Their Product Is Doubt--Deceptive Government Campaign Against Electronic Cigarettes - Forbes
by Sally Satel Oct 30, 2015
I am a psychiatrist specializing in addiction medicine, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and a lecturer at the Yale University School of Medicine. A former Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy fellow, I have worked on several Senate subcommittees. I have written on veterans' mental health, racial disparities in medicine, addiction theory and practice, harm reduction in public health, organ markets, among other topics. My latest book is Brainwashed - The Seductive Appeal of Mindless Neuroscience (Basic, 2013), which was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize in Science.
The author is a Forbes contributor. The opinions expressed are those of the writer.
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C. Everett Koop, Surgeon General under President Ronald Reagan, was an ardent crusader against smoking. As he said of himself in 1998, “I frequently spoke of the sleazy behavior of the tobacco industry in its attempts to discredit legitimate science as part of its overall effort to create controversy and doubt.” Koop was referring to doubt surrounding the relationship between smoking and lung cancer.
The word “doubt” carried special resonance. It conjured an infamous 1969* internal memo from the Brown and Williamson Tobacco Company. “Doubt is our product,” a B and W executive instructed his colleagues… “[It] is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the mind of the public… of establishing a controversy.”
The tobacco companies are no longer blowing smoke about the hazards of combusted-tobacco cigarettes. But the critics of electronic cigarettes — an important new technology that has the potential to replace smoking worldwide – have begun mass-producing doubt about the product.
E-cigarettes, as most of us now know, are battery-powered devices that heat a nicotine solution to produce an inhalable nicotine vapor that does not contain tobacco, let alone burn it. E-cigs release a vapor that contains none of the carcinogenic tar present in cigarette smoke.
Last month, the Centers for Disease Control and, independently, the California Department of Public Health launched public education ad campaigns aimed at derailing the future of e-cigs. The ads are teeming with half-truths, speculative harms, and massive spin.
The CDC’s 20-week installment called “Tips from Former Smokers” includes a print ad featuring a woman named Kristy who announces, “I started using e-cigarettes but kept smoking. Right up until my lung collapsed.”
The Kristy spot unmistakably suggests that e-cigarettes caused her collapsed lung.
This is deeply misleading. Kristy’s lung, it turns out, collapsed after she stopped using e-cigarettes and resumed smoking. There are no reported cases of e-cigarette use resulting in collapsed lungs. If anything, when many smokers with COPD and asthma switch to “vaping” e-cigarettes, their lung function improves.
source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/sallysa...nment-campaign-against-electronic-cigarettes/
by Sally Satel Oct 30, 2015
I am a psychiatrist specializing in addiction medicine, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and a lecturer at the Yale University School of Medicine. A former Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy fellow, I have worked on several Senate subcommittees. I have written on veterans' mental health, racial disparities in medicine, addiction theory and practice, harm reduction in public health, organ markets, among other topics. My latest book is Brainwashed - The Seductive Appeal of Mindless Neuroscience (Basic, 2013), which was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize in Science.
The author is a Forbes contributor. The opinions expressed are those of the writer.
______________________________________________________________________________
C. Everett Koop, Surgeon General under President Ronald Reagan, was an ardent crusader against smoking. As he said of himself in 1998, “I frequently spoke of the sleazy behavior of the tobacco industry in its attempts to discredit legitimate science as part of its overall effort to create controversy and doubt.” Koop was referring to doubt surrounding the relationship between smoking and lung cancer.
The word “doubt” carried special resonance. It conjured an infamous 1969* internal memo from the Brown and Williamson Tobacco Company. “Doubt is our product,” a B and W executive instructed his colleagues… “[It] is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the mind of the public… of establishing a controversy.”
The tobacco companies are no longer blowing smoke about the hazards of combusted-tobacco cigarettes. But the critics of electronic cigarettes — an important new technology that has the potential to replace smoking worldwide – have begun mass-producing doubt about the product.
E-cigarettes, as most of us now know, are battery-powered devices that heat a nicotine solution to produce an inhalable nicotine vapor that does not contain tobacco, let alone burn it. E-cigs release a vapor that contains none of the carcinogenic tar present in cigarette smoke.
Last month, the Centers for Disease Control and, independently, the California Department of Public Health launched public education ad campaigns aimed at derailing the future of e-cigs. The ads are teeming with half-truths, speculative harms, and massive spin.
The CDC’s 20-week installment called “Tips from Former Smokers” includes a print ad featuring a woman named Kristy who announces, “I started using e-cigarettes but kept smoking. Right up until my lung collapsed.”
The Kristy spot unmistakably suggests that e-cigarettes caused her collapsed lung.
This is deeply misleading. Kristy’s lung, it turns out, collapsed after she stopped using e-cigarettes and resumed smoking. There are no reported cases of e-cigarette use resulting in collapsed lungs. If anything, when many smokers with COPD and asthma switch to “vaping” e-cigarettes, their lung function improves.
source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/sallysa...nment-campaign-against-electronic-cigarettes/
