The Indefatigable Frog, or Why this won't stop us!

So this is becoming a bit of a theme and I am going to take that theme and look at it again from another angle. Clive has written fantastically on why Public Health need to address how they view the public. Jo has addressed the difference between us banding together and Public Health banding together and I am going to address just why us vapers have tinkered with miffed, passed through irked, sailed right over gobsmacked and are now firmly settled in Furious. I want to take this back to before we were vapers though, perhaps to give a little more insight.

I will use myself an as example, cos I know all my own details and that makes it a bit easier.

I started smoking when I was 12. I already knew it was bad and was used to hearing my nan nag my dad about him stopping. I also grew up with my dad not being able to smoke in the house. So by 12, I was well aware that smoking is bad enough that you are not allowed to do it around other people. Of course, I still started smoking. I smoked until I was a little over 34. So that is 22 years by the numbers. I am going to round it up to 23 cos it makes this simpler.

I am 36 now. This means, that for 2/3rds of my life, I was a ‘dirty smoker’. Something that society was at pains to remind me about on a daily basis, with my freedom to smoke being restricted more and more. I am sure I was not the only smoker to feel utterly sickened to read news articles condemning adoptive parents for smoking, that they should be prevented from giving love and security to a vulnerable child, all because they enjoyed a cigarette. As a parent, this strikes a bit of fear into you. Will they condemn parents that smoke? Will they one day say my children should be taken away from me cos I go into the garden to have a ciggy?

But it was nastier than that. They ran adverts about horrible tobacco guzzling parents, so that all of society could hate me a little bit more, as the adverts on the tellybox had told them what an appalling mother I was.

The public at large already sneered at me, customers at my workplace would comment on my habit, tell me it would ruin my skin, age me or how it made me look ugly. Really personal stuff, and insulting too. I did not know these people, who were they to tell me that I was ugly because I smoked? I wish I were kidding, but I used to get these comments with relative frequency. If they could think of nothing particularly personal, they would settle with ‘Bad for you, that’ as though somehow I must just have missed the adverts, posters, flyers, billboards, comments etc and was happily thinking I was replacing one of my 5 a day with some tobacco leaves. So I was stupid, too.

To recap – I was stupid, ugly, will  be ugly, a bad mother and society thought I stank.

Then when the smoking ban came into affect, by which time I had switched to rollies, I would stand at work and roll myself a ciggy before going outside for a break. I remember catching a woman looking at me as I fashioned a perfectly cylindrical tube of ‘I am going outside so you lot can stop clicking your damn fingers at me for service’ to see such a look of disgust on her face that it really took me back for a moment. I had never had a stranger look at me like that before. Pure unadulterated loathing for me rolling a ciggie. I probably could have chopped out a line of coke, or rolled up my sleeve to tap for a vein and not been looked at like I was just then.

Post the 2007 ban, things just got worse in terms of how ppl treated me. The adverts got more aggressive, the second hand smoke messages got more aggressive. So now rather than just being ugly, smelly, stupid and a bad parent I was also dangerous.

If you are not a vaper or smoker and are reading this, imagine for just one second, what that must be like? To spend 2/3rds of your life being treated like this, looked at in this way. Remember that poor woman who ignited her oxygen tube with a lighter? Seek it out – look at the comments and see what the public thinks of smokers. The vitriol and hatred is something to behold. A poor woman made a horrible mistake whilst still under the effects of a general anaesthetic and what did the public say? She deserved it. Why? 

Because she was a smoker.

For the record, I think they were wrong! I think to demonise a group of people so determinedly as they did with smokers is inhuman and immoral.  However, there is no escaping the fact that when I took up vaping instead, I thought I had freed myself from that. I do not look for people to accept me, I do not and did not want to be confirmed as a human again, but I did think that would stop.

Well it hasn’t and frankly, it has gotten worse. 

So, ask youselves. Why am I angry? Why are many vapers angry?

We have tried to talk to you. We have written to you, we have emailed you and we have tweeted you. You have largely ignored us. You have written articles that hide behind paywalls discrediting us with accusations and thinly veiled but loaded reminders of ‘What The Tobacco Industry Did To Us’, that you have ‘Seen All This Before’. You told us our stories are not true. You go to the public and you tell them that we are to be feared just as we were as smokers. That we have not achieved anything, by moving the goalposts: Is the endgame tobacco free, or nicotine free? You use your media presence to say things that evidence has not shown and common sense denies. And what can we do about it?

Nothing.

 We cannot answer, we cannot explain to you why a custard flavoured e-liquid is so important to us. Why we have faith in what we are trying to advocate because WE were the very smokers you had not got a chance of getting to Quit. When we use one of the only mediums we have available to us to contact you, you block us without deigning to answer, then profess to your peers that you are being attacked, by ecig zealots or tobacco stooges. You use your credibility to convince others that you are right. Afterall, we are just addicts. Have you the first CLUE how insanely insulting this is? This is not our job, we do it because we want to keep this movement going. We do this for FREE, for NOTHING. No one pays us. YOU on the other hand are paid. You are paid to look after our health. 

Understand, this is NOT related to any one individual, this has happened for as long as I have been doing this and  before, it is not new but has worsened. And what can we do? 

Nothing.

We do not have funding. We do not have the ear of the media. We do not have letters after our names. We do not have influence. We do not have swathes of respecting public and academics. We are normal as normal can be. But we do have something! We have experience and knowledge and understanding of what it is to be a smoker then a vaper. We can see first hand why this is working and what will stop it, dead in its tracks. We are trying to warn you that the direction of travel you are choosing is going to cause untold damage to people’s lives, but you will not listen.

And why do we do this? It is not to save our arses! The loudest and most active of us will continue to vape no matter what you do. We can be self-sufficient, that is something you cannot prevent. We do this because there are hundreds of millions of smokers across the planet who face being denied the opportunity that we had. That is not acceptable. That is not OK, not in any world, at any moment in space or time. We are not out to convert people, just to stop you from scaring them off of a new and safer habit that may well save their life, at the very least, improve it if they choose!

Is that a bad thing? No, and it is something YOU should be doing too.

But be clear, those of you that are doing this to us, there are others amongst you are are looking at you askance. 

So why are we angry? We did what you want, just not how you wanted us to, or BECAUSE you wanted us to, and you still persist with the demonisation. Except, this time, you are lying about us personally.