Philip Morris lobbying to stop WHO ‘attack’ on vapes and similar products

Forgot how Pro-drug the fediverse is as well; vapes should be regulated as heavily as cigarettes and other tobacco products. Just because it's less harmful doesn't mean it's not harmful.

I thought vaping was fine because I didn’t know it had nicotine in it.

Super fucking addictive, it should absolutely be regulated because currently in most places it isn’t, as evidenced by all the kids buying vapes.

Fuuuuck Philip Morris. Tax them heavily and use the proceeds to pay their customers' medical expenses

If I could just push a button and make all non medical use tobacco become impossible to grow, I would push that button a million times just to be sure. I hope everyone working for Philip Morris gets lung cancer.

That should just be an accepted cost to enter the industry.

I interviewed with them once, and they swore up and down that they were cleaning up and divesting of all the harmful stuff, and wanted me to trust they were all about health and a smoke-free future.

Thankfully they were so staggeringly full of bullshit during the interviews that I quickly realized it'd be an absolutely horrifically toxic (groan, yes, sorry) place to work irrespective of my other doubts, and I ended up telling them I didn't want to continue the process and that I was so unhappy with the assorted bullshit during the process that I didn't want to ever be approached by them again.

That's the very long way of saying I'm not the slightest bit surprised it turns out they are in fact still massive asshats, and I'm very happy I caught on early enough.

Given the damage they have done to society is there a good reason the fines aren't all your companies money and all of your executives money we seize and destroy and products farms and machinery that can't be sold for non-tobacco use?

so glad I quit.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

In a message sent by the PMI’s senior vice-president of external affairs last month and seen by the Guardian, staff were told to find “any connection, any lead, whether political or technical” before a meeting of delegates from 182 countries.

The email sent on 22 September by Grégoire Verdeaux, the senior vice-president of external affairs at PMI, said: “The agenda and meeting documents have been made public for the main part.

Unfortunately they reconfirmed every concern we had that this conference may remain as the biggest missed opportunity ever in tobacco control’s history … WHO’s agenda is nothing short of a systematic, methodical, prohibitionist attack on smoke-free products.”

Without “reasonable, constructive outcomes” , Verdeaux wrote, the “WHO will have irreversibly compromised the historic opportunity for public health presented by the recognition that smoke-free products, appropriately regulated, can accelerate the decline of smoking rates faster than tobacco control combined”.

Tobacco companies are not invited to the event and Verdeaux said despite this he would be in Panama “to publicly denounce the absurdity of being excluded from it while PMI today” was “undoubtedly the most helpful private partner WHO could have in the fight against smoking”.

Asked about the leaked email, Verdeaux said in a statement: “What I say publicly and what I say to our employees is exactly the same: I am proud to make the case to governments and media that innovation drives down smoking rates faster and for that reason should be supported and regulated.

The original article contains 880 words, the summary contains 246 words. Saved 72%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

Now can someone give a probability for the success of that?

It's an international organism, with scientific input from almost every nation of the world.

Vaping seems to be healthier than cigarette smoking from what I've read, and it makes sense. Burnt particulate matter is hell on your lungs.

But it should be used for smokers to break addiction. And recreational use needs to be heavily regulated until we can do long term studies that show it's relatively safe.

I'll explain as someone with professional chemistry experience. Vaping vaporizes water to deliver the nicotine -- or just to deliver flavored vapor without the nicotine. This process gives me two major concerns:

1. It isn't pure water vapor, there's additives and oils even for juices with no nicotine. We don't know what breathing in the vaporized flavor additives does. And, we don't know if the process is generating enough heat to cause chemical reactions and degradation of the non water components. It's completely possible that carcinogenic or toxic compounds could come from this. This warrants a lot more study, and fortunately, it should be quite doable. Spectroscopy could tell us a lot.

2. Remember how Flint had a lot of lead in their water? Heavy metals in water come from surface atoms on the metal leaching into the water. You can treat the water to either discourage this or cause it to precipitate out. Heat increases the frequency of leaching -- so vaporizing water with the coils is going to lead to heavy metal particles in the vapor. This is where we really don't have information. We can likely determine the quantity and type of metal atoms, but we can't determine what it's going to do to the lungs. A big safety concern with tiny particles is breathing them in, because nanoparticles and the like will also ravage your lungs when inhaled. Doesn't even matter what the solid particle is.

The latter concern is where we need long term research. We need to know if the heavy metal particles in the vapor are causing damage in the same way that nanoparticles do. And we need to know what prolonged exposure to those metal particles does. After 40 years of vaping, would enough metal have deposited in airways to cause health issues? It's very possible.

Is that to say stop right this second? No, but just be aware of the risks and don't go overboard. Heavy drinking is probably still worse for you than this, and smoking is definitely worse.

There seem to be a few people who have unfortunately believed the anti-vaping propaganda.

If you think that vapes are more harmful than smoking in any way, this is for you. I've been following the actual science on this for almost 15 years and have peer reviewed the studies.

Every single study in the US that produced negative results either had methodologies designed to only produce negative results, or the negative results were orders of magnitude lower than OSHA levels, or even lower than atmospheric levels.

The only things the anti-vaping campaigns can rely on is bad science and purposefully misrepresenting study results. Well, that and the "think of the children" bullshit.

There's also a belief that nicotine is highly addictive and very harmful. This is incorrect. Nicotine on its own is actually less physically addictive than caffeine (shorter withdrawal period), and actually has heath benefits.

Now, to the "think of the children" bullshit. For one, children can't legally purchase nicotine in most countries. If you want to say the flavors attract children, then we need to ban any sort of flavored alcohol. Also, children can buy as many energy drinks as they want, which are actually harmful to them.

The real reason that vaping is being demonized is because the state governments are losing tobacco tax revenue faster than they planned, and they've already budgeted the money they expected to get. But, instead of imposing a reasonable tax to fill the gap, they tried to make a 30ml bottle of eliquid (normally ~$10-20) cost upwards of $100.

Don't bother asking for sources, because I won't Google for you. I am educated on the topic, and this isn't a formal debate.

I will answer any questions you may have, though.

Vapes are even worse than cigarettes, for real.