Siegel Responds to Glantz
As a follow-up to Glantz’ Regulator Watch interview, Michael Siegel deconstructs his anti-vape position.
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by Dave Cross
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Michael Siegel is a physician who completed his residency in Preventive Medicine at the UC Berkeley School of Public Health and trained in epidemiology for two years at the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta. He has 25 years of experience in the field of tobacco control and runs an excellent blog. He completed his training under Stanton Glantz and used to view him as a “hero” in his work to combat tobacco.
Siegel uses his blog, and any other media outlet, as an opportunity to debunk the myths and lies put out by anti-vaping campaigners who oppose harm reduction and sound science.
He is unequivocal in his support for vaping, and would strongly recommend it for smokers looking to quit – a position diametrically opposed to that held by Glantz. He points out that while Glantz states there are plenty of other products on the market for smokers to use, these products have failed the smokers wanting to quit. “There would be no need for e-cigarettes, there would be no market for e-cigarettes, if the nicotine patch worked,” Siegel correctly highlights.
“If quitting smoking was as easy as buying a nicotine patch and slopping it on your chest everyone would be clamouring to use the nicotine patch, everyone would be using nicotine gum. Everyone would be popping a pill – if anything, people just love to pop pills to solve their health problems. The problem is that these programs aren’t working, they have about a 10% success rate.”
“For 90%, the overwhelming majority of smokers, these products are not going to work. As a physician, as a public health professional, I am not content telling those smokers ‘Sorry, you have to keep trying these products that aren’t working’!”
“I don’t understand how anyone could possibly feel that we shouldn’t be promoting or recommending these (vape) products to adult smokers. To say that we shouldn’t be marketing them and promoting them to adults makes no sense whatsoever.”
Siegel was asked about Glantz’ claims that teens are leaping into vaping and progressing to dual use with cigarettes. Glantz claimed there is evidence to support his assertion (the interview with Glantz can be found on this page) from the likes of the CDC.
Siegel retort: “The CDC has been completely misrepresenting the data. They have classified e-cigarettes as a tobacco product. When they give their official numbers on the number of youth using tobacco products they include electronic cigarettes – and, to me, that’s lying! There has never been a study that shows youth have been getting addicted to these products and that addition leading to the use of actual, real cigarettes.”
You can see Michael Siegel blow away the anti-vaping arguments in full on the videos below:
Photo Credit:
Images from the Regulator Watch Youtube videos
Dave Cross
Journalist at POTVDave is a freelance writer; with articles on music, motorbikes, football, pop-science, vaping and tobacco harm reduction in Sounds, Melody Maker, UBG, AWoL, Bike, When Saturday Comes, Vape News Magazine, and syndicated across the Johnston Press group. He was published in an anthology of “Greatest Football Writing”, but still believes this was a mistake. Dave contributes sketches to comedy shows and used to co-host a radio sketch show. He’s worked with numerous start-ups to develop content for their websites.
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