A few salient points from the Forbes
article in OP's post I thought worth posting up specifically:
"However, we do have rather a Baptists and bootleggers situation going on here. There are those who, as with the Baptists and booze, think that any drug use, even the inhalation of nicotine, is simply wrong, perhaps even evil. It should thus be entirely expunged from our society.
And there’s also those over in Big Pharma who have invested very large sums (it really does cost up to $1 billion to bring a new drug to market) in various pharmaceutical smoking cessation aids. And they would be very interested in being able to market those without having to face the competition of a $3 piece of electronics assembled in a shed in China. It’s this that gives us the background to the discussions about whether the FDA should be regulating e-cigarettes."
I love the Baptists/Bootleggers analogy. Vapers and bootleggers have so much in common
Anyway, it seems to me the economic and err.. moral/ecumenical-type forces being brought to bear on the evolution of the vaping industry as described above definitely
inform in a major way the background to the FDA regulation discussions--but they don't comprise it entirely.
For instance, I don't spend a whole lot of time reading about this stuff (I should, would like to, will) but even my own dim awareness of our country's economic and political situation along with a superficial survey of vape-related media tells me there are at
least a few other big factors influencing these discussions:
- >our government, deeply invested in (and probably depending to some degree on) taxing tobacco;
-> a clique within public health that feels ambivalent and threatened by vaping lest it wipe out all their hard work making smokers into pariahs;
-> big tobacco and now "Big E-cig" concerns adding to the massive complexity of the attempts to regulate.
This is just off the top of my head, just trying to put some examples out, and I'm sure it doesn't begin to adequately describe the situation. But it does make an impression on me that Forbes and
Reuters and
Pharmaceutical-Journal.com, and all the other coverage of vaping only seems to make one little dent at a time in describing what's happening...even though it's usually presented as a "big picture".
It strikes me, as I type this, that in some ways all the controversy works FOR vapers, by making regulation so complicated.
I mean, that could easily backfire, if/when some powerful body or bodies decides they've had enough and will just "make it happen". Whammo: regulations without the messy process. But it might be worth thinking about in terms of advocacy and strategic activism.
PS: This is what I'm doing instead of watching Mod Envy's 2nd anniversary show (have never seen the show yet) because apparently I have an unsupported browser or something... it won't work :/ Blegh!
