IN response to “The Ferret: Holyrood vaping plans targeted by ‘astroturf’ campaign from London PR firm” (Jun 5).

I don’t smoke, and I don’t vape, however I did both and doing the latter is how I stopped doing the former. Patches, gum, inhalers, pseudoscientific rubbish like NLP – I tried every ineffectual bit of nonsense that the NHS sanction for treating tobacco addiction and none of it worked, but what did was being able to buy the vape device I wanted to, and the flavour of juice that I enjoyed, and be able to do so at a strength I chose.

Having been a heavy smoker, I started with a strong juice and steadily reduced it over the course of a year until I was vaping with juice that had no nicotine in it at all, which was a vital final step as it allowed me to decouple the last pangs of the physical addition from the little rituals of the habit itself, which made ending both easier.

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This may seem like a bit of a non sequitur to those who read the Ferret article about tobacco industry astroturfing, but in fact it isn’t, because despite now using the tobacco industry as a bogeyman to imply that vaping is something sinister from which we must be protected just as we are from tobacco, the people pushing for this legislation were only too happy to ally themselves with that same tobacco industry not too long ago when vaping first came on the scene and the industry tried to block and control it to protect their existing business.

While the industry have now changed their minds because they are driven by profit and see an opportunity to sell a product without the (rightly) tainted reputation of tobacco, the campaigners have not, and now fight to taint vaping by association, because these campaigners are not motivated by genuine concern for people’s health, they are the same neopuritan moralists who made existing smoking substitutes so weak and access-restricted that they’re worthless to most smokers.

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They also oppose safe consumption rooms for harder drugs, and battle against marijuana legalisation. They demand that vaping be controlled like tobacco because deep down they believe that addicts are weak people who should have to suffer penance for their moral failure, and the idea that someone might be able to quit smoking on their own terms, at their own pace, and without any strife or discomfort at all – or even, heaven forfend, continue on with their nicotine consumption without facing the ill health and ostracisation of smoking – deeply offends their sense of righteousness. And so, absent any actual evidence of the dangers of vaping they insist must surely exist, they smear, and they lobby, and they gin up social media campaigns of their own, but because they’re not the tobacco industry they get a free pass.

The irony is that they are now the greater threat to public health, because they would regulate vaping out of existence for no reason more than to satisfy their own prohibitionist impulses, despite it having the potential to eliminate tobacco use entirely.

Ross Naysmith
via email