An article in the N.Y. Times Business section highlighted the marketing tactics of the e-cigarette business, and the sub-headline should have been Guilty, by association.
Not that the real headline was any better: E-Cigarette Makers Ads Echo Tobacco s Heyday. The news article featured quotes from the omnipresent foe of this technology and harm reduction, the Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids Matt Myers, who never met a cylindrical object he could trust. His take on the skyrocketing marketing campaigns and the commensurate accelerating sales of e-cigs now expected to soar past the $1.7 Billion mark this year went like this: It is beyond troubling that e-cigarettes are using the exact same marketing tactics [employed by Big Tobacco in the last century]...
The writer also gets input from e-cigarette marketers and that includes a representative of R.J.Reynolds new product, Vuse (an e-cig). Impressive investments in different advertising spheres are mentioned, of course. There are no comments from any professional involved in public health.
ACSH s Dr. Gilbert Ross perspective: Nowhere is the big monkey in the room mentioned: cigarette-related disease and death. Why does the Times and Matt Myers and his acolytes in the government and nonprofit world feel the need to single out e-cigarettes marketing for attack? The writer of this piece takes pains to point out that e-cigs tactics are redolent of the nefarious seductions of Big Tobacco of the 1950s. But there is a big, big difference between then, and now.
It seems that the e-cigarette marketers are doing their jobs well," Dr. Ross continues. So what? If Chevy and Nike can do so, why not e-cigarettes? No one involved in this article bothers to pay even casual attention to the public health miracle these little devices seem to be responsible for: cigarette sales are in historic declines in parallel with the upsurge in vaping. Meanwhile, 45 million Americans keep on smoking and dying, the latter at a rate of over 400,000 deaths yearly, from tobacco cigarette smoke. Vaping has harmed no one that we can identify, as of today. So, I must ask again, and not for the last time: why do Mr. Myers, Tom Frieden s CDC, Harold Wimmer s ALA, the FDA, all stand in the way of smoker s getting off deadly cigarettes via e-cigarettes? Why do they tell desperate smokers to stick with the approved NRTs, when they do not work?