For Smokers wanting to change to vaping - make your own miracle happen.

Vaping has been a wonderful discovery for me - a smoker of 50 years. I had no intention of giving up smoking. Uh Uh. The more the anti-smoking corporations tried to stop me, the more determined I got to never give up. Furthermore, I wanted the protection that nicotine gives to people as a medication.

So, it is still my surprise to find that I prefer vaping to smoking. I made this video to help other smokers should they be as determined as I was to never give up smoking and who might try vaping. At first glance, vaping is not just a miracle, but a miracle each person needs to make happen to themselves.

Thank you to everyone who helped me become a vaper

I had the most stunning year in 2012! I did not smoke a single cigarette - and even more miraculously, I did not crave one!

I met new people in the flesh and over the Internet who have supported me as a vaper by just "being there". Strangers on forums have answered my questions, and introduced me to new ideas about vaping, health and life.

I have really enjoyed 2012.

Thank you to all of you who have helped and supported me - and to all those people - strangers really - who have made comments on my blogs and videos and talked to me on Facebook and Twitter. It's been a ball! I'm looking forward to 2013.

I wish everyone a Happy Festive Season and Happy New Year. Good vaping everyone - and thanks.

Liz

A bunch of ignorant, backward, bigoted loonies

The new EU Tobacco Control Directive that proposes banning the use of flavourants in cigarettes - especially Menthol seems designed to be as destructive to smokers as possible. Not only would the 4mg nicotine ruling for eliquid in electronic cigarettes make a completely useless NRT device for smokers wishing to quit by vaping, but banning Menthol, the one protective flavouring that gives Menthol smokers a benefit is seriously foolish.

Menthol cigarettes and Lung Cancer

Menthol cigarettes and Lung Cancer

I am still disbelieving by what has been revealed in the EU proposals. It really can't be true. I have to pinch myself to grasp the point that our lives are really and truly being legislated to the minutest details by a bunch of ignorant, backward, bigoted loonies.

No bovver yule fire

Loads of visitors have been in and out of our tiny lounge bringing gifts and Christmas hugs. Of course the central heating is still playing up - but we've found the cause! We have gunge in our pipes! Nasty black yuccie gunge. So the whole problem has to be put off till after the celebration season.

In our lounge, we now have a little greenhouse heater going. It works a treat! It turns itself off and on according to the temperature of the room. No bovver.

But the best thing is the cosy fire!  The fire crackles and spats on our television screen! And it really feels good.  Our visitors have been delighted.

Ask not what your country is doing to you, ask what you can do to stop them.

 EU Release Yesterday   This   and   This

 "Extension of the product scope of the Directive: Nicotine Containing Products (e.g. electronic cigarettes) below a certain nicotine threshold are allowed on the market, but must feature health warnings; products above this threshold are only allowed if authorised as medicinal products like nicotine replacement therapies (e.g. nicotine patches). Herbal products for smoking (e.g. herbal cigarettes) will have to carry health warnings."

I JUST DUNNO. Can you imagine our lovely, vital community of vapers cowed into submission vaping on 4mg three part cartridges off little 250mAh batteries? You can't?  Me neither. Furthermore. these devices are useless to smokers wanting to quit. Shame on Tobacco Control for their utter stupidity. Of course they don't want anything to substitute for smoking and they don't care a jot for smokers' health. Suggesting 4mg strength nicotine in eliquid authorised as medicinal product will make sure that ecigs are as useless as patches. Something really really stinks here. All this can come into "EU Law" in 2014, to action in 2015/16. I hope UK leaves the EU and secondly vapers need to be VERY active next year. We should all ask ourselves "What can we do?" Ask not what your country is doing to you, ask what you can do to stop them.

Please watch this episode of Vapour Trails TV and Dave will tell us exactly what we can do. 

Getting to know WHO!

 I am trying to find out more about The World Health Organisation. So I got sidetracked into reading Chapter 4 of their book Bugs, drugs and Smoke Chapter 4: Tobacco trap: fighting back

Please forgive the very strange formatting - words were copied from the WHO site and are very unfriendly to being copied and pasted I CANNOT get it right!

I include here some interesting information and three ideas of my own regarding each.  Here follows the story of how Big Tobacco infiltrated WHO. I suggest that Big Pharma are in there - but in reverse - what you and I would call "brown nosing" "arse creeping" for their benefit...and maybe they BRIBE people too? WHO should investigate THAT.

"The advent of the Tobacco Free Initiative and the Master Settlement Agreement made 1998 something of a banner year for tobacco control campaigners. But for Brundtland (Photo"4.2) it marked only a brief moment of calm before the storm that broke in 1999, when she received the news, in an internal WHO document, that tobacco companies had for many years undermined WHO’s tobacco control efforts, spying on sta% and infiltrating the Organization The revelation of spying and infiltration of the WHO had a profound effect on the director-general. “We were upset in our hearts, all of us,” Brundtland recalls. “It was mind-boggling. Perhaps for the first time in its history, the Organization was confronted by a group of people, who had set themselves against it simply because it was getting in the way of business.” Brundtland appointed an expert committee, to take a closer look at the industries Organization’s anti-tobacco campaign had to begin by laying open the inner workings of the tobacco companies documents and compiled a more detailed report. Its fndings were shocking.Not only had tobacco companies been paying “consultants” to sabotage WHO’s anti-tobacco work, while employed at WHO, but the expert committee also found that tobacco companies had joined forces to “contain” and neutralize” WHO’s tobacco control work and to “reorient” it, where possible.“They saw WHO as one of the greatest threats to their global expansion,” says Dr Douglas Bettcher, the director of the WHO Tobacco Free Initiative.

“They were studying us under a microscope in order to counteract our work.”The tobacco companies had also tried to block the funding for WHO scientific and policy activities, and had tried to undermine and create confusion about the scientific basis of WHO’s work.

Here was a little "boxed" information which is actually the fault of Tobacco Control, recently acknowledged - demanding safer cigarettes.

One of the tobacco companies’ most cunning tactics was to launch ‘light’ cigarettes claiming that

these have a lower tar and nicotine content and implying that they are, therefore, less harmful. The

fact is that ‘lights’, sometimes called ‘low tar’ and ‘mild’ and similar descriptors for cigarettes were

developed and marketed as less harmful to counteract a new requirement for tobacco companies

to limit the measured nicotine and tar using a machine specially designed for this purpose.

By creating holes in the cigarette filters, the machine measured less nicotine and tar in each type

of cigarette. But, later, studies showed that after millions of smokers had switched to ‘lights’, ‘low

tar’ and ‘mild’ cigarettes, thinking they were safer, they were not safer at all.

The studies found that when people smoke these cigarettes, their fingers, lips or both tend

to cover the specially engineered ventilation holes intended to let air inside the machine and

dilute the tar and nicotine measurements. The studies also found that smokers ‘compensate’

for smoking these types of cigarettes by smoking more of them and inhaling more deeply. So

‘lights’, ‘low-tar’ and ‘mild’ cigarettes are no less harmful than ordinary cigarettes.

This was in an interesting "box" of information which I have never heard of (in UK), but the sentence in bold, gives me the creeps!

A myth is born

Ever since countries stated to make workplaces, bars, cafes and other public places no smoking areas, tobacco companies have been fighting back. One of their tactics in recent years has been to create a myth – that smokeless tobacco products are harmless. Some tobacco companies have created new ranges of smokeless products that are often packaged in the form of sweets to attract young people. These and other smokeless products are also marketed to smokers to help them bridge the time they spend in smoke-free bars and cafes. They are in fact perpetuating their nicotine addiction.

Tobacco control campaigners say these ‘nicotine pills’ are seriously undermining efforts to protect young people’s health. “Smoke-free environments and tax increases on cigarettes are

supposed to help people give up smoking, but these new products give smokers an alternative

to giving up,” says Dr Jeffrey Wigand, a scientist, who worked for a tobacco company for many

years before switching sides to become a passionate anti-tobacco campaigner.

Never heard of these described below....

“Smokeless products are marketed to kids. They look and taste like candies, in vanilla or spearmint

flavour, and they are cheaper than cigarettes,” says Wigand, who runs the USA-based charity

Smoke-Free Kids, Inc. “Studies show that these smokeless products contain more nicotine for

absorption than cigarettes, and the nicotine is absorbed more quickly that from cigarettes.”