Tag Archives: dissolvables

Remember, what the US government wants to do to ecigs, they have already done to smokeless tobacco

Posted on 2 November 2015 by | 16 comments

by Carl V Phillips

Well, a lot has happened during my blog hiatus. I trust I do not need to tell anyone interested in THR that things in the US e-cigarette world “got real”, with the US FDA finally moving ahead with “deeming” e-cigarettes. Why, exactly, it was suddenly more real that it was for the last year or two — during which it was clear that this was coming soon — I will leave to the behavioral economists. But it does seem to have changed the mood. The last time I posted here, CASAA membership was about 70,000 and today is north of 110,000 and climbing fast. So this is probably a good time to give people new to this world a primer, and remind everyone else, that the US government has a long history of being hostile toward THR.

Few who actively oppose FDA’s plans need any additional reasons to object to them. It is sufficient to know that this is not actually regulation, but a de facto ban of the entire category that might — or might not — be followed by granting exceptions to the ban for a handful of closed-system e-cigarettes. (I will detail why this is the right way to think about it in my next post.) But there are people on the fence. Perhaps more important, there are many opponents of banning e-cigarettes who are naively optimistic, expecting reasonable behavior from our government once they implement this rule. Continue reading →

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Posted in Science lesson, truths

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FDA signals that nothing is ever “substantially equivalent”

Posted on 31 August 2014 by | 23 comments

by Carl V Phillips

The FDA Center for Tobacco Products (CTP) recently ruled on “Substantial Equivalence” (SE) applications about a group of smokeless tobacco products in the Ariva/Stonewall family. They ruled that these are not substantially equivalent to predicate products, which is an Orwellian way of saying they are banning them. In a week filled with bad news about supposedly health-oriented organizations threatening people’s health and welfare with anti-THR lies, this perhaps passed unnoticed by many. It should not have. It is by far the worst news of the week for Americans. We are still trying to make sense of the details as they relate to the particular products (note all the complexities below), but one implication is clear: FDA plans to use the SE process to block the introduction of THR products. Continue reading →

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Posted in Lies, truths

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From my archives – Tobacco Candy research “study”

Posted on 19 February 2013 by | 2 comments

by Carl V Phillips

I do not have enough spare cycles this week to write any new Lies posts, I’m afraid, and the rest of the CASAA leadership is equally buried with legislation and such so I cannot draft them.  But it has become increasingly apparent that many readers of this blog are not familiar with the huge collection that comprised my older THR work, and by “older” I mean everything from early 2012 and going back more than ten years before that.

So I will take this opportunity to outsource to a “research paper” I wrote in early 2012, which I think is one of the best, or at least funniest things I have ever written.  It would have been a good post for this blog, but this blog did not exist yet.

It is interesting to note how much things have changed in a year.  That post was inspired by the flurry of ANTZ junk “research” on the dangers of dissolveable smokeless tobacco products (though it has an e-cigarette component too).  Some of that is reviewed in the post, for those not familiar.  A year later, dissolveables have pretty much disappeared from the market (for the moment — they will be back) and, of course the ANTZ have stopped writing anything about the topic.  It is further evidence that, as noted in the last post here, they are not actually interested in learning anything or assessing whether a product is good or bad for the world.  They just do their pseudo-science to bolster their political attacks on THR, and when they think they have won a battle they lose interest in the topic.

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Posted in Lies

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