For nicotine enthusiasts, 2015 will be
remembered as part of a golden era. Less than 10 years after they were
introduced in the United States, e-cigarettes have gone relatively
unregulated by health agencies, with companies and users making their
own rules in a nicotine-laced Wild West. E-cigarette companies have been
advertising their products to adults and children alike, claiming to
help smokers quit while simultaneously promoting lollipop-flavored
liquids. But now health organizations, including the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention and even city-based public health departments
are starting to fight back—not in the form of regulations, but with
their own media campaigns.
It’s a tough fight to pick. Nationwide, more than 20 million people—about one in 10 adults—have
tried e-cigarettes, and plenty of those people have become vaping
devotees. That’s due at least in part to the way e-cig companies have
advertised their products, unhindered by the FDA’s ad regulations for
tobacco products. “It’s totally out of control,” says Stanton Glantz, director of the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education at the University of California San Francisco. “For the first time since 1972, we have recreational nicotine being advertised on television and radio.” Reminiscent of glamorous smoking ads of the last century, many of the ads feature celebrity endorsements; in a Blu ad, Jenny McCarthy flirts with the camera
while rejoicing that she can now smoke without scaring guys away with
her smell. And many of them seem shockingly child-centric. “The youth
use is exploding in parallel to the marketing,” says Glantz.
What’s a concerned public health agency to do? Fight ads with ads.
Health advocates were relatively slow to react to the onslaught of
e-cigarettes, but recently, national, state, and city-level public
health organizations have launched their own campaigns against
e-cigarettes and their promiscuous advertising. On March 30, the CDC
began its first anti-smoking campaign featuring e-cigarette users. Last
week, the California Department of Public Health launched a anti-vaping
campaign called Still Blowing Smoke. And in January, the San Francisco Department of Health launched #CurbIt,
pointing out the dangers of e-cigs and their brazen plays to hook kids
while warning residents that vaping is only allowed in the same places
as smoking.
There’s plenty of evidence behind the campaigns’ claims—studies that
link e-cigs to asthma, lung inflammation, MRSA infection risk and
exposure to harmful chemicals. But with scant data on the long-term
health effects of e-cigarettes and their usefulness as a quitting tool,
the ads use a number of classic psychological strategies to help beat
back the ire of pro-vapers.
One CDC ad relies on anecdotal evidence to make its point. It
features a story from an e-cigarette user, a 35-year-old wife and mother
named Kristy from Tennessee who says she started smoking e-cigarettes
hoping to quit combustible cigarettes. Instead, she began to smoke both,
until her lung collapsed. The American Vaping Association reportedly
called the ad “patently dishonest,” saying that it implies vaping led to
lung disease, when in reality Kristy had gone back to smoking
cigarettes alone in the months before her lung collapsed. California’s
anti-vaping campaign lists toxins that humans once thought were
safe—arsenic-laced powdered wigs, radium therapy, and of course
cigarettes—and compares them to e-cigs, using a deceptive associative
tactic that we’ve called out before.
The backlash against those campaigns has been swift. In the battle
between public health and e-cigarettes, e-cigs have one major advantage:
a massive population of users, many of whom credit the product with
helping them to quit smoking, and who loudly defend their choice to
vape. One thread on the American Vaping Association’s website collects anti-#CurbIt tweets. VaporVanity.com, a pro-vaping site, quickly posed the question: “Are The Members Of The San Francisco Health Department The Stupidest Human Beings On The Planet?” And pro-vapers launched a site nearly identical to California’s—called Not Blowing Smoke—that claimed that, well, basically everything the state said was a lie. The state’s Facebook post
was quickly taken over by angry vaping fans. “There is this
hyper-aggressive social media response to anyone who doesn’t think
e-cigarettes are the greatest things ever,” says Glantz. “They’re trying
to shut down any criticism.” Derek Smith of San Francisco’s Tobacco
Free Project says his older colleagues saw similar reactions decades
ago, when the city launched its first anti-smoking campaigns.
In a perfect world, the safety of a fun, potentially helpful smoking
cessation method wouldn’t be left to nasty debates like this. The
problem is, as in the early days of campaigns against cigarettes, there
isn’t definitive evidence that e-cigarettes cause long-term
harm—a point that pro-vapers will be quick to remind you of. But there
also isn’t definitive evidence that they’re safe. And there are many
good reasons to assume they’ll be found in time to increase cancer and
heart and lung disease. “E-cig people would like you to believe that
because the evidence that we have on them is limited, that we don’t know
anything. And that’s just not true,” says Glantz. There’s a difference,
he says, between not having evidence of an effect and having evidence
of no effect.
Read More: http://www.wired.com/2015/04/war-vapings-health-risks-getting-dirty/
Related Article: March E-Cigarette Madness: Semifinal Results for Worst E-Cigarette Lie
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