After reading my 2 cents recently on the new Electronic cigarettes that are being touted as both the latest and greatest cessation aid along with being the best long term smoking substitute, one could say I was less than impressed to say the least.  I wanted to like these things and gave them more than a fair shot several times but came away with a bitter taste in my mouth regardless, and it wasn’t from the leaky e-cig either.    The devices do work, to an extent.  Electronic cigs do deliver a substantial amount of vapor supposedly containing varying amounts of nicotine.  Whether there’s any nicotine in them or not, I have no idea,  but none of the liquids impressed me in the least.  Fine and good, case closed.   But my curiosity about them and the prevalence of ads pertaining to them makes it difficult to totally forget their existence though.  In running across these ads,  posted on every other website, I’m becoming more and more disgusted with the marketing strategies being used. The last ad I just read states:  “it’s a fact, smoking kills 400,000 people a year in the US”.  Is that right, say’s who?  Legislators,  statisticians, special interest groups such as ASH and their brainwashed followers…   Stats are the telltale sign that your talking to a liar and the opposite is more often closer to the truth.  I don’t see how preaching this anti tobacco propaganda to smokers is gonna make this product appealing and might have the opposite effect.

The point of these ads is becoming closer and closer to anti-smoking rhetoric.  The general strategy is to quote inflammatory junk science that groups such as ASH use to propagate and increase hostility between smokers and the rest of the world.  The ads that make smoker’s crave a smoke, that’s no joke.   The hostility being used in turn to incite the naive do-gooders and nanny types to raise Cain against smokers (who pay their salaries by the way) and keep on keeping on with the malfeasance.  That these idiots are using this junk science is not surprising, all’s fair in war and marketing.   But, that these new “ex-smokers” take these views to heart  is beyond ludicrous.  Just months prior they were refuting the junk science and propaganda that has recently swayed them to the Dark Side.   Where’s their pride, much less character?   In effect, they’re admitting themselves fools and that anti sentiment has been right all along,  if that’s the case, why quote fictitious studies?  What a bunch of spineless sheople.

Not that their ineffectiveness wasn’t enough to avoid these new toys but the guilt by association with the new ex-smoking traitors is more than I could bear.  When I had quit smoking those seven years, several years ago, I never allowed myself to don the cap of the anti.  That’s an easy temptation to fall for, the superiority over a whole class of people by one’s own act of quitting.  I couldn’t quit using one of these things much less do a 180 in my convictions.  I need nicotine and I don’t relish in the “look” of being a smoker, which is essentially what these things do accomplish.  I remember the kids in smokers court of my youth who would follow their smoking friends into the smoking areas and make a  dramatic show of smoking, to be “cool” I suppose.  Funny that they picked up a little addiction too, serves em right.   I think the e-cig is a great thing for these folks, to keep up the “illusion of smoking” when they were never very heavy smokers to begin with.

Smoking isn’t something anyone takes pride in.  Smoking is a profound addiction that neither candy cigarettes nor faux electronic smoke will easily cure.   Looks like these vendors are trying to swell the ranks of the anti’s with new recruits though.  Wonder how long the probationary period for ex-smokers is before regaining full human status in the anti’s eyes, how much re-education is needed before full re-admission.   Looks like hypocrisy is good for a few brownie points to start.