FLOW
MY TEARS
This is a first for me.
I have thought about blogging many times but always felt there are
better people out there already doing it. However, today, I had the
pleasure of engaging a member of the medical establishment. We have
swapped tweets before but today was different. The trouble with
twitter though is the ability to write enough in a series of 140
characters. Often quite less as more people join the conversation. So
I felt driven to write this. It is not aimed at said person but I
hope he reads it and gets a little insight.
I am 59. I have smoked
since 14 but dabbled with tobacco since 9. I quit many times with
varying degrees of success. No, what am I saying. With ZERO success.
Two years ago, my daughter persuaded me to try Vaping. She had been
hinting at it for a lot longer and I knew it was working for her. She
was advocating, which meant little to me at the time, and had become
quite well known. So I relented and let her set me up with some
Vaping gear and Juices. It worked. Overnight I quit smoking and have
not looked back. I have not had one single urge to light a cigarette
since that day. I was an inveterate smoker yet for the 1st
time in the longest part of my life I didn't want to smoke. If God
had came down and spoken to me I couldn't have been more shocked.
I followed my Daughter
on Twitter and tried to get a handle on what it was she was having to
fight for. I started meeting a lot of people just like me. Surely,
no-one wanted to take away this miracle and cause so many people to
inevitably return to smoking burnt tobacco did they? Well actually,
they did and the more involved I got the more it became clear that
vested interests were at stake. People who held positions of power
and respect not only did not understand what it is like to be a
smoker and why Vaping works, but were actually dismissing people as
shills, anecdotes and astroturf. These were people like me, real
people who had found a real answer to a lifelong struggle against
tobacoo addiction. People who actually wanted to help other people
find that same escape route that we had all discovered. Yet Public
health and the Tobacco Control Industries, because make no mistake
that is what they are, were prepared to lie, produce biased, flawed
studies and then refuse to engage with the people they were damaging.
Now let me make this
clear. I KNOW Vaping works. I KNOW it is magnitudes safer than
smoking lit tobacco. I don't need to fight to save Vaping for
personal reasons. I know enough now to pretty much ensure I can Vape
for the rest of my life. NO. I am fighting to give every smoker the
chance to find what I found. To be able to help every smoker find the
right set up to Vape and never return to cigarettes. To not be
limited to ineffective equipment designed by committees that have no
clue what is required thus leading to the inevitable relapse and
return to smoking. I am fighting for peoples lives.
To members of Public
Health. I look inside me and can say without doubt, my conscience is
clear. Can you really do the same.