Smokeless Cigarettes, yikes, they are really advertising aggressively! I got this in the mail today, so I can “reinvent the way I smoke” LOL!
Score! I have $15 worth of coupons to jump start me into an addictive habit that will costs thousands of dollars over my lifetime!
Its been decades since I got direct mail advertisement trying to get me to smoke or drink alcohol and it appears the floodgates have been opened. This whole smokeless cigarette thing seems to have caught regulators completely by surprise, its like the gold rush all over again, and there don’t seem to be any regulations in place to control it.
First of all, look at the way the blu electronic cigarette is marketed, read the ad. Nowhere in the bulk mailer flyer I got did it mention anything about using these to help you stop smoking. In fact, in bold print at the top of the ad is:
REINVENT HOW YOU SMOKE
This product is intended to replace cigarettes, not help you stop smoking. They want you as a lifetime customer. Let me share a parallel story with you. Back in dark ages, there was only sugar to make things sweet and only butter and oil to make things greasy. Back then, in Popular Science magazine they speculated about the possibility of artificial sweeteners and artificial fats that would make it easy for anyone overweight to lose weight. Then a miracle happened! The chemists came up with a zero calorie oil named Olestra and several zero calorie sweeteners – saccharine, aspartame, and others. Guess what though? Rather than make the obesity problem go away, it got three times worse! How is that possible? Zero sugar sweets and zero fat snacks should make the fat melt away .. but they dont, people just eat more of them. They no longer feel guilty eating them, so they eat MORE! The way for obese people to get ripped abs is not to substitute fat free pastries for normal pastries, olestra fat free chips for potato chips and diet coke for coke – that doesnt work. The only way to lose fat and keep it off long term is to substitute apples for pastries, carrots for potato chips, and water for coke.
In a similar way, making cigarettes “safer” by making these e-cigarettes is not going to help, mark my word. People will start thinking of vaping as a “healthy alternative to smoking” so more and more people will become addicted to e-cigarettes and those who smoke will consume far more nicotine than if they were smoking tobacco cigarettes. If the only people who used them were people who were addicted to cigarettes and could not quit smoking after many failed attempts, then I would say “Bravo!” but I know this will not be the case – especially if aggressive advertising like this is allowed. So what costs America more in health care costs, 20 million people smoking tobacco cigarettes or 40 million people vaping the electronic cigarettes? We don’t know. Lord only knows how/why the FDA approved them with such scanty safety evidence.
USA has made such incredible progress in the last three decades in lowering lung cancer rates and increasing peoples quality of life by reducing the number of smokers and that could be very quickly erased. :(
Read WebMD article on e-cigarette safety
- If you smoke burning real cigarettes, please stop. If you want to use e-cigarettes as an aide to help you stop smoking then that is the one and only awesome use of e-cigarettes.
- If you don’t smoke, please don’t start smoking these e-cigarettes!
- If you are a lawmaker, please make all laws that apply to cigarettes apply to e-cigarettes also.