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Thomas Miller, Attorney General of Iowa, argues for America to stop focussing on vaping teens and calls out the deceptions of the anti-vape campaigners
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by Dave Cross
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“There is confusion, misinformation, misdirection, and even outright deception crowding out balance,” Miller begins. He states that “perspective is paramount to understand the vaping issue.”
With America all too frequently fixating on supposed teen epidemics, Millar says that an answer to tobacco-related harm will never be found. A preoccupation with youth or adults will, he adds, only result in “surefire [sic] ways to create bad public policy and harm Americans”.
This isn’t the Attorney General’s first rodeo.
In 2016, Miller put out a statement warning, “There has been an effort to say that combustible cigarettes and e-cigarettes are equally harmful, that their companies are equally evil, and that they should be strongly regulated the same way. This view is incorrect, but it has gotten significant traction.”
He took Scott Gottlieb, the then FDA Commissioner, to task over research findings in 2017. The following year Miller wrote to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) demanding an evidence-driven approach to tobacco regulation and the treatment of vape products, saying: “The availability of alternative nicotine delivery systems is integral … by providing beneficial migration pathways for continuing nicotine users.”
Another letter attacked the FDA’s policy on vaping and tobacco harm reduction in 2019, and then he addressed the FDA’s commentary shortcomings at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Nobody wants adolescents to become addicted to nicotine,” Miller asserts in the latest contribution to the debate. It’s a stance the FDA appears to be struggling to publicly accept.
“E-cigarettes are helping adult smokers move away from smoking, but they could do so much more if we could fully embrace harm reduction… We have seen the lowest prevalence of adult smokers ever. A more rapid drop has coincided with the introduction of e-cigarettes, from 19.3% in 2010 to 13.7% in 2018. The harm-reduction effect of non-combustibles is reflected worldwide with e-cigarettes in the United Kingdom and much of Europe and Canada, heat-not-burn products in Japan and South Korea, and snus in northern Europe.”
The problem according to Miller are the people overstating the harm in ecigs, claiming vaping acts as a gateway to smoking, and “denying that adults are switching from combustibles to e-cigarettes in substantial numbers.”
His essay also addresses the cherry-picking of data, fictional threats like “popcorn lung”, and failing to appreciate that the dose makes the poison.
Related:
- “The Harm-Reduction Quandary of Reducing Adult Smoking While Dissuading Youth Initiation”, Thomas J. Miller JD – [link]
- Iowa's Attorney General Speaks About Vaping, POTV 2016 – [link]
- Attorney General, POTV 2018 – [link]
- From The Attorney General, POTV 2019 – [link]
- Dear Mitch, POTV 2020 – [link]
Photo Credit:
Image by AIAC Interactive Agency from Pixabay
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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