Know Thy Enemy: Beating Big Tobacco

In the last few months, the electronic cigarette business has been facing adversity left and right from government bans in different places. Mostly in North America, the majority of the bans aren’t all that bad, regulating electronic cigarette use in much the same way as ordinary tobacco cigarettes. This basically means having to acquire licenses to sell electronic cigarettes in some states, prohibiting their sale to minors, and banning their use in public areas.

While we agree with many of the legislations being passed, especially those prohibiting the sale of electronic cigarettes to minors and we don’t mind having to acquire licenses to manufacture and sell them as a means to protect customers against lower quality devices and substances that could potentially cause harm, it sometimes intrigues us to wonder why all of a sudden this industry, which enjoyed relative freedom until recently, is being put up for scrutiny.

“What’s so intriguing about it?” you may ask. Well, from an insider perspective in the industry, it isn’t too difficult to notice how it seems like there is a bigger power moving in the background to thwart the growth of the electronic cigarettes industry using more subtle approaches. Yes, call us conspiracy theorists, but we somehow see the hand of Big Tobacco at work here.

One of the most telling signs is how quickly suits have popped up calling for the banning of electronic cigarette use in public areas; from city and county ordinances to state level legislations, we’re extremely surprised at how quickly the fire is spreading to limit their use to certain areas.

Now, we have to be absolutely clear with one thing: we don’t thing controlling where they should be and not be allowed is not a bad thing. We may be indifferent to it, but we’re not entirely against it. We understand that electronic cigarette users still breathe out vapor that may contain nicotine and limiting where they can be used can help address that. In fact, many electronic cigarette manufacturers like us here at TigCig have anticipated the fact that this might one day happen, but it’s hard to fathom how it’s happening at the rate of how it’s happening now. It only becomes evident why this is happening if you ask yourself, “Who is benefitting most by banning the electronic cigarette use in public areas?” If you guessed Big Tobacco, you guessed right.

As it stands, the majority of Big Tobacco’s earnings come from people who have been smoking for a while now. More and more people choose not to smoke because of the understanding of the possible consequences of the habit. In fact, tobacco use has seen a steady decline since the 1970s, when massive campaigns first started running to educate the public on the dangers of smoking cigarettes. This aggravated by all the other restrictions that have been put on cigarettes that have worked against smokers’ enjoyment of the vice.

Many smokers who’ve made the switch to electronic cigarettes have told us they did primarily because they have a lot more freedom – not just about where they can use them, but they also gain freedoms in terms of their health and well being, in their finances, and in their social lives. Public smoking bans on electronic cigarettes take away many of these freedoms. They group electronic cigarette users with the ordinary smoker even if science has proven that they worlds apart. That means that vapers will have to surround themselves with actual act of smoking a cigarette, an activity they are trying to avoid in the first place; they surround themselves with smokers, who smell repulsive – the same way they used to smell when they used to smoke – which may be quite an inconvenience; and they surround themselves with smoke, the kind that creates the health problems they were trying to escape in the first place.

Without the freedoms electronic cigarette users have enjoyed in the past many of the benefits of using electronic cigarettes will be lost. When that happens, how much incentive do you think an electronic cigarette user will have to stick to an electronic cigarette instead of picking up a regular pack of smokes? Think hard.