On the 16th November, 2016, Stanton Glantz writes in his blog: “E-cigarette advocates love to present e-cigarettes as a disruptive technology developed in China to compete with the big cigarette companies. Lauren Dutra, Rachel Grana, and I looked in the previously secret tobacco industry documents and found that Phillip Morris had been working on what became e-cigarette technology since 1990 and had developed a functional system well before the Chinese.”
Doh!
I think ‘vaping advocates’ already knew that! But, this is typical of the nature of many of the criticisms and sleights that Stan likes to use to undermine e-cigarette advocacy.
“E-cigarette advocates love to present?” Of course, advocates repeat this, they are a disruptive technology developed in China… Aha! This is where we part ways Stan. They were not developed as a disruptive technology to compete with big cigarette companies.
Yes, vaping advocates do repeat the tale of Hon Lik the Chinese scientist who watched his father die of cancer and developed [you will note I do not say, ‘invented.’] what was to be the first commercially viable e-cigarette. The reason he gives for doing this is… “I truly understood smoking’s harm to my health, so after a while I thought “because I’m a pharmacist, maybe I could use my knowledge to develop something that could help me stop smoking.”
So, the initial impetus was personal: this is not to say that Hon Lik did not quickly realise the commercial implications. This is very different to the impression that Mr Glantz is trying to create. Slippery Stan sneakily confuscates[1] the facts that e-cigarettes became a disruptive technology and only later did they become a form of competition for the big tobacco companies. They were not designed, at the very start, as such, but created from a personal desire to make something which would allow a smoker to escape from the dangers of combustible tobacco use and this is the truth that is hidden in the first sentence.
Secret knowledge
The nonsense contained within the next sentence, again, would seem to give us a real insight into the nature of, and what motivates Stanton Glantz.
“Lauren Dutra, Rachel Grana, and I looked in the previously secret tobacco industry documents and found that Phillip Morris had been working on what became e-cigarette technology since 1990 and had developed a functional system well before the Chinese.”
For goodness sake! You would think that this pronouncement was news of some kind – that vaping advocates had somehow been unaware of this ‘secret’ knowledge.
Crap!
So, it took three experienced and highly qualified researchers (Wow! A team!), people with access to ‘secret’ (How exciting!) documentation, to discover what any 5/8th vaping advocate already knew?
Oh dear! The drama!
And yet it is so easy to find out the history of alternative technologies to smoking. All you have to do is look up the number of patents which have been taken out for these things. Just Google, ‘smokeless non-tobacco cigarette.’ Tut, tut! Secret papers! Teams! … Blowhard!
And added to this there is still the element of deception. It is almost as if Stanton Glantz just cannot help himself. Even with the simplest of statements: in the most innocuous of introductions, he must twist and weave his own warped interpretations and prejudices into the fabric of what he is saying.
And it is warped. Although he does not say it, he leaves the reader with the impression that it was somehow a cigarette company who came up with the idea for smokeless tobacco products – the naive audience making the mistaken connection that e-cigarettes were initiated as a part of yet another great tobacco company conspiracy. (And it was not Phillip Morris, it was possibly R. J. Reynolds with their dry powder inhalator).
Besides this, it was not an idea hatched and buried in the catacombs of the big tobacco companies by masked and robed and very evil tobacco company scientists and executives, it was the imaginations of people like, Henry Ferret (1903), Ignazio Bucceri (1909)[2] These were not tobacco companies trying to maintain smoking addictions, they were individuals using their talents and were the first faltering steps of the tobacco harm reduction movement.
Yet, despite the efforts of a whole team of researchers: despite access to ‘secret’ documentation; despite probably having the huge resources of the University of California and San Francisco Centre for Tobacco Control and Research, our super sleuths, our intrepid investigators could only come up with what amounts to no more than a potful of unadulterated drivel, and doing this in only two sentences – Phew!
Everything expressed in this article is the personal view of the writer.
[1] Confuscate, as in conflates, but with more emphasis on deliberate deception as opposed to simply the merging of different ideas.
[2] In the patent, he is introduced at the start with “I. BUGOERI.” And is signed off with, “IGNAZIO BUGGER’I.” It is just as well that we are forewarned, “(OCR text may contain errors).”
