Vape!

How loutish, greedy homo sapiens turned a public health miracle into a social and environmental disaster

It started with such promise, supported by an unimpeachable authority: Public Health England. In 2015 the NGO commissioned a series of investigations into the relatively new phenomenon of vaping. The conclusions, which it kept updated with further studies and never resiled from until its dissolution in the reforms of 2022 are unequivocal. To summarise:

  • Vaping is probably the most effective, lasting and easiest path to quitting smoking yet devised
  • Vaping is 95% safer than smoking
  • Vaping neither stains, infects or in any discernible way damages the lungs, (by inference including that of bystanders).
  • Vaping is not a gateway to smoking among young people. The decline in the uptake of smoking among young people in developed countries continues.

Are we sure about that? Let us turn to a more disapproving but equally prestigious body, the John Hopkins Centre for Heart Disease:

There are many unknowns about vaping, including what chemicals make up the vapor and how they affect physical health over the long term. “People need to understand that e-cigarettes are potentially dangerous to your health,” says Michael Blaha MD.

After more than a decade of widespread vaping, that’s what they’ve got: ‘unknowns’; ‘long term’; ‘potentially dangerous.’ From the language we can tell that they feel that it must be bad, why, it’s almost obvious. It’s just that, dammit all, they can’t find any evidence, and it’s not for want of trying.

Now to what is happening on the ground. The virtuous public regards vaping as another form of smoking, and equally bad. Most people firmly believe it to be harmful. Laws have been passed in some jurisdictions limiting and controlling vaping. This should be a civil liberties issue — banning an activity many find helpful and pleasurable, with no evidence of harm? Where is the outrage?

Silence.

Why? Because it looks like smoking. It’s … cheating!

“You can’t do that here!”

“No smoking!!!” Ah, the shrill self-righteousness. The self-satisfied revelling in judgement without fear of third-party disapproval.

Vaping has become a trope in screen entertainment. Heroes never vape. The bad guys, and especially the bad guy’s dim muscle boys, frequently do. Slaggy molls vape.

The papers are full of material treating vaping as a known evil. Of course they are; that is how the echo chamber of modern media works. If the public conceives a prejudice, any prejudice, feed it to them with all you’ve got. Truth? Who cares? We have advertising to sell.

How did this happen? Let’s roll back to the beginning. For me, it started fourteen years ago. I was living in England and sitting in a surgeon’s office being briefed for a knee replacement, the damage from an old skiing accident having by then almost crippled me.

“Do you smoke?”

Answer: yes. In fact, after decades of abstinence I had returned to smoking a few years earlier in the cauldron of a marriage gone bad. Partly for the stress and partly, I confess, because it infuriated my wife. Mea culpa.

The surgeon: “If you stop six weeks before your operation, you will have 50% less carbon monoxide in your blood. If you quit three months before the op you will have none. This is very good news for the anaesthetist, whose job it is to keep you alive while I saw your leg off.” (A doctor once told me orthopaedic surgeons were glorified mechanics; he might have had a point.)

This was not really what I wanted to hear. I still rather enjoyed a fag and was, of course, properly hooked. But there was this new vaping thing. Not available in any shop I could find, but all over the Internet. A few days later I received my kit. A thing called a ‘vape pen’ that constantly leaked a fluid that the label warned should never be allowed to touch the skin, and a range of flavoured liquids. The so-called tobacco flavours were uniformly foul, the sweet ones less so but I did not want to smoke a lolly, but that espresso flavour hit the spot. Coffee and a fag rolled into one — what’s not to like?

I ditched the smokes and started vaping. Effortless. Literally effortless. Vaping was every bit as satisfying as smoking, in fact if I got the coil resistance and wattage right I could generate vast, gratifying clouds of steam that looked like smoke but wasn’t.

I quickly learned that those around me most emphatically did not enjoy being enveloped in the visible products of my exhalations so I toned it right down. Vaping was to be a private pleasure. Fine.

Alas, the instincts of the young to loutishness soon dropped a spanner in the works. Online forums sprang up swapping tips on how to wind your own coils and supercharge your kit to produce a fog of vapour sufficient to conceal the advance of an infantry battalion. Within the year stores began to pop up on the high street, gleaming palaces of fluids and kit ranged up like expensive perfumes. Posters and instore videos advertised conventions where yoof in giant pants competed to blow the most smoke rings from one puff.

The idiots seemed to think vaping was cool. Wrong! A Gauloise hanging from the corner of Albert Camus’ mouth, perhaps, but those clunky devices the size of a small handgun, those vast nimbuses of water vapour? Never.

The rest is history. Obnoxious zoobs marched around with their portable fog machines literally getting up the noses of the citizenry and the long decline began, a decline which turned into a cliff thanks to one Zang Shengwei, of Shenzen parish, godfather of the Elf Bar and similar candy-coloured devices which are now the curse of our landscape. In 2022 it is estimated that 40 tonnes of lithium were tossed away in tiny batteries inside those bits of bright plastic trash in the UK alone. In the middle of an eco-disaster, they let it happen. Business is business.

How did the powers that be not instantly ban those things? If there is one harm that can absolutely be sheeted home to vaping, it is the effect of high doses of nicotine on developing brains. The lamentable Mr Zang knowingly, deliberately designed those things to look like toys and to deliver the kick of a horse. And he was allowed to. Became a billionaire, in fact.

And so we go down the familiar track. Australia and New Zealand have passed a raft of laws, some sensible. Most importantly they have banned disposable vape devices. With luck, medicalising vaping will channel it successfully down the quit smoking route for which it has been a godsend. The Ministry of Health website in NZ is almost silent about vaping risks but admits that no long-term studies have found any evidence suggesting it is harmful. In the UK, search for ‘vaping’ at nhs.uk and you will find that everything I am telling you here is true. But the Aussies have blown it spectacularly by letting loose a barrage of misinformation and outright lies.

The ‘About vaping and e-cigarettes’ page at health.gov.au lists several toxic substances that e-cigarettes ‘can contain’, such as acetone and formaldehyde. Sure, they can contain them but any fluid you are likely to buy most certainly will not. Acetone is highly flammable, a substance only a lunatic would expose to a glowing e-cigarette coil. Inhaling its vapours would make you throw up. The page repeats the ‘gateway to smoking’ lie, which the authors must know to be untrue. And so on.

What any over-the-counter fluid does contain are two substances widely used in food, drinks and, significantly, in vaporisers designed to deliver drugs: propylene glycol and vegetable glycerin, both rated GRAS (Generally Recognised As Safe) world-wide. And nicotine. Nobody objects to nicotine in gum, pills and patches and nor should they in vaporisers. Time for a little-known but true fact: exhaled vape steam contains little or no nicotine because the drug is very rapidly absorbed into the bloodstream across the alveolar membrane of the lungs. You breathe a lot in but breathe very little out. So here is the truth about forcing others to breathe in your ‘chemicals’: the vapour is almost entirely steam, and the trace chemicals it may contain are the very same that your bystanders have probably, voluntarily but unknowingly, ingested by one means or another in the preceding twenty-four hours. All they had to do was eat a supermarket muffin or anything else listing E1520 and/or E422 in the small print on the ingredients label.

One flavour of one brand of liquid in NZ was found to contain small quantities of diacetyl, the compound that can cause bronchiolitis obliterans, or ‘popcorn lung’. The product was immediately recalled. Acetone? Yeah, right.

None of this, of course, will make the slightest difference to my life as a vapist. No matter how discreet I may try to be, I will continue to be cursed and condemned. In the end the war on smoking is in one respect like any other war: the first casualty is truth.

In Defence of Nicotine

Tobacco is a dirty weed. I like it.
It satisfies no normal need. I like it.
It makes you thin, it makes you lean,
It takes the hair right off your bean.
It’s the worst stuff I’ve ever seen.
I like it.

Tobacco, by Graeme Lee Hemminger

Vaping is rather satisfying. It recalls the pleasure of the pipe. It delivers one of those plant-based drugs that almost appear to have been devised by God to benefit us humans, the alkaloid family. Caffeine, morphine, nicotine, codeine, quinine, atropine and thousands more.

Nicotine, with a couple of caveats, is a Good Thing. It’s a pity it’s addictive, like many other alkaloids, but hey, we’re addicted to oxygen, water, food, motion. The idea of a life without addiction is a nonsense. A lot of people, and as a vapist I know, are deeply addicted to passing judgement on others. God knows I’ve given enough of them their fix.

But taken to excess, nicotine is bad for your blood pressure. I vape using a machine with a removable rechargeable battery containing liquid with a very low level of nicotine – 6 mg/ml, so much weaker than a cigarette that when I took a puff on one a while back I turned green and nearly vomited. My blood pressure was 119/68 this morning thanks to my practice of Nordic walking thousands of kilometres per year. If you don’t know how outstanding 119/68 is, ask a nurse. It plummeted when I quit drinking. I am 77 years old, in bouncing good health, and I have been vaping for more than a decade. Bad for you? Bah!

In fact, nicotine is rather good for your brain. So good, in fact, that they give it to some dementia patients. There is a reason the photographic annals of the world are awash with pictures of great writers and artists smoking while they work. This is no trivial thing – Walter Raleigh brought tobacco to England in 1587, just in time for Shakespeare and the great English literary renaissance. It is my belief that tobacco was one of the driving forces that turned England from a country with few literary figures of note to one whence flooded a literary canon revered to this day. A canon, one must say, overflowing with praise for the weed. Google ‘literary praise for tobacco’ and you will be swamped. Were they all wrong, all fools? I decidedly think not. A pity they did not fully appreciate the dangers of inhaling smoke, but we are the beneficiaries.

My father was a writer and I grew up next to his study, forbidden territory, where he sat pounding his typewriter and filling the atmosphere with a grey fug from his endless cigarettes. They killed him in the end, but he died content at 84, hardly a life tragically curtailed by the fags. But I am under no illusions: he got lucky. Now I spend my days at a laptop, puffing happily on my vape, my brain firing on all cylinders on much smaller doses of the blessed drug than he ingested, but still doing its benign work.

Vaping, by removing the harm of smoke but retaining the benefice of inhaled nicotine, is to my mind an outright blessing. Long may it reign.

You may commence firing. I may flinch but will not run.

Welcome Back – to the Middle Ages

“Honoured and esteemed Sir, may the Lord protect and preserve your eminence, we humbly ….” etc.

There was a time when even academic treatises would start in such terms. Why? Because the authors knew their endeavours had no hope of acceptance unless received and sponsored by someone of power and influence. A time when a recipient would first look to the authors’ names and positions before even considering looking into the content. And if those authors were not similarly endowed, the chance that some eminence might even read, far less consider the contents, was also doubtful.

This was when medical ‘knowledge’ was believed to be perfectly embodied in the works of Galen, millennia dead.

Then came the Enlightenment and the rise of the modern world, with all its material and intellectual riches. One single, non-fungible asset underpinned everything that followed: the idea of the supremacy of merit over social position, leading rapidly (on the historical timescale) to the day when a lowly Jewish patent office clerk would upend our understanding of the universe.

The primacy of merit is the most precious asset we have. It is sublimely simple: the sense to ask ‘What?’ instead of ‘Who?’ It has delivered us such riches that we now believe ourselves so secure in our prosperity that we can pat it on the back, say ‘Well done, and goodbye.’ Now we return to the mediaeval notion that people and their ideas (or lack of them) can be advanced or held back because of who they are, not what their abilities may be. We are, quite simply, reverting to the mediaeval state. Once, what mattered was to be a landed noble, a king’s bastard, or a bishop’s. Now, the sinecures and leaderships go to those who meet the right metrics of equality, diversity and inclusion. Don’t believe me? Stroll along Molesworth St in Wellington at lunchtime and mingle with those who guide our future; hang around the lobby of a university or two, or perhaps the spacious halls of the TVNZ building on Hobson St in Auckland. Look at who, ever-increasingly, holds the power in New Zealand. Sorry – Aotearoa. We now live in a funding environment when the first criterion many applications must meet is that they will somehow benefit Maori. Nor is this some covert agenda. It is often declared in the funding guide. Conducting research into some aspect of medical biology? Better get at least one EDI-friendly face on the team if you want your research funded. I’m not making this up.

Pale, stale and male? Begone. We don’t care what you may have to offer, don’t care that you have the talent and training to stand pre-eminent in your field. We now believe our society to be so wealthy that we can afford to place lesser but more worthy, more diverse and supposedly less privileged candidates in the vanguard of society, let such deserving souls determine our future together.

How is this working out? Plagued by low productivity, NZ’s economy remains one of the developed world’s worst performers. Next door, Australia has resisted the fad for the return to mediaevalism and not only remains well ahead of us on virtually every performance metric, it is hoovering out our unwanted talent at a rate that should be, but is not, a national scandal. Of course many who flee across the Tasman will say it is for the money, the sunshine. But if you get them alone and ask for the truth, I guarantee many will tell you that it is also because they are sick of seeing the opportunities going to those who are the right gender, sexual orientation or, God help us, ancestry, just like in the Middle Ages. To the more ‘diverse’ cohort. They know they won’t be battling that over there.

And so back we go, to conditions where an ever-shrinking pie is divided up ever less fairly to favour the whos over the whats.

Time to buy an ox, perhaps.

Or to stop the rot.

Hello there ..

The stats tell me this blog gets more than a hundred views a month. Since I do nothing to promote it, I’m mystified. I keep it as a personal thought silo which people are welcome to browse. That’s all it is.

Who are you? I would love it if you would leave a comment or just say hi. I promise I won’t try to sell you anything.

What I Believe — It Gets Stranger

It’s a process, this business of trying to understand the deeper dimensions of human life. At the time I wrote What I Believe I was not in possession of information that has since come to hand. Although I have nothing to renounce in that earlier essay, new discoveries take it further – much further.

Two very peculiar and unforgettable events have continued to puzzle and challenge me for decades. In 1969 I had the experience described in my post Another Force of Nature, where my mother 1,200 miles across an ocean absolutely knew that I was in serious trouble in Sydney and, thank goodness, acted on that knowledge. Two years later, in Bangkok, I had a vivid dream in which I was terrified by two Americans who, in a few hours, would walk into a room, identify themselves as FBI agents and do me serious harm. I saw into the future. I have always felt greatly blessed by those two events because they allowed me to know with a great deal of certainty that the Newtonian/Einsteinian view of space and time did not describe the limits of what we consider reality. Thanks to In My Time of Dying, an extraordinary book by Sebastian Junger, I just might now understand the true state of things. At least insofar as they can be understood because as Junger points out the comprehension of matters involving quantum mechanics may exceed the design parameters of the human brain.

We now know that neither physical reality nor the flow of time are anything like how our perceptions construct them. It started with Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, moved on to quantum entanglement and has now arrived at the point where it has been experimentally proven that consciousness influences reality. Subatomic particles subsist in many places at once, each place being no more than a probability that that particle is in that position. But when we observe a particle it instantly coalesces into a single point. What’s more we can know that particle’s location or its momentum, but never both. Observing the particle blinds us to one or the other, always, as a law of nature.

That’s right. Just looking at something changes it in a provable, measurable way. This flies in the face of everything we consider rational and real. It is so alien to the way we think that many great minds have suggested that we may never understand it because our minds are intrinsically incapable of doing so. As Nobel physicist Richard Feynman observed, “If you think you understand quantum mechanics you don’t understand quantum mechanics.” There is a temptation to regard the incomprehensible but real outcomes of quantum experiments as interesting but to us irrelevant events taking place only in laboratories. That is an error – quantum mechanics are at work in every atom of our bodies and the world around us, all the time. Recent computer modelling suggests that quantum entanglement plays an important role in our neural network. And what we observe, how we observe, is in all likelihood shaping external events and processes. We must learn to live with astonishment and incomprehension.

Which raises the question of what is meant by that ‘we’. Great meditators and many experimenters with hallucinogenic drugs share the experience of the non-separateness of living beings. Now that we know that consciousness changes objective reality there is every reason to suspect they may be right. We know of many instances of ‘hive mind’ in the natural world. What if all consciousness is one great hive mind, something our primordial antecedents may have experienced? We know that our senses are filters developed by evolution to process information in ways that enhance our chances of survival. Most importantly for the purposes of this discussion the senses remove data; that is what filters do. Our senses shape our experience of reality by making us ignorant of much that is there to be observed. That approaching sabretooth tiger was so important to our survival that we learned to filter out birdsong, weather, and the falling of leaves to see only the tiger. Importantly, our senses and our minds limit our observations to what our individual biological organisms can perceive. But that may not reflect the true state of consciousness. As Ralph Waldo Emerson put it in his essay “Experience”: “We have learned that we do not see directly, but mediately, and that we have no means of correcting these colored and distorting lenses which we are or of computing the amount of their errors. Perhaps these subjectlenses have a creative power; perhaps there are no objects.” An impressive observation for someone writing in the early 19th century.

I have come to the hypothesis that at some point way back in the evolutionary chain we broke our hive mind into apparently individual, separate instances of consciousness because that enhanced our chances of survival. Each separate biological pre-human organism then had its own, specialised instance of consciousness highly focused on taking care of itself. But perhaps the hive mind persists below our level of perception, breaking through under great pressure. Hence in 1969 my mother in Auckland knew with certainty that I was in serious trouble in Sydney. Is this universal consciousness what we call God? Why is there not a single human society that did not, historically, subscribe to some version of divinity? The belief that there is something conscious, with agency, that is greater than us and inhabits a universal realm is uncannily persistent across all humankind.

The ancient Hindus said that there is Brahman, the material world, and Atman, spirit or universal consciousness, and that they are the same thing. I’m starting to think they were right.

While we are at it, nor is time the linear absolute we perceive it to be. In the early 2000s scientists in the Canary Islands performed two sequential versions of the famous two-hole experiment with two entangled photons in which the second experiment caused the results of the first experiment, in the past, to change. Maybe under great stress we can also break the flow of time. It would explain how in Bangkok, in extreme danger, I was able to see in a dream the two men who in a few hours would turn up in my ‘real’ life and consign me to a hellish prison.

Astonishment, but perhaps some comprehension.

My thanks to Greg McGee for tipping me off about Junger’s wonderful book and to Robert Lanza for his thinking about biocentrism. See https://theamericanscholar.org/a-new-theory-of-the-universe/

Universal Credit – The Hidden Industrial Subsidy Making Landlords Rich

I wrote this ten years ago, pre-Brexit. Its inference is that outside the EU, Universal Credit would be replaced by the more effective, efficient and honest practice of subsidising targeted industries. Why is it not even being discussed?

The United Kingdom probably has the largest and most complex welfare system ever known. Much of its workings are the standard stuff of modern economics, revolving around the pretence that it is desirable for everyone to be in education, paid employment or retirement, a condition known as “full employment”. This in defiance of the plain fact that for more than half a century standard economic theory has held that a certain level of unemployment is both desirable and necessary as a hedge against inflation. The clear and present threat of loss of employment is the sole available brake on wage demands in those economies such as the UK still locked into the adversarial employment relations model.

The German mitbestimmung is of course an effective alternative. Germany’s experience has shown that wages can effectively be limited by mutual agreement based on open books. Workers under mitbestimmung have shown themselves well able to recognise wage thresholds beyond which the enterprise and therefore their jobs cease to be viable.

This holds little political appeal in the left-right-obsessed minds of British politicians and workers’ advocates, with each side holding the other to be unrestrainedly greedy. This is a pity and a waste, but it is business as usual, neither likely to change nor even particularly interesting, the quotidian folly of a society mired in 19th Century industrial relations philosophy.

So much for the circumstances and attitudes surrounding unemployment benefits. I am more interested in the other, larger slice of the welfare bill: payments to the poor in employment. In the mid 1980s New Zealand introduced a purer form of monetarism than that of either Britain or the United States; Thatcher was a fervent admirer of Minister of Finance Roger Douglas under the unfortunate Lange government, who swept away every single vestige of state support to the employed. Not that there were many to start with. The child benefit of around £7.50 per week per child had been around since Michael Savage’s far-reaching welfare reforms in the thirties. I part-funded the purchase of our first house by the common practice of child benefit capitalisation, which gave us 18 years’ worth of child benefit for both of our children – a substantial sum. (And yes, I felt rather smug when the child benefit was axed soon after.) The only other benefit for those in work was the ability for the employed to claim work expenses – study and training, work-related travel beyond the daily commute, clothing allowances, etc. This also went in the late 80s.

So arriving in the UK to see vast sums disbursed in welfare payments to the lower-waged was something of a shock. In my world it is now an absolute given – to go into work is to leave direct welfare behind. Free or subsidised health care is not viewed as welfare, but as a right, derived from the shared belief that access to healthcare being dependent on wealth is immoral, an anathema.

So why is it seen as necessary in the UK? On the face of it, you could call it the good old British sense of fair play, simple compassion for the strugglers. But scratch the surface and we see a deeply unpleasant underbelly: a hidden subvention for British industry and agriculture, direct support being severely constrained under the firm and ungenerous thumb of Brussels (as it stood while the UK was in the EU).

Suppose the housing benefit, the winter fuel payments, the child tax breaks and all the rest of it were swept away in one fell swoop.  What would happen? Rent and mortgage payments would white ant the rest of the family budget. Then what – rent default on a huge scale, hundreds of thousands of simultaneous evictions? If that were the only consequence, well, rents and mortgages would simply have to drop. So what? The consequences of that are not hard to calculate – thousands of highly geared landlords going bankrupt, for a start.

But that would not happen, or at least not quickly, because experience shows that most people will freeze and starve before they give up their home to go – where?

If there were any slack in the system, the lowly paid might stand some chance of enduring the shock. But there isn’t any, at least not nearly enough. My partner’s son and his family simply could not survive on their meagre earnings alone, in spite of the fact that he is a hard-working and successful bed salesman. Most people would simply choose unemployment and the dole and it would be a valid choice. You can’t hold your job if you can’t afford to get there. You can’t put in a day’s work if you’re constantly hungry. You can’t show up to a retail or office job in shabby old clothes. Of course the first to go would be the Smiths, the Perkins, the Jameses. The Wronskis, the Odungas and Wachikes would hang on longer, the ones who will live six to a room and subsist on rice and beans, a dynamic already observable under the current system. Cue deepening hatreds, the oppressed turning on the oppressed.  So often ‘taking our jobs’ really means doing our jobs for low wages we refuse to accept and should not have to accept.

Such scything cuts to workers’ welfare could not be made without declaring the whole plan, being an intention to divert those billions into supporting capacity and advancement in agriculture and industry, research and development, and where necessary direct price support. The British public has become so used to ubiquitous welfare it is likely that, even if the scheme were openly described as a reallocation of resources, the reaction from the street, the pulpit and the leader page would still be to flay the heartlessness of the politicians driving them. The British sense of entitlement to welfare has become endemic. From the other side of the fence, the beneficiaries of these hidden subsidies would howl about the unavoidable wage increases which would follow, ignoring or not trusting the intention to replace them in a more open and targeted manner.

It is a fact that failing that strategy forbidden by the EU many British products and services would become more expensive than those of their competitors. So we see what this really is all about – international competitiveness. A deeply dishonourable covert subvention that reduces workers to the role of part-time beggars on their knees before the armies of bureaucrats employed to administer their welfare. Their day-to-day existence haunted by the spectre of The Cuts. Perfectly honest hard-working employees who deserve decent wages and the respect due to those who thrive by their efforts are often driven to become cheats, sharing with their mates every new wrinkle to work the system, escape deductions, drive up entitlements through falsehood and secrecy. Absolute loss of belief in the political process and the law.

It is (was) a terrible price to pay for staying in Europe and exalting the Holy Grail of free trade.

This is (was) the hidden cost of Europe: the humiliation of the British worker.

So why, now the UK is no longer subject to Brussels, does it continue?