A new survey of doctors shows the extent of the damage caused by the endless war on vaping by so-called public health groups. Presented a hypothetical scenario in which a smoking patient asks if she should try e-cigarettes to quit smoking, the majority of surveyed physicians say no. The survey is described in a paper published in the journal Annals of the American Thoracic Society. The authors are from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, TN, and the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN.

The doctors were sent a survey that offered a “clinical case vignette” that described a smoking patient seeking advice on quitting who asks about vaping. “A 27-year-old woman with moderate persistent asthma presents to establish care. She is on a moderate dose of combined inhaled
fluticasone and salmeterol. Her symptoms are currently well controlled. She smokes. During your interview, she asks if she should use electronic cigarettes to help her quit smoking.”

Doctors who advise against e-cigs and only offer FDA-approved cessation products are then told, “She tells you that she has tried other medications to quit before, refuses a prescription, and asks again whether she should try electronic cigarettes to quit.” Believe it or not, only 27 percent of the doctors then suggest the patient try vaping. — despite being told by the patient that she will not use nicotine gum or Chantix! That is as good as telling the patient that she might as well smoke.

Who do we blame for this revolting story? The doctors who refuse this patient a consumer nicotine product that might change her life — or even save it — or the organizations that have worked so hard to twist the truth about nicotine and vaping? Dr. Michael Siegel of Boston University lays the blame squarely on the anti-nicotine zealots in the tobacco control industry. Siegel himself was once among their ranks, training with Stanton Glantz and working in the CDC Office on Smoking and Health. But what they’ve done to shape public (and medical) opinion on vaping now disgusts him.

How upside-down is the world of tobacco control that they take satisfaction in brainwashing doctors — who see the ravages of smoking every day! — to think that quitting cigarettes by vaping is worse than smoking? Who shoulders the blame for this? Let’s name them: Matthew Myers and the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, the American Heart Association, the American Lung Association, the Truth Initiative, the American Cancer Society, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the University of California, Tom Frieden and the CDC, the FDA, and many, many others.

These groups have become a massive industry — far larger than the vaping industry, far more advanced, and absolutely unified in their anti-harm reduction message. They hated smoking so much that they eventually came to hate smokers themselves. So much that they consider it a success to turn doctors against the patients they’re sworn to care for.