment of shared mourning, the collective outcry of e-cigarette consumers can be heard from anywhere in the United States. It’s difficult not to recall the famous headline from satire website The Onion, “Fun Toy Banned Because of Three Stupid Dead Kids.”
In the meantime, we can all sit twiddling our thumbs awaiting the arrival of the next Goliath. But somehow, when having a clear Goliath, our minds automatically want to assign a David. In this case, David was JUUL. As it turns out, David wasn’t the brave archetype of the hero we know from the story after all. He was the leper on the corner, begging for a coin and a free get-out-of-jail card. David rolls over and shows his belly for a rub at the first sign of trouble. We can wail and weep to the latest concerns because our problem has finally reached the White House.
We may now perish, thanks to unlicensed sellers creating bad batches of products in their garage and distributing the illicit THC across the country. Historically, believing anything you hear on the news is not a good idea, time and again it proves to be a complete waste of attention. It’s simply a cognitive load dropped into the back of our minds to slowly chip away at it. How do you think this fares in the minds of the Barcalounger masses? The fast-food dwelling mouth-breathers sucking at the teat of misinformation and vomiting fragments of what they’ve read on a Facebook headline. Unlike these words, they don’t fall on deaf ears. It’s nice to write for the walls sometimes. “Hello, walls. How'd things go for you today?”
What happened to the old practice of interrogating a belief? The critical thinking practice of attempting to tear the legs off of an assumption before it runs on a destructive course of biases. Instead, let’s confine the individual claim into its own isolated pulpit. The lone claim must stand on its own before we allow it into our minds. The articles and segments indicating the distinction between the illicit products and the rest of vaping are criminally late. The harm is already done. An example of things going too far would be the new Michigan law set to imprison anyone in possession of four or more flavored vaping products (starting at age 17). It doesn’t stop there.
As of September 14th, 2019, President Trump seems to be slowly easing off the hard stance against vaping he had initially conveyed last week. I can’t presume to know what anyone in the White House is doing, but the sudden change of heart, combined with the phrasing of his tweet, raises a few question marks. Was he briefed on the nature of vaping and the root cause of the severe lung illnesses popping across the map? I sure hope so. There is some semblance of light at the end of the proverbial tunnel. We’ve been sitting at the end of a gun for far too long. Staring at the empty, cold, depths of the barrel, waiting for it to scatter our gray matter on our Juul cartridges.
We’ve come too close for comfort. Maybe we’re safe now, but we were close to damnation because of trigger-happy bloggers and journalists pumping their headlines. Some comments allude to the classic maxim, “follow the money,” considering the clear cash infusion into Big Tobacco from the upcoming former smokers going back to cigarettes. Don’t wear a tinfoil hat yet, though, as most of it is hearsay and conspiracy group think. True? Maybe. But, as of today, it requires giant leaps of logic to get there.
Let’s save the tin foil for a rainier day (in this climate, it could be tomorrow). Earlier this year, the boogeyman had a different face: popcorn lung. Thinking of how far off we’ve veered from the main road, it astonishes me more in retrospect. This deranged atmosphere of the current anti-vaping climate will be remembered with groans of shame by everyone. I’ve heard about this “epidemic” even from my own mother (who knows jack-shit about vaping).
The bedeviling nemesis of the vaping industry – the FDA, continues to provide ammunition to the opposing side. With each anti-vaping “concern” established to the public, they smuggle a heap of potentially deadly repercussions – especially for those who utilized an e-cigarette as a smoking cessation method. If we get to live to vape another day, we shouldn’t take this for granted. There should be a propulsive charge for those who want to keep far from the cancer sticks – a sustained offense in response to these charges.
While I like the Vaping alternative to Cigarettes, we need to make sure this alternative is SAFE for ALL! Let’s get counterfeits off the market, and keep young children from Vaping!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 13, 2019
