Monthly Archives: September 2017

 

Wander up to a friendly neighbourhood vape store. Dead skin cells and small twigs lie across the shelves, shelves that once groaned under the weight of 5ml Taifuns and those things you needed res/nores wire for. I wish I could remember the name because it was a great vape when it worked. Oh yes, when it worked. When, after creating thirty minutes worth of electrical shorts and dumping two tankful’s of juice over the table. But now nothing works because this is the vaping equivalent of a Mad Max movie.

Sure, there are 10ml bottles. Somewhere. Well, we’ve been told they exist, but now they are the same size as Jimmy Krankie riding on a subatomic particle these new containers aren’t the easiest thing to see with the naked eye.

There used to be a time when people desperately hunted out eliquid suppliers. During this time, contact details would be traded by personal messages with the gravitas that accompanied the stealing of trade secrets. Waiting lists would be created for the release of a batch of juice, if your face didn’t fit then you went without. Now there’ll be shady blokes hanging around town centres or popping into pubs. “Psst. Oi mate, fancy buying some *wink* juice? I can do you a good deal on some large tanks n’all.”

The new tiny juice bottles were chosen by politicians because they had spent their collective formative days playing with posh kids’ tea sets. Tiny little cups matching tiny little saucers and tiny little teapots. The TPD was never about health, it was about Linda McAvan recreating her childhood.

You? You’re the little doll from the poor part of the dollhouse. Here’s your cute tiny juice bottle. Now, pour the juice into the atomiser before it evaporates. Damn, where’s that atomiser? It was here a minute ago – but now we have matching tiny ones they seem to have all the presence of a Prime Minister at a televised public debate.

The bottles are tiny, the attys are tiny – everything is tiny. It’s like the content of cheese packets at the supermarket. Once upon a time, they bulged with coagulated curdy goodness, now you open them up and there’s more ziplock or Velcro than the edible product.

So now we are all creations in a Benjamin Tabart morality tale. Only we don’t all live at the top of a ladder surrounded by gold, we are vaping giants clasping our minute equipment and waiting for a new world order to rise up, built of common sense, from this daft TPD landscape.

 

 

What is a lie? Are they all the same?

Your partner returns home. He or she has had something done to their hair that makes them resemble the successful splicing of a traffic warden and a sexual predator. Do you:

a)    Tell them it accentuates their cheek bones

b)   Tell them a cap will help smother it until it grows out

c)    Scream something about Hell as you run into a machine with rotating blades

If you answered mostly A’s, then you are a rare gem. If you answered mostly B’s, then you are probably in the pub. If you answered mostly C’s, then you are most likely to be the kind of vaper who likes walks on winter beaches, pulls the wings off flies and find the actions of anti-harm reduction advocates quite reprehensible.

Some scientists are busy producing papers on vaping that we find *ahem* dubious. Many will be quick to point fingers and accuse those involved of having a cosy relationship with pharmaceutical companies. Hang on, says the Association for Science and Health (ACSH) – be wary of being a member of the “hyperpartisan ‘Follow the money’!” gang, it says. Or rather, as it writes: “in science (as in life), it is best to assume that people are well intentioned, until there is sufficient reason to believe otherwise. In law, we call this “innocent until proven guilty,” and on the Internet, we call this Hanlon’s Razor”.

The ACSH reckon there are five scenarios for some of the ropey stuff we see:

1. They screwed up

2. The data is right, but the conclusions are wrong

3. The [well intentioned] scientists don’t know what they’re doing

4. The scientists are pushing an agenda

5. The scientists are committing fraud

So, is it possible to apply Hanlon’s Razor to Doctor Ninad Katdare?

Katdare wrote an article for the Huffington Post titled “Why tobacco is never safe – not even in an e-Cigarette or hookah”. It’s not a scientific paper, and the Huffington Post is not a journal of repute, but the doctor is meant to be a man of science. If he is then, when he presented his arguments, did he screw up? Did he not know what he was doing? Or was he committing fraud and pushing an agenda?

If you go and read the piece, and we don’t recommend it, he states that vaping is just another form of tobacco use, “implicated in causing asthma, coronary artery disease along with lung cancer.”

If we’re going to be honest, I’ll start – I hid the goal posts in my chest of drawers. Now it’s your go, Doctor Katdare

 

President image – https://www.teepublic.com/t-shirt/1242839-i-cannot-tell-a-lie

 

 

Stories like this one carried in the Burton Mail exemplify how the dead-eyed, light-fingered menace stalks our streets. Well, maybe “stalk” is the wrong word as it’s far more likely that they shuffle, hunched over unless fuelled with the cheap cider of their choice – then it would be all shouts and randomly falling into street furniture.

People work hard for the things they own, but some folks seem to think they can take whatever they want. “Oh the business has insurance,” they cry. The independent vape market isn’t one where all the business owners are driving around in fancy cars, throwing ten pound notes from the window. Almost all are living on less than minimum wage as they reinvest in making the company better for the customers. Not just that, there has also been a huge cost as a direct result of the Tobacco Products Directive. An insurance claim leads to increased premiums – which mean higher prices for the customer.

But this isn’t even a case of a company claiming after some low-life has made away with a bag of juices. This is about Szilvia the well-liked store manager at Van Dyke Vapes. This is about her personal mobile phone, something that carries precious memories and personal information. Precious memories and personal information that can’t be replaced and are now lost thanks to this gentleman. Precious memories and personal information that are now lost, but are replaced with a personal bill for a new mobile phone.

That’s not fair.

That’s not right.

Maybe you live in Yorkshire? Maybe you know a few other vapers and recognise this chap? Maybe you don’t live in Yorkshire and don’t recognise the gentleman, but sharing it on your social media accounts will help someone else to identify him?

You can contact them at:

https://vandykevapes.com 01756 796662

https://www.facebook.com/vandykevapes/

You can share:

Video footage of the person

https://d3vv6lp55qjaqc.cloudfront.net/items/1F3c0B250y0f0i3D3m3D/Rotated.mov

Animated gif

https://d3vv6lp55qjaqc.cloudfront.net/items/1m3n082r1a2E2l371X1Y/Screen%20Recording%202017-03-08%20at%2008.02%20pm.gif

JPG

Let’s show how the vape community can be a force for good – let’s track this guy down.

 

 

The process of exchanging opens up learning possibilities, we get to try out things that we would never have done in days gone by. Who reading this can honestly say they didn’t benefit emotionally and spiritually from experimenting with those mail order thongs?

Everybody wins. On one hand you have businesses expanding their order books through encouraging test purchases while on the other millions of people prove that nipple clamps really aren’t for them. But, like a child pulling faces at a Brussels sprout, the important thing is that it was attempted – lessons were learnt, minds changed.

One of the single biggest issues vape faces in 2017 is the collective obstinacy of people like Stanton Glantz. These (almost exclusively) outspoken academic gentlemen like to ignore facts as they rail against something that is 95% safer than smoking. So, the question we asked ourselves was this – how can we get them to question their preconceptions?

Channel 4 was set up to inspire, nurture and stimulate debate. As it strove to become innovative and distinctive, one day a producer said, “Hey, I know what, let’s get men to swap wives”. As most of us don’t live in places were such things take place [nobody has ever touched my motorbike keys] the concept is alien to us.

But swap they did, in a non-sexual sense: The Orchards and the Sinclares, the Seniors and the Jordans, and the Sheriffs and the Wards. Families came together from different ethnic backgrounds, sexual orientations and political viewpoints to spend a week in each others company, learn about a different way of living, and then have a good argument.

These academics who hate the notion of harm reduction are just like us: they go to the toilet like we do, they pick their noses when they think nobody is looking and they eat the same foods as us – except in the case of McKee, he seems to have more in common with the porcine inhabitants of farms.

So this is our proposal: we are seeking a number of volunteer vapers to go and spend some time with Simon Chumpman, Stanton Glib, Colin McPiggy and a host of other anti-vape crusaders. Obviously, there’s not chance that they would agree to this so we haven’t asked them. The plan is for a number of vapers to turn up at their front door and push their way in, staying for about a week, then all talking about what went well and what you all learnt from the experience.

It’s an exciting, experimental project and carries the chance that some things could go wrong. For a start, our public health experts might want to run away (we advise taking some string, tape or rope) or call the police. Clearly, we are not going to cover travelling costs or legal representation in fact, we’ll deny ever knowing anything about this if somebody asks. Who’s game?

 

 

The process the EU Commission is engaging in is meant to give the illusion of democracy in action. The bottom line is that it wants to tax electronic cigarettes and everything connected with them and, although the outcome might well have been decided behind closed doors, if we can muster up weight of numbers there is the chance we can influence the outcome.

The consultation has been taking place for a number of months but the deadline falls on the 16^th of February – there isn’t very long left to get involved. Jessica Harding, speaking for the New Nicotine Alliance, says: “It would be excellent if consumers could respond. It only takes about 15 minutes to do.”

The forms can appear a little confusing. For anybody struggling with working his or her way through the process, we recommend having a look at the brilliant guide residing on the ViP blog page.

The IG-ED e.V., a consumer’s organisation of German speaking vapers, contends that the issue is coming about because of declining cigarette sales producing less tax revenue for member countries: “The declining tobacco smoking quota is partially due to the electronic vape products which have been on the market for 12 years now. A tax on these products would stop this trend. It is also likely that a considerable number of newcomers would return to the tobacco cigarette.”

“For smokers, the motivation to switch would be significantly lower. This is not necessarily due to the tax, but the fact that a tax is being imposed at all, suggests to the consumer that electronic vape products are just as harmful as smoke tobacco products. Directive 2014/40/EU already leads consumers to be deceived about the actual minimal risks due to the same warning signs as on tobacco products.”

Closer to home, The New Nicotine Alliance believes that “There is no case on principled or practical grounds to apply excise duties to vaping products and other products that offer a much safer alternative to smoking.  The value to health and wellbeing associated with switching from smoking to vaping will exceed any benefits arising from revenue collection.”

“Just as it was with the Tobacco Products Directive, the inclusion of products which do not contain tobacco in the Tobacco Excise Directive is unhelpful and risks creating confusion in the minds of consumers.”

The EU Commission consultation website – here.