Hello!

I am 46 years old.  I began smoking cigarettes at the age of 13, when smoking was still commonplace in hospitals and on airplanes.  I have hated every single aspect of smoking cigarettes: the smell, the taste, the way it made my body feel; but I could not quit.  I tried patches, gum, pills with horrendous side effects, hypnosis, therapy and even in-patient addiction treatment.  Nothing worked.  Not until vaping.  From the first time I used a vape product, I have never wanted or used another paper tobacco product.  Vaping literally saved my life.  I feel better physically and I am more active.  I can walk up stairs without getting winded.  And I no longer smell like a poker parlor.

The availability of flavored vaping products is the exact reason why switching from paper tobacco was so easy for me.  At first I was using a tobacco flavor, and my own doctor recommended I switch to a flavor that would not be associated in my subconscious with smoking cigarettes, in order to make a clean break from tobacco addiction.  This worked so well that I actually vaped less, and have been able to step down my nicotine intake from high concentrations to the lowest concentration… something cigarette smoking has never offered.

This is my story of how vaping has impacted my life.  Now to address the hypocrisy of the flavor ban.

First: anyone with a high school diploma has learned about the prohibition era and what a wonderful success that was for our government.  Anyone who leaves their houses or watches the news is painfully aware of how wildly successful drug and firearm legislation has been in our country.  The simple fact is that enacting laws that only affect tax-paying, law-abiding adults has never and will never successfully impact teenage or illegal use or possession of anything. 

What personally disgusts me as a logical, thinking adult is that our government has very successfully – if inadvertently – proven exactly how quickly and decisively it can act to ban real threats such as assault weapons, and the continued failure or refusal to do so speaks volumes more loudly than anything else.  There is now absolutely no excuse as to why those guns have not been removed from the market beyond the pressure on our politicians by powerful and monied lobbyists.  Ergo, hypocrisy.

In closing, politicians patting themselves on the back for banning vape products in an effort to “save our children” need to answer the simple question: “in the same time period as the so-called ‘vaping epidemic’, what is the exact number of underage children who have died as a direct result of banned drug, alcohol, or gun use?”  In other words, “exactly how do you justify your attack on the vaping industry while simultaneously ignoring any real threat to the children of this nation?”