Ex-Lung Association Chief Leases His Lungs to E-Cigarette Industry

'Science should triumph over opinion,' says past president of the American Lung Association

Senators and state attorneys general are clamoring for the Food and Drug Administration to quickly restrict the sale of electronic cigarettes, but the past president of the American Lung Association, Charles Connor, says e-cigarettes may be "the breakthrough product" that stomps out carcinogen-packed conventional cigarettes.

Connor, president and CEO of the lung association from 2008 to 2012, joined the Electronic Cigarette Industry Group (ECIG) on Thursday as a paid consultant. He will serve as a conduit between public health experts, regulators and the booming industry, which will have an estimated $1.7 billion in U.S. sales this year.

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Rush To Regulate Ecigs Could Destroy Effective Alternative

WASHINGTON, Sept. 24, 2013 /PRNewswire-USNewswire

Last week, several organizations sent a joint letter to the President, asking him to order the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to promptly assert authority over all tobacco products not currently under its jurisdiction.

The organizations imply that the delay is resulting in negative health consequences. However, they never mention any specific consequences, and for a good reason: They are proposing a "solution" where no problem exists. Instead, enacting regulations without sufficient scientific evidence has the potential to do a great deal of harm to public health.

The Consumer Advocates for Smoke-free Alternatives Association (CASAA) is writing the president today to urge him to advise the FDA to take the time needed to develop science-based regulations that will serve the interests of public health. CASAA is a non-profit organization that works to ensure the availability of low-risk alternatives to smoking and to provide smokers and non-smokers alike with truthful information about such alternatives.

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Is ‘Vaping’ Better Than Smoking?

A growing number of smokers are turning to electronic cigarettes (e-cigarettes) to get their nicotine fix instead of smoking traditional cigarettes. Is "vaping" better than smoking? The e-cigarette industry would like us to believe that it is. But more research needs to be done, and federal regulation is needed.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) currently does not regulate the manufacture, marketing and sale of e-cigarettes. In New York State, they cannot be sold to minors, but other states are still trying to determine how to deal with this relatively new product. As Mitch Zeller, Director of the FDA's Center for Tobacco Products, has said, "Right now, it's the wild, wild west." Buyer beware.

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The Anti-Smoking Lobby’s Clueless Crusade

From The Daily Beast By Nick Gillespie:

The anti-smoking movement is going after e-cigarettes, the harmless inhalers that help people kick the habit. Nick Gillespie on why their single-minded zealotry has gone too far.

H.L. Mencken famously defined puritanism as “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.” He might have been describing contemporary anti-smoking activists, that dour band of fuss-budgets constantly on the prowl for new ways to make life slightly less bearable by limiting the choices available to grown adults.

Incredibly, the latest push from tobacco eliminationists doesn’t involve actual smoking, which has already been driven out of polite society more thoroughly than Rev. Jeremiah Wright sermons, early David Allan Coe records, andThree’s Company-era gay jokes combined. But it does lay bare the prohibitionist mindset and its fixation on scrubbing the planet clean of any behavior or attitude the crusader deems unacceptable.

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