Oh well, thats are hello and welcome to the show.
This is the Cult of Conspiracy and my name is Jonathan Jacob and today we are going all in on the vaporing, canceling, cancelation and and why is why are vapes being criminalized?
Now?
Why are they taking off the shelves? I mean, do they really care about your health? The quick answer is absolutely fucking not.
Now, before we start all of this, we do need to give this disclaimer. Okay, the Cult of Conspiracy is not trying to promote big tobacco or big vape. Okay, We're not getting sponsored from any of these people. We do, in fact acknowledge that nicotine is an addictive substance and that everybody should do what they can to relieve themselves of their vices rather than get more heavily. With that that being said, Jonathan and I are also heavily addicted
to nicotine. Let's be very open and honest about it before we even kickstarted.
Yes, yes, And to be honest in doing this research, I was trying to make sure, all right, am I just looking at this from a biased angle?
Like?
Am I just saying that vaping is healthier? Because I prefer to vape over smoking cigarettes. I smoked cigarettes for I think twelve thirteen years or something like that until I switched over to vaping. And I knew the moment that I switched over from cigarettes to vaping because I was playing semi pro football that during that transition, right, and I could tell just with my lung capacity and with my overall endurance, I was able to run a little bit longer, run a little bit faster, not be
so as so like winded or anything like that. I knew that there was like an immediate difference from whenever I made that transition, And I was thinking, well, is this just in my mind? Is this placebo is there? I want it to be true, So it is, you know, like you never know exactly how the fucking human mind is. I mean, it's a whole matrix in and of itself, so you gotta, you know, kind of test these things. That being said, whenever I did make that transition, I
felt so much better. And so I've been vaping ever since. And what's great about it, well not what's great about it, but it's it tastes better than cigarettes. You can vape indoors. I mean, I fucking vape on it their plane. They tell you not too, but I mean, yeah, I'm such an addict that, like, you know, anyway.
I get it. Wait, how old were you when you started smoking?
Seventeen? Okay, sixteen seventeen something like that.
So I was sixteen when I started smoking, right, But I smoked cigars. I didn't pick up cigarettes until I was halfway through my enlistment in the Marine Corps, matter of fact, because cigars are an expensive habit to have, like to get at the time anyway, because I didn't know where to shop. I can get a decent cigar for like fifteen bucks a pop. Bro, I'm not trying to kill fifteen dollars a day for me to go outside for two hours and burn that bitch down, Like
no way. But I did develop a nicotine addiction from that. I still chewed. I didn't use dip. I can't do dip. But like chew man, you get you some Levi Garrett, some some red Man gold blend. That was my shit, or maybe some beech nut, oh dude, and that was my shit. Basically the entire time I was in the Marine course, I had an entire mouthful of chew and then once a day, I'd go outside and smoke a piper or a cigar, and then I swapped to Marlboro Reds
and then later on swap to American Spirit Blacks. Right, But all of that to say, it was around the time when I swapped to cigarettes where my cardio went to absolute shit. And it wasn't like I was the stud of my platoon by any means. As far as running goes, I was decent. I wentn't great soon as I started smoking, and it was never like I went like a two pack a day kind of guy. It would take me like three days to kill a pack, you know, just every so often you go outside and
take a smoke break kind of thing. And still I felt to my cardio go down. I could feel myself being unhealthy, and at the time I kind of liked it because I had I had gotten lazy with it, so I was like, yeah, I just kind of all flowed in the same direction. You know, cut too swapped to vaping when well often one swapping between cigarettes and vaping because twenty fifteen, twenty sixteen, vaping wasn't what it
was now. You know, you had those little like it was like a pin that looked like the weed pens these days, but like it was a refillable thing. You'd have to buy the little juice and all of that, and it the flavors weren't the best. You had to constantly go buy new batteries, and you had to buy new little tanks because like, if you're using something though, like a citrus flavor, then you couldn't use the plastic
little tank. You had to use a glass tank. And then remember when the big stupid mods came out and these people were blowing like enough of a cloud to clear out an entire room from what was in their lungs.
And like fucking tugboats. Bro, I remember that?
Yeah, yeah, dude. Then they had vaping teams. You remember that vaping teams? Yeah, dude. The Cloud Chasers was the local team. They would do competitions with other vaping groups, and it was like, Okay, this is getting fatty or trendy or whatever you want to call it. And it's like that's I'm just trying to get my nicotine fixed. I ain't trying to like be one of that click by any means.
But yeah, yeah, and so I was around the same thing. I mean, I to be honest, I had been smoking since I was fifteen, but I didn't start regularly like needing it, like addicted to it until I was seventeen, I would say, because I mean my parents smoked. Everybody and my family smoked, like my aunts and uncles and shit like that. All my friends smoked and everything. So it was I mean, it wasn't hard for me to jump on that train and so but yeah, I mean
it pulled me right in. And that's the nicotine. And believe it or not, cigarette companies they use certain chemicals to make the nicotine even more addictive.
Yes they do. That's why I still prefer cigars. Man. I love still to this day, I love cigars. And yeah, you can become addicted to cigars. Yes, they are not nearly as addictive of cigarettes. We're talking by a leaps and bounds worth of a margin.
So we're gonna be getting into a lot of the data that the backs that every everything that is surrounding this whole vape band. A lot of states have already and them, some of them are even criminalizing them, and it's it's pretty wild. And I know that Louisiana just recently banned them, was it a few months ago.
Yeah, that's a motherfucker. I gotta go to some underground places to get a vape these days, and or if I travel out of state, I just buy like twenty of the mugs and stock up.
Yeah.
Well, in the same over here. As of September one, Texas is banning vapes and not just not just like nicotine vapes, but also the weed vapes too. Really yep, they're banning it all. And wow, it's crazy, dude like Texas, I feel like we are just fucking rolling back to prohibition times. I mean, do they not understand that when you make something illegal that it only fuels the black market, Like common fucking sense, bro, that's how this goes.
How do you think the mafia got to have so much power and influence? It was because prohibition happened, and these dudes are already doing illegal activities. You just made a whole new market for them. And that now everybody knows that if they want to get a drink, they're gonna have to go to some sort of an illegal means to get it. People are not gonna quit their nicotine addiction because big Daddy government said so. If anything, this will push more people to go back to smoking
rather than quitting. But that's not good.
Well that's their goal in general. And I will say this too, that a lot of the the big tobacco companies are actually buying some of the vape companies. So what is it Philip Moore.
Us, Yeah, Philip Morris owns Views, if I'm not mistaken.
Views and Jewel A Yeah, Jewel ship with Jewel. A couple of years ago, they were trying to ban all the all the flavored ones. All of that is it. They don't care about like protecting the kids at all, Like if kids you think they got a problem with kids lighting up a fucking cigarette. I mean they might say that they do, but that's not really what they're after. They're using the flavor to target the kids, which it's not even really targeting the kids that it's just targeting
the vape industry. And because the vape industry outside of the couple of vape companies that they know or that they own that are within you know, regulatory guidelines, it's dude, it is a full on clusterfuck of everything that we're gonna be getting into today. So we're gonna start right here. So the vape pan it's not about your health. We're going to be getting into that. They say it's for
your health. They say it's to protect the kids, to stop another generation from being addicted, to prevent a public health crisis. But if that were true, explain this wire cigarettes, products that kill half of their long term users and contain thousands of chemicals, dozens of which are known carcinogens, still sold in every gas station, every corner store, and still heavily taxed by the same government claiming that vaping is a big threat. It doesn't makes sense. Why are
food dies banned in Europe still in your cereal? Why is fluoride in your water but lead pipes still delivering it. Why is the air filled with industrial pollutants and wild chemical spills swept under the rug? And why does the nightly news feed you fear and rage instead of truth and solutions. If this system truly cared about your health, they go after all of it. But they don't, And vaping is just the latest battlefield in a war that has nothing to do with your lungs and everything to
do with your wallet, your choices, and your freedom. Today we're going to lay out the whole story, the science the propaganda, the money trail, and the players pulling the strings. And by the end, you won't just see the vape band for what it is, You'll see the entire machine
that keeps you under its fist. Now, I'm personally somebody, and this may be somewhat controversial, I think that every single thing drug, nicotine, alcohol, should all be entirely legal because whenever you illegalize something, you create a black market for said thing, which makes it even more dangerous and more harmful. And now you can spike it with all these different things and it's not regulated by anybody or anything.
Not that I necessarily have a whole lot of faith in the FDA in general, because look at what they legalize in our country. Just with the fucking food dies in the cereal is enough to make your head spin. So but at least there's some bottom line to it, you know what I'm saying, Like it has to go through some kind of custom to where if the FDA approves it, at least you can go after the FDA if you die or or you know, come up on a cancer or something like that.
Right, I don't necessarily disagree with what you just said. I think that pretty much everything should be legal. I will give small exceptions, like, all right, I know very successful alcoholics, right, So to say that alcohol is ruining people's lives, it can, but that's not inherent to alcohol, right, that's like inherent to addicts. Okay, fair enough. I know tons of successful smokers, right, I know tons of successful stoners, like very high level successful people who smoke we like crazy.
I know successful meth heads. I don't know any successful heroin addicts. I will give a disclaimer that opiates. I think we should still have some sort of like if not outright bands, some sort of like serious regulations on that. And there's a few other exceptions that you could throw out to where it's like, yeah, like if you give this substance to ten people, maybe one of them will be okay, not even like doing better or worse, like even neutral, nine out of ten are going downhill quick
because of it. Fentanyl is another one, Like I don't know many people that are addicted to fentanyl that are like doing so hot right now, That's what I'm saying. There's levels to it, but for the majority of it, alcohol, tobacco, and most illicit substances, I agree that it should be completely legal.
It's the conversation with the war on drugs, That's really what it's all about. Like people, you know, you have your government, your country telling you that you need to get drugs off the street. You need to get all these things off the street. Meanwhile, the government and the CIA, the FBI, whoever is the one that is funneling all these drugs in here via cartel or you know illegal you know black ops type shit, I mean, or a pharmacy bill Clinton back in the nineties right over in Arkansas.
I mean, it's it. They don't care like the way that they say they do. They care because these things have have a little something to say with their pocketbook. That's really what it's all about.
It's this lobbying group's got the most money to push the agenda and get the votes to sway whatever they whichever way they want. That's what it boils down to.
It's all about policy. And certain policies may make them some money, and certain policies don't make them any money. And you think that the like and we're gonna get to like the the taxes that are on cigarettes. I don't know if you've looked at cigarette prices lately. Yeah, ly, shit, I am so happy I don't smoke cigarettes anymore. What
an expensive hot hobby, right or rap addiction? Yeah, like it is crazy, and they they have taken that and run with it because like, well, smoking is bad, so we can we can put a nicotine or a tobacco
tax on it, and that's how we feel justified. Meanwhile, they're reaping in the fucking rewards they're collecting on people who are going broke because of this shit, because you're the one that made us all addicted to it in the first place by not only getting us hooked on an addictive chemical, but you amplified said addictive chemical so much so to where it is damn near what for what? As far as like, uh, if you're trying to give
up on nicotine, they say, it's actually similar. It is similar to break the hobbit or the habit of nicotine. I keep on wanting to say, hobbit the habit of nicotine. It's similar to fucking heroin. Yeah, it is the way that it processes in your brain is the exact same thing to the same extent, if.
Not more one hundred percent, dude, And so nobody really wants to have that kind of conversation. But here's the deal. Cigarettes didn't used to be that expensive, like by comparison. Yes, I understand the cost of living goes up the devaluation of the dollar. A pack of smokes costs you more in two thousand and five than it did in nineteen seventy five. Like, okay, fine, that that conversation. I understand a gallon of gas the same way.
Course ten years alone, cigarette prices have more than doubled.
Exactly. Here's the deal. You know where that's started. President Old Barryhusein Obama, Okay, put on a luxury tax on cigarettes. Keep in mind that dude was chained smoking cools like it was going out of style. He was, and I can verify that I was stationed in DC. I've seen the motherfucker. Okay, cools are Newports. I do believe it was Cools. I know it was menthol you could tell by the smell, but I I want to say it
was Cools. Maybe it was some high dollar meenthoal. I don't fucking know, but you know what, I kind of hope it was Newports, you know, And that's legit if you're gonna smoke a menthol smoke, a proper menthol smoke. One's going to hit you in your.
Chest, you know that one that was called it was like Benson and Hedges or something like that, the real like fancy, like oh god.
Now I'm trying to remember. I thought you didn't want to cloth For a second, I was like, nah, I'm closed cigarettes. That was a whole other other thing.
I think it was called Benson and Hedges or something along those lines. It was like Benson in something and they they actually people preferred to smoke those for the longest time because they didn't have the Fire Safe Cigarette FSC logo on them. And yeah, well the FSC you know, those things were designed allegedly to prevent people's houses from burning down if they fall asleep with a cigarette in
their hand. Don't look at actually what's in the FSC, which is even more carcinogens that than the original cigarette already had.
Wait a minute, do you mean to tell me that lighting and inhaling the smoke of fire retardant materials literally chemicals chemical compounds that are meant to put out fire, and lighting that and then inhaling it, that's worse for your health than lighting a leaf. Wait a minute, are we sure about this? Is there science to back that client? Now, I'm with you one hundred percent.
A Jacob euphemism.
Color me shocked, right, but no, one hundred percent. So when Obama put on that luxury tax, people want to say it was to incentivize smokers to quit, but it wasn't like a doubling of the price. It was a small incremental thing to how we got to this point. Like you said, in the past ten to fifteen years, cigarettes have doubled in price, but it didn't start with that initial jump. It went maybe a quarter more per pack. Then it was like seventy five cents more pack a dollar.
I mean, it's just a dollar, you know whatever that shit adds up. But it's a really crazy comparison to look at the timeframe in which vaping became more popular and it was starting to go a little more mainstream, even if it was the old school with the little pins and the little fillers or whatever. Right around the time where you started seeing vape shops pop up is around the time when a luxury tax got added onto cigarettes. Is that because they wanted to incentivize people to quit?
Or is that because Philip Morris and other big tobacco companies were losing profit margins, so they had to do something to cover the gap.
That's actually a good point you, I would say that that's probably the main argument that I would think so the most amount of sense whenever they're really starting, because if you think about it, if you have less users, you're bringing in less money. So what if you doubled the price. That way, if your consumer decides to cut in half, you just double it. Now you're you're equaling what you used to equal.
But the tax didn't go to Philip Morris, right, that went to the US government. And here's where things get a little shitty, right, lobbyists make up the money to give to the politicians, and they don't Sometimes they give it in one lump sum. Sometimes it's an installments. And if your company is losing money but you still need to make your monthly payment to whatever politician you made this deal with, you have to backdoor that shit. So
that's where the luxury tax came from. Philip Morris wasn't handing over a check to these people anymore, but they incentivize the government to pass a luxury tax to where they were still they being the politicians, were still getting their monthly cut. You see what I'm saying.
Well, and what's interesting too, is just because i've I mean, obviously we're very clearly vapors. And yeah, a lot of times, whenever you know you shouldn't be doing something, you almost don't even want to look at the data because you don't want to have to give it up. It like come and you know, contact with the information that shows that like it's poisoning you, you're gonna die, right, Yeah, we have met. Like dude, my great grandma, I think she died like in her late eighties and she was
still smoking cigarettes. So yeah, I think that it affects every like people differently.
Yeah, but those smokers that have lived to be ninety five still smoking two packs a day and they've never had the first bit of lung cancer, heart problems or in physema. Right. I also know people that have their first heart attack by the time they're forty because they smoke it. I think it's the same conversation to say that, like cancer affects people differently. It all goes down to genetics.
Some people's genetic bloodline are more prone to cancer. They're more susceptible to develop cancer and other people people are not. I think that's just the way it works out.
Well. The Chinese are the ones that I believe invented vaping in the beginning, which happened in two thousand and four. So the story of vaping traices back to China in two thousand and four when the vaping product first was introduced to the market, and from there quickly gain moment momentum, spreading to other parts of the world and evolving into the diverse array of devices and flavors that we see today.
So and I remember this, dude, because my dad, My dad used to travel to China for work all the time, and this was right around that time that he was traveling. And I remember a time, dude, it was like two thousand and four, two thousand and five, he brought some of those vapes.
Home.
Now, they weren't as like, you know, delicious as we are today. Like they're dangerous. I mean, I swear it's like hitting these vapes is like taking a bite out of a fucking piece of strawberry cheesecake nowadays. Literally yeah, yeah, literally quite literally. And so yeah, it's it's it's evolve over time, and they've learned about how to deliver it a little bit better, and that throat hit in the back, and you know, how to make the batteries last longer
and all these things. Right, But we're going to uh, all right, we're gonna.
Get to the Chinese.
Dude, Chinese graded it.
Yeah, so wait a minute, just we're all clear here. This is new information to me. Hold on, are you telling me that vapes are commy?
I'm telling you that vaping comes from China. Yeah.
That kind of has me a little perplexed.
Everything that you have ever smoked has come from China.
And that makes me feel like we need to hear from more Malaysian correspondent.
Don't trust China.
Chinese asshole, there you go. Damn, I you know, I didn't know. I didn't know. I didn't know that I'm puffing on commy batteries here, man, shit, Now I got to change the whole perspective out of life.
Yeah, I mean, I get it, due, I do get it. And honestly, that was like my main hang up with vaping too, because you always see it. It's always made in China, every single one of them. Yeah, And so I started doing a little bit of research, and now, even though that they are still made in China, the majority of them, not all of them, But even though they're made in China, you're still going to see how much more safe they are than cigarettes. Oh yeah, this
is the whole TikTok conversation all over again. I would rather get poisoned by my own government than a government from a foreign government.
Yes, yes, I would the same with like the baby toys, right Fisher Price. They had lawsuits because China was putting lead based paints into toys even into the early two thousands that they knew babies are gonna put in their mouth. You know, I have a healthy distrust of China. But fuck man. Now, the vape conversation's coming up. This one hits close to home.
So governments roll out the same talking points. Vaping is unsafe, we don't know the long term effects, kids are using the using them at alarming rates, and an epidemic of nicotine addiction is brewing. In twenty nineteen, US headlines screamed about a mysterious vaping related lung illness. The CDC labeled
it as an epidemic. Politicians moved to ban flavored vapes and public panic skyrocketed, but buried in the fine print was almost every case was linked to illicit THC cartridges contaminated with vitamin e ascetate, not legal in nicotine vapes. The panic was real, but the target was misinterpreted. When you strip away the hysteria, you find what. Public Health England and Royal College of Physicians in the UK already concluded that vaping is far less harmful than smoking and
should be promoted as a harm reduction tool. But here in the United States and other countries that message gets buried because it doesn't fit the controlled narrative. So I'm a popcorn lung that whole, like all of it. I mean, yeah, that's the main one.
Okay, So I remember them try to There was like newscasters on Fox and CNN that were having these people come on and talk about popcorn long that was never an epidemic. There was only a few cases of that ever really brought forward. And again we're talking about how many people vape and how many of these people have an epidemic of popcorn long Like, that's not that's not accurate to say, But boy, the media acted like it was.
Oh yeah, yeah, and and and I'm I have some of those articles that we're gonna pull up. We're gonna read right from what was it again, the Public Health England and the Royal College of Physicians of Physicians in the UK. And it's documented shit like these, aren't, you know, like some spin off spoof shit. This is all these are, like peer reviewed journals. They have no reason to give
this information, you know what I'm saying. Like you can tell that it's not swayed in you know, four big to apps like you could argue that Big Tobacco probably came after them for those articles.
Oh I'm sure they did.
So what is really in a vape versus a cigarette? This is going to this is going to really blow it wide open. So first of all, and this is in celsius, so aery drink, no, no, no celsius as opposed to fahrenheit.
Oh okay.
So I don't know why it's written that way, but it says that a cigarette burns at up to nine hundred degrees celsius. What does that convert to in American degrees?
I'm looking that up right now, So giving that number one more time, sir.
Nine hundred degrees celsius.
So nine hundred degrees celsius equals sixteen hundred and fifty two degrees freedom.
Damn all right, that's hot as fuck. So the cigarette burns, and that's because of the chemicals that are feeding into the flame and all that. So the cigarette burns at up to nine hundred degrees celsius, releasing over seven thousand compounds in a cigarette. So you have ammonia, hydrogen, cyanide, arsenic, lead, formaldehyde, benzene, radioactive, polonium ye, polonium to ten, and more than seventy of
these are confirmed cancer causers. Tar coat your lungs, carbon monoxide robs your oxygen, and combustion byproducts damage every blood vessel in your vot in your body. But what about a clean vape? So not all of them are clean, but the ones that are somewhat regulated, So the more popular ones, I would say, and this is something that I've looked into, because like, I have two favorite vapes, which would be raz and geek Bar. Those are my two favorites. Those are the ones that I looked into.
Those seem to be heavy, heavily regulated, and they actually care about what actually goes into those fucking things.
I'll also say that cali and elf bar are also highly heavily regular.
Right, so a clean vape liquid has four ingredients four okay, mountains, not hundreds of thousands or tens of thousands.
I thought it had three. What are the four, Jonathan?
So the first one is vegetable glycerine also known as VG.
Which is a refined vegetable oil. Just so everyone's clear.
Yeah, it says it's plant based, using food and medicine. Everybody does come in contact with this. Next one is called PG, which is propeline glycol, so propelling glycol. It says that it's common in asthma inhalers. Okay, then you have nicotine, of course, addictive, yes, but not the cause of smoking related cancers. Actually, nicotine is not dangerous at all.
No. As a matter of fact, nicotine is in a lot of vegetables. Do you just off the top? Do you know what vegetable has the like that you probably have in your local garden has the highest level of nicotine by far?
I don't know.
Tomatoes, really, tomatoes are extremely heavy in nicotine.
That's interesting because it's labeled as a night shade.
Did you know that I did or did indeed. So I don't know if we could take tomato plant leaves and dry them out and smoke them to get a nicotine hit, I don't know. I'd be willing to do an experiment and find out. But yeah, so nicotine itself, Yeah, you could be addicted to it the same way you could be addicted to any addictive substance. But there is no such thing as a nicotine cancer that has ever been recorded in medical history.
No, it just doesn't happen. And the final ingredient would be food grade flavorings, so the same kind used in baked goods and candy. So when heated properly, vaping avoids the combustion toxins entirely interesting because you're not lighting it on fire. It's more of a heating than an external flame.
It's the same conversation if you have a diffuser in your home, that vapor that is going up, it's yeah, there's a heat to it. It's not like it's being boiled off either. It's being vaporized.
I mean vix vaporizer. Yeah, those things are fucking awesome.
Mm hmmm.
And although I think that they have found a way to corner that market by selling those stupid little fucking tabs that run out after one night. I'm like, just give it the liquid, bro, that's all I Ah, yeah, doubt. But anyhow, so when he did properly, vaping avoids the combustion toxins entirely. Overheating can create small amounts of what they're called u atul hides. Yeah, ald hides. Yeah, there we go. But the levels are drastically lower than cigarette smoke.
That's why studies keep finding vaping has a fraction of the toxic load, and yet governments regulate in band vapes while selling cigarettes without a blink. It's yeah, regulation, it's all policy. It has nothing to do with what's safer in what's healthier. It's about what they can do to tax, and they have not found a way to tax. You can't tax nicotine, and and that's something that I just recently learned. You cannot tax nicotine because.
It's like it's in tomatoes, dude.
That's the thing is that it's the reason why you have think about what are they called like fucking multi vitamins and shit like that. Right, they can tax all that because they have created a substitute for vitamin A four vitamin B, four, vitamin C, and they have patented it in that way.
You can't patent nature. And that's how you came out. Well, you say that they keep patenting plants. That's the thing that just keeps on happening, which blows my mind.
But well, probably their own, you know, hybrid plant, I would imagine.
Yeah. Now that being said, also, you brought up adult hides are a deal aldehydes. Aldehydes, right, so I know there's gonna be somebody say, see, see that's the cancer, that's what's making them bad. All right. So, an aldehyde are a class of organic compound characterized by a carbonyl group all right, bonded to a hydrogen atom and a carbon atom represented by the general formula of RCHO. They are versatile compounds found in various applications from synthetic chemistry
to biological systems. Okay, now, what are the dangers of these things? Because they do naturally occur. I'm gonna say that one again. They naturally occur. Okay. Atol hides, while naturally occurring, can pose significant health dangers due to their reactivity and potential toxicity. Exposure can lead to various issues,
including respiratory irritation, allergic reactions, or even cancer. Long term exposure, especially to certain atol hides like formaldehyde and as acetyl acetl hyde at acetyl high excuse me is linked to increased rees of cancer an other diseases. So yes fromaldehyde and a sadal hide if you're ingesting those things can have disastrous effects. But like that's not news to anyone. Everybody knows that smoking fromale hide it and good for you.
That is not the type of atal hide that's going to be coming from a vape.
Well then, so the original vapes had from how to hide in them, and then they they got banned out of there and a lot of the companies started taking the fromut to hide out of there because a lot of people were complaining.
I had no idea. So when you say the earlier ones, like that's confirmed.
Yeah, Like I think that that really started coming into effect about three or four years ago that they started taking out the formaldehyde. And because that was a reason that that was some of the pushback from the consumer that like, oh, from out to hide in this shit,
what the fuck get it out of here. I'm basically smoking a cigarette and they've taken it out and they've actually if you look into especially some of the bigger ones that we mentioned, if you look into it, they actually have taken a lot into account as far as trying to make it safer and not its dangerous. So that's the opposite of what tobacco companies are doing. They're just more and more and more shit.
They're just leaning into it at this point.
So and we have a couple of articles we're going to get into on that as well. But all right, so the science is that it's harm reduction. The vaping is so if you're going to if you're going to smoke, it's it's a lot easier on your body, on your lungs, everything, everything that your body's made up of if you are going to vape. And so they call it actually a harm reduction almost like what is that ship that people.
Uh, it's like methadone to methadicts.
No, because that's actually even more dangerous believe or not.
Like does somebody go into the methadone clinic instead of going and trying to score it on the street.
Yeah, if you look into that, dude, like the methadone shit is actually more dangerous than the the illegal drugs themselves.
Are you talking about like suboxin maybe.
M cretum That's what I was thinking.
Creatom Okay, okay, it's.
Like creatum compared to you know, meth or heroin. I don't know why people do creatim. I can't remember. I've never donrowin one of those drugs. Heroin. Okay, yeah, kreatom is the healthier substitute to heroin then, right exactly. I mean it's you would rather not do either one of them, but if you're going to do one of them, you should do creatim.
Like nobody's going to go out and try to like steal a catalytic converter to score some k You know they will do that to score some h right right now.
So let's be clear first, vaping is not risk free, but it is a game changer for harm reduction. The UK's Public Health England says that it's at least check this out. The UK's Public Health England has said that it that vaping is at least ninety five percent safer than smoking. I think that's five percent safer.
I think that's more generous towards tobacco. I would actually put it more towards like a ninety eight ninety nine percent to be perfect, get honest with you.
That's why I said, at least so smokers have switched to vaping. See their exposure to carcinogens drop to near non smoker levels within weeks, Respiratory symptoms improve, cardiovascular strains lessons, and quit rates rise. Why isn't this blasted across every
public health campaign? Because harm reduction doesn't fit the quote unquote quit or die morality play that help bureaucrats and anti nicotine activists push, and because a healthier, longer living X smoker isn't feeding the same tax base or corporate interest as a smoker buying two packs a day.
Mm hmm.
That's the way of looking at it.
There.
Nextly we have the money trail, and old boy, is there a fucking money trail which I'm just gonna glaze over. These are These are some of the points, and then we're gonna get to the actual articles. Next the money trail, which is the tobacco taxes tobacco and dude, you want to talk about lobbying, and oh, dude, like not only just lobbying to get these things legalized, but lobbying to certain presidents and political parties and conservative and liberal and
fucking Republican and Democrat. Nobody is nobody's free from taking a dollar from big tobacco.
No, it's like oil money, like the oil lobbyists and shit like that. Bro, big tobacco. That's that's all DC ties, that's all DC money. This is this is systemic. It is it's like almost organic to d C. This isn't like something just came about in the nineteen sixties by any fucking means. No, no, no, no, this is long, long time.
So tobacco tax revenue is a government drug in its own right. In the United States, states pull in, uh, they pull in twelve billion dollars annually from tobacco taxes, and the federal government grabs billions more. That doesn't include the nineteen ninety eight Master Settlement Agreement, where tobacco companies agreed to pay States two hundred and six billion dollars over twenty five years, payments tied directly to cigarette sales.
When people quit smoking and switch to vaping, those revenues, uh, those revenue streams they shrink. Instead of adapting with a fair nicotine tax, most governments cling to tobacco specific taxes because they're embedded in budgets. This is why vaping gets demonized. It's not a health threat, it's a budget threat. Absolutely agree with that, unabsolutely fucking real. And you notice it
just goes know how insincere the entire government is. Like, not that you needed this episode to prove that to you, but I mean it just pours a little bit more fucking diesel onto the fire, oh one hundred percent.
I mean, this goes back a lot further than people really want to think. Does anybody know why up until recently, the smoking age was eighteen, but the drinking age was twenty one? Oh boy? Anybody curious as to why that might be? I'm curious why is that?
You know?
What? Give me the ability to share the screen real quick? I got a YouTube short that is going to just lay it out so much faster and so much more eloquently than I ever could for anybody who'd like to see what I'm about to share. Instead of just here it, Jonathan, tell them where they could go.
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No, it's less than a pack of cigarettes, say that way less and a lot better for you and your third eye. Yes, surgeon General says so. Anyway, so as we're talking about this, yeah, recently, tobacco products were made by law to where you have to be twenty one to buy them, but that wasn't always the case. Alcohol for the longest time was not a twenty one thing, right. Michael Jackson is the reason why the drinking age in America got raised to twenty one. Are you ready for this?
Oh yeah, okay, oh yeah.
And for anybody listening that wants to try to fact check this, I already did. It's mind blowing, but it is real. It goes back from the Vietnam War and then it ends with Michael Jackson in the nineties. Let's fucking go.
Michael Jackson is the reason you need to be twenty one to drink alcohol.
Seriously, So it's the Roaring twenties. These Americans are partying like crazy, and Congress starts.
To realize your owner, the country can't get nothing done with Audi Runch running ram and they passed the eighteenth Amendment prohibition no making, selling, or consuming alcohol.
But then instead of drinking, people just turn to organized crime and violent So Congress is like your owner, way need to repay you at their amendment and the country can't get nothing done with Audi Crup running round.
And if he comes up to each state to set their legal drinking it most was twenty one years old.
But then you've got Richard Nixon like, we need more eighteen year olds to fight in my veya an amaze vote.
So the twenty sixth Amendment is passed, letting eighteen year olds vote for the first time.
So states decided that eighteen year old should be able.
To drink too.
The only problem eighteen year olds are done, they start drive and Michael Jackson starts putting out anti drunk driving ads set to his music.
So the new president, Ronald Reagan, has to do.
Something with hoe five percent of a stage highway fund. If they do not raise they're drinking age.
To twenty one, then they all did, Michael, So there you have it.
Wow.
Reagan came in and said that he was gonna withhold funds from any state that did not raise their drinking age to twenty one.
Oh wow, that's interesting.
So do we really want to talk about what just happened to where they said they were going to withhold funding from the states unless they raise their smoking age to twenty one?
Oh? I mean it just out. They don't care, bro, they don't care. They don't fucking health like getting out of your mind. They don't care about your health, they don't care about your well being. They want you poisoned. So uh, if they're trying to it, it's almost like, oh, what is it the Evil Queen or whatever in snow White.
Yeah, even queen, I don't know if they ever gave her a name.
The Evil Queen. It's like she's always trying to give the apple to snow White, right, because it's poisoned and it'll make her fall asleep and all this other shit. Right, but now imagine that there is a Chinese queen that cover the actually yeah, Panda Panda, But now imagine this Chinese queen is coming over and saying, look, that apple's poisonous as fuck, and yeah, I have this apple. It's still pretty poisonous, but it's not going to kill you.
And there's actually zero confirmed deaths to vaping related shit nicotine vaping not entirely across the board. And so it's like the government doesn't like that. They want to keep on giving you the Evil Queen apple because they want you poisoned, because it feeds big Pharma. It keeps the population down a little bit. You know, they're always talking about reducing the world's population, right, And so they try and poison you in all these different types of ways.
Vaccine is one of them. You know, the harmful chemicals in your food and water, and we talk about all the time. They want you poisoned as much as they possibly can, because that is how they maintain control if they have it. Think about it, we as citizens. Some people don't like that word, but we as citizens of this country, we outnumber them, like what one thousand to one, not even probably more than that, right.
Ten, Probably a million to one something like.
That, probably a million to one. If we were to rise against them, they would be trampled overnight. Okay, So they need you poisoned, they need you sick, They need you thinking that we need them. So this is one of their ways. And obviously this would be one of the reasons why they're trying to ban vaping, because it reduces the clutches that they have on your back as far as reducing the population and keeping you sick.
Because you think.
About it, one of the biggest money makers within big pharma is a cancer treatment. And if there is less people getting cancer, we can't be having not.
Like you said earlier, right, so one of the things that could potentially be in these vapes is from aldehyde, right, which is not good. Not I'm with you one hundred percent, but do you mean the chemical that's in every cigarette known from aldehyde? It's that chemical compound is in them.
So if we're gonna really call a spade a spade, they're gonna they all have tried to throw this smear campaign on vapes to say, oh, you know, those are just as bad as cigarettes, or there's a whole group that really believe these are worse than cigarettes because they were told by somebody who was told by somebody, and well, you know, it's that new shit and it's just worse
aus it's even worse. They and all this the smear campaign worked because literally, we just led there's seven thousand compounds, seventy of which are confirmed they're going to give you cancer. These there may possibly be one thing in them, and that's a very small chance that's even in them. And to say that a little bit of that is going to give you the same effects as smoke, looking something with seventy I'm sorry, like it's not even a fair comparison.
So we're gonna get to big tobacco strategy. Now, so think do you think that big tobacco hates vaping? Think again, they've bought in Okay, not just a couple of them that we named earlier, but there are some some big names here at Steak. So first you have Altria, which is actually it's just rebranded from Philip Morris. So just as Philip Morris Altria, or Philip Morris owns a Steak in Jewel, British American Tobacco owns Views, japan Tobacco owns Logic,
so they play both sides. They lobby to ban or restrict flavored vapes from independent shops. They keep their own tobacco flavored corporate pods legal. They don't have a problem with that. They ain't got no, they've already they've already squeezed everything they can out of them, and now they owned them.
And that's the thing.
They bankrupt certain companies and then they buy them for pennies on the fucking dollar. And now those things aren't as harm as all the other vapes because we are in control of them, and we obviously care about your health.
Right, it's a company name, you know, and trust right.
Philip Morris, Yeah, I mean, hey, you like jewel, I mean big Tobacco loves you, baby girl.
Absolutely.
So they keep their own tobacco flavored corporate pods legal. They push for regulations that small vape companies can't afford to comply with. And so the result is is that big tobacco eliminates competition, owns the vape market, and still sells billions of cigarettes. A monopoly on nicotine, whether you burn it or vaporize it, That's how it runs.
That's how the monopoly game goes. Man, That's how big business. This is like the biggest of big business. This is high level stakes here. That's how it goes. That's how they operate.
They don't just own fucking boardwalk and park place, Bro, they own the board exactly. That's the thing is that you're playing on their field. They have the home field advantage. They owned the refs, they owned the coaches, they owned the stadium, they owned the state where the stadium is. The entire game is rigged in their favor, and they're going to do They're they're going to stop at nothing
to control all of it. That's why I do believe that vapes will absolutely be completely taken away because the the little vape companies, dude, hey, you want to talk about they're they're minnows swimming in an ocean of sharks.
Oh yeah, especially one that they like we said earlier, this is this is old money, This is long standing ties to legality. These, like you said, smaller vape companies and I know, like the ones we just listed Geek bar Elf bar U Raz. These are big vape companies. But as compared to Philip Morris, that's that's not even a fair compared. This is this is comparing your micro brewery to Anheuser Busch. That's what that is.
Oh it's a shack versus a castle bro.
Yeah, that's that's comparing a Beta brewing company, which is not a micro brewery. They have, they got beer all over the country, all over the world, out to Abida, but they are not anywhere in the conversation as a comparison to Anheuser Busch.
Give me that Barney Baby, Yeah, yeah, Andy, Gator and Purple Hayes.
I like the Boot also, it's pretty.
The Boot is probably my favorite Abita beer. Yeah, I agree with you on that.
It's getting harder to find.
I know, I don't know why it was such a such a good beer. I thought that it was the best one I thought, I mean, Purple Hayes is like the most famous one.
I mean that's they're tried and true. You know, that's that's that good.
Good it is. It is so uh Now there is uh political influence and donations as well. And like I said, we're gonna be getting to those numbers into you know, UH said, constituents that are receiving benefits from big tobacco. So we're gonna follow the campaign money. Check this out, bro. In Australia, the National Party, which I don't know if that's their conservative or liberal.
Probably there I would think they're they're liberal. Honestly, show is a pretty uh liberal place by and large.
Okay, So the National Party took donations from tobacco companies and then backed harsh vape bands. In the United States, lawmakers in states with strict vape laws often received campaigns from campaign cash from Altria, R. J. Reynolds and other giants. So it's not a conspiracy. It's public record. Money talks, and in politics, it rights the laws. So wow, yeah, dude, And like.
I said, we got it right. By the way, the Nationalist Party or the Nationalist Party in Australia is the right wing party. So I was wrong.
It made more sense to me. Usually liberals are anti national anything.
So very true, very true.
They're more global.
Yeah.
So then there's a regulatory capture as well. So by legally defining vaping as a tobacco product, even if it contains zero tobacco leaf, governments get to apply the same taxes, the same restrictions, and advertizing bands. This keeps vaping stigmatized, keeps the public confused, and allows total control over what can be sold to whom and where so all within the literature itself. Why would I mean? Yes, nicotine is derived mainly mostly from tobacco, but there is no actual
tobacco leaf. And this is the argument on behalf of the vaping party, is that, why are you putting tobacco you know, laws on something that is tobacco lists.
Could you imagine if the alcohol companies tried doing that, if out of nowhere, name a big liquor company, Jack Daniels tried putting and lobbying in DC to put restrictions on coca cola.
Exactly, Well, it has water in it, yeah.
Right, right, right, right, Yeah, it's ridiculous.
So crazy. Then you know, you know, the World Health Organization, she got a little something to say about this. So whose framework? The whose framework contention on tobacco control, that's the name of their thing. It pushes anti vape measures globally, treating them no differently than cigarettes. Countries that rely on who funding or want to align with its policies follow suit. Meanwhile, big pharma selling nicotine patches, gum, and prescription cessation drugs
benefits when vaping is suppressed. So the overlap between these interest is really is really discussed in mainstream media. So if we are going to look at vaping as a healthier alternative to smoking, meanwhile the World Health Organization is benefiting from nicotine patches, nicotine gum, and some of the drugs that they use. What was that big one that people It was a pill that people were taken to try and quit smoking. It got like robo chantis chantics.
Then they found out that it was extremely fucking dangerous and nobody should be taking it.
Who could have seen that coming a mile away?
I know the World Health Organization funded that. Okay, hmm, they funded all They fund all these things. They back all of these things as well. So they're the ones that are benefiting from people quitting, and they're like, look, we got this shit and we're gonna help you quit. Meanwhile, the big Vabe company wants to come come along and say, look, we want to try and get you to quit smoking cigarettes. Whooo, whoa, you hold your fucking horses. We already got that absolutely.
Wow. I didn't know the World Health Organization is the ones that were behind chantics.
Yeah, yeah, all of it. Yeah, it's crazy. So and then of course there's black market backfire. So bands don't kill demand. I don't know if anybody knows that.
Wait a minute, Wait a minute, you're telling me that if they take it off the shelves, the streets will find a way.
Yeah yeah, yeah. It's almost like guns, right.
I wonder if anybody's ever written that down somewhere. You know, as we just learned from that quick little clip about how when they made alcohol illegal, the organized crime skyrocketed because they now had a new medium to sell. You know, street pushers are gonna push, the streets are going to eat, you know what I'm saying. But hey, I wonder if anybody else at the top knows that or something.
It's crazy you think marijuana dealers would benefit if marijuana was made illegal in every state.
You mean like the shops or you mean like a street dealer, street dealers, you know, when more and more states started legalizing weed, Oddly enough, the weed dealers on the streets, yeah, they saw an initial dip, sure, but more often than not, they're cheaper than the dispensaries, so their standard customers continued to go to them. It really didn't take away the organized crime, if we're going to really call that organized crime, but it didn't increase it either.
But to your point, if they made weed outright illegal, honishable by ten years in prison, right now, would that be good or bad for your street corner pusher?
The black market would definitely see an increase for sure, and.
The price would also go through the fucking roof.
Yeah it would. And so now you have illegal versus legal as far as battling for market market share and
market price and everything like that. You know, might be might be good for the economy or the economy the way they see it, but yeah, it's a And honestly, like you know, I mean me personally, I always felt better about buying weed from quote unquote black market dealer rather than getting it from a dispensary or you know, a store or something like that, especially in states where they only allow like Delta eight, Delta nine, Delta ten and all these different deltas, right, because all they are
is just spin offs. And I mean I personally, I mean I've smoked all the deltas and it doesn't doesn't feel the same as regular does. And also think about it, dude, Like these dispensaries, bro, I mean, the fucking thc percentage is through the goddamn roof, Like it's tough, fucking strong, And I mean, I miss Reggie. You can't find Reggie anymore.
Nah, You've definitely got to support your local farmer, right, and in this instance, support your local dealer if you are somebody that does partake. But that's the thing, right, If they were to outright criminalize it, and I mean yeah, certain states it is, and federally it is and all that, Yeah, fine, fine, fine, if they were to really put weight behind that and put pressure behind the illegalization of marijuana, bro, yeah, the
price would probably double even on the streets. Then all those white frat boys that have been buying eighths from their guy for like for years, would find out what an eighth is actually worth, there'd be fistfights over it, I'll say that much. But yeah, it's it's crazy, It
would be absolutely insane. But of course they're not gonna do that because that would make the war on drugs go to a level that the prison system can't actually compete with, Like they don't have the bedspace for that many hardened criminals of non violent crimes, of course, but like, oh, hardened criminals, And it's ridiculous.
Well, it's all about the public perception of it.
You know.
You look up one or two people and I and this is what I've recently found is that Texas is going to be illegally there. They're going to be illegalizing vaping and vaping products and all that shit as of September first. And from what I've heard, I cannot confirm or deny this, but from what I've heard, it's going to be illegal to even have it on your person. Oh shit, yeah yeah, So like.
Oh Louisian is going to follow suit, God damn it.
Yep, load the fuck up. I mean that's September first, and so there are other states that are obviously going to be a little bit slower to pull the trigger on that, but you know they're all going to follow suit. Like dude, California is all the way in on it, Massachusetts all the way in on it. New York's all the way in on it. Louisiana is all the way
in on it. Eventually every state is going to comply with this because every state is going to see their their certain pack money for certain representatives that you vote in. You think vaping companies are sending politicians money. No, that's just not it's they're not there yet.
And you know I was gonna quit vaping, like before you even did this episode. I planned on quitting as like my New Year's resolution for this year coming up. I got some things there coming up this fall. They're gonna be stressful. Now is not the time for that, But like next year, I was gonna like realistically put it down for good. Of course cigars on occasion, but like the everyday nicotine addiction.
Now I don't wanna no, now, I don't fucking wanna Okay, like they did this, and also just to work clear again to reiterate the whole nicotine is not bad for you thing.
You realize they just made it known FDC approved that the fucking pouches Zen's. Yeah, they're actually not bad for you at all.
No, not at all. You can fucking hike twenty of those bad boys in your mouth and be all right.
Those are literally just nicotine salt, the exact same nicotine salt that is inside of this vape. So if we're just gonna keep it one thou, well here, let's make sure we're all on the same page. The government has no issue with nicotine. It's the way you ingest it that they're trying to regulate.
Yep, yep, that's it. If they ain't making a money, it's all the sudden bad for your health. Absolutely, absolutely crazy how that shit works. So if vaping was openly acknowledged as safer, cigarettes would look indefensible. If nicotine taxes replaced tobacco taxes, the quote unquote morale crusade would collapse. So the narrative must be maintained. Keep vaping scary, keep tobacco legal, keep the tax base secure. This is perception management,
not public health. It's all absolute people believe, right, So the people pushing these bands aren't your guardians. They're managers of a revenue stream, every law, every press conference, every quote unquote for the children SoundBite is theater to protect the cash flow and corporate partners the health angle. Well, that's just costume.
Absolutely. Now we do need to give the distinction on this one as well. There are significant numbers of children, and by children, I don't mean high schoolers like elementary and primary school kids that are bringing vapes to school. Yeah, that is real life, one hundred percent. But I should also give a mention of this. So one of the ex wives teaches out of school local to the home, okay.
And if you go to the ISSP teacher, the disciplinarian, I don't know what everybody calls their shit in school suspension correspondent, disciplinarian, the teacher you go to when you fucked up and got rote up and now you got to go sit in a different room for the rest of the day.
That person, Okay, it was always the principal to me.
Okay, Sometimes the principal is the disciplinarian. Sometimes they have a designator teacher for that, but either way goes right. If you go to their desk drawer and open it up, you're gonna find a bunch of contraband items that they took from these kids. You are going to find a drawer full of fucking vapes. That is a true statement. Okay, fair, but we also need to keep it one hundred percent here.
Two years ago, a fourth grader got off of the bus, went straight to the boy's room and lit up a cigarette.
Nobody probably said anything about that one, though, huh oh.
No, No, he got suspended, right, and like, actually, I think that was like his ninth offense of doing some shit, so I think he got expelled. But beside the point, if a parent or guardian is going to be careless about where they leave their substances of whatever that might be, the kids are going to grab it, regardless if it's a cigarette, regardless if it's a beer that you left out and your kid's just gonna see it and nobody's looking at he's gonna just chug the rest of it
and move on. Like And I'm not saying that every kid is up to no good. I'm saying that, depending on the home, in the environment, or whatever, vapes are not more readily accessible than cigarettes. They are easier to hide. And I will give you that, but again, the flavorings are not targeted towards children, because if that was the case, we're saying that candy is specifically only targeted for kids.
Yeah, the same way the cereal companies are using it.
Oh I forgot only children eat cereal?
Yeah, yeah, trade they're the only ones, Jacob.
Right, exactly, kids are the only ones eating sugary cereals. I forgot when you hit twenty five, all of a sudden you just love Brand Flakes more than fucking Reese's Puffs. I forgot that that's how that works.
Give me those cocoa pebbles bro all day.
Exactly right. That it out loud, That makes no sense. Now, Yes, I agree that these are a lot easier to hide, and a kid can swipe this a lot easier and get away with it than swiping a cigarette and coming in smelling like an ash tray. Like Okay, I can at least understand their argument here, but it is not the governments and to protect your children by any means.
We're talking about the same government that up until very recently, in elementary school libraries had books explaining to children how to have gay butt.
Sex with each other and blow job shit.
Like the same government entities are all of a sudden really worried about your children's health.
No, they're not, not at all, not at all. So once you see the vaporing game, you start seeing the pattern. Everywhere. They restrict what threatens corporate profits, They monopolize it, they tax it, and then they sell it back to you as a quote unquote approved option. Whether it's food, medicine, energy, or information. It's the same blueprint. If you remember, whenever people were doing their own research that God said that, you got told that it's unsafe to do your own research.
You shouldn't do that, you should rely on the experts to what they say. Meanwhile, you go back and you check the experts, the quote unquote experts that told you to wear a mask, that told you to stand six feet up part to stay inside, to not go to work. That only what were the people called that were allowed to go and drive.
Uh shuh. Not necessary workers. It was essential that's what essential employees.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I was an essential worker, so I was.
I really loved it.
I felt really important. But that being said, it's like, yeah, they they they don't really care about your health. And even the clinical experts are none other than people that are just backed by big money in some form or fashion. You know, you remember, I mean back in what was it the seventies, that our sixties or seventies. That's why like mad men became a thing. Back in the sixties
or seventies. They did every single scientific experiment to prove to to prove that, you know, smoking was okay for pregnant women.
Yeah, well, we were doctors that were prescribing it to pregnant women at one point in time.
So it's always been money. It's it hasn't changed. It's it's it's just changed form. That's really what we're looking at. And then oh, dude, there's one episode I remember.
It was so all the results came back and they knew beyond any shadow of any doubt that cigarettes were bad for you, and they were trying to find a way for the ad agency to spin it in a semi positive light. One guy was like, well, humans inherently have suicidal tendencies. Why don't we just lean into that, you know, if you're gonna die, why not die with us? And then uh, Don Draper's character was like, no, that's fucking stupid, Like, no, that that's not gonna get sales whatsoever.
So tell me the process of how to make a cigarette. They're like, you grow the tobacco, you let it dry, you cut it, you toast it. You do this. He's like, wait, wait, wait, that's it. It's toasted. That's gonna be the thing on your cigarette to say that you're better than your competitor. And the guys are like, no, every cigarette company toasts their tobacco. You have to. He's like, no, they don't.
The public does not know that. Therefore no one else does that but you, and that's what we're gonna run with. It was like, bye, I forget the name brand, buy so and so cigarettes. It's toasted, and like that was the thing. And then they leaned into its toasty flavor and all these things and like, yeah, it's bad for you, but like bro, it tastes so good though, And that was how they ran it, even after they knew that it was going to kill you.
Yeah, they don't care about actually making something safer. They just want you to perceive that something is safer. And a great example of this would be deodorant. A lot of people are a lot of those big companies are saying without aluminum. Now you know, there's no no more harmful aluminum that's going in here. Meanwhile, you go and look at the actual ingredients. It's actually the newer ingredients are worse for you than the aluminum was.
Yeah, like and that's not like us saying, oh, you know them vapes are worse for you than cigarettes. No, no, no, you can do the research on this. There's peer reviewed studies on the chemical compounds inside of those deodorant sticks
that are aluminum free, and they are not good. The only ones that I can say that are actually natural and not necessarily good for you, but they don't have these harmful chemicals are like Doctor Squatch and like some of these more all natural brands, but they fucking suck. They don't work.
I know, I know. And the same thing goes for even the toothpaste companies. You know a lot are going fluoride free, right, and then look into certain chemicals, not all of them. There are some of them that are actually still like, really good for you. I use Gurunanda, which is fluoride free, fluoride free, which seems to be a pretty safe one. But companies that I used to think that were holistic and they really cared about your health, like such as Bird's Bees.
Bro.
You look at fucking Bird's Bees toothpaste. Holy shit, is that stuff that?
Dude?
That's way, that's that's worse for you than Colgate bro.
Dude, toothpaste is one of those things where it really is easy to make your own toothpaste. I baking soda and peppermint oil is like the one two punch of a decent toothpaste. You don't need all the fucking chemical compounds of shit that you can't pronounce.
You really don't, not not at all. So, So anyway, this is this is an article that I pulled up what is the name vaping three sixty dot com. So in Australia, black market vape sales outpaced legal productions seventeen hundred to one. Whoa, So you want to talk about tobacco taking a big hit, how about seventeen hundred to one hit.
Yeah, yeah, that's a drastic tickup.
So Australia's legal vape market has been destroyed by the government mandate that forced sales into pharmacies and replaced by an illicit market at least partially controlled by organized crime. Now the sale of the failure has become clearer after government documents obtained by a newspaper under the Australia Australian Freedom of Information Act, OH they have their own for you show that legal sales account for only about one
of every seventeen hundred transactions, so it says. The Daily Telegraph obtained pharmacy sales records recently from the Therapeutic Goods Administration, the country's drug regulator. The paper reported this week that pharmacists reported fewer than six thousand supply notifications per month from October twenty twenty four to April twenty twenty five. According to the newspaper, The TGA, the Therapeutic Goods Administration admits that over ten million vapes are sold each month
on the illicit market. Illegal products, mostly typical Chinese disposable vapes, are sold in ordinary retail stores, including vape including smoke shops and convenience stores. Legal products and pharmacies are available in tobacco, mental and mint flavors only, and must be sold in plane packaging. Australia adopted the scheme last year after a bill that would have banned all sales without
a doctor's prescription. Fell through. That's something that they were trying to get, Like you had to get a prescription to get a vape.
Yeah, yeah, I remember this shit.
The compromised legislation, passed in June twenty twenty four, and in effect since October, allows consumers to purchase vapes without a prescription, but only from licensed pharmacies. However, pharmacies were not consulted before the legislation was pushed through, and most
are clearly not interested in being vape retailers. The Daily Telegraph says that no more than seven hundred of Australia's fifty nine hundred pharmacies are selling non prescription vaping products, and even that number may be high because of glitches in the TGA's tracking system. On average, each legal seller is reporting only one sale every two to three days, while over three hundred thousand vapes are sold on the black market daily.
Can you imagine having to go to your local pharmacy to pick up a vape, dude, to the same context of could you imagine having to go to your local pharmacy to buy a pack of smokes?
Oh, I mean Walgreen sells cigarettes?
No, but yeah they do, But I mean so does every gas station, right, Walmart sells these And I mean just like your local what we might call a drug store, which is these days called a convenience store. I mean you actually have to get a doctor's prescription to go to your local pharmacy and buy a pack of smokes. That out loud is fucking retarded.
Yeah, well, it's just another way. It's like making people get a fucking twig card to enter the plants. It's like they're just that's a background check. Yeah, but I mean, I don't know.
Some of these plants make chemicals and shit that you really need to make sure of this person's of terroristic nature or not.
All right. A better example would be an inspection sticker.
Oh yeah, fuck that that's extortion. I don't participate in that program.
That's yeah, that's my point there. So uh yeah, Australia is going through their own shit with it. Let's move to the good old free America. What we want to think anyway is free. All right. So in Massachusetts, flavored tobacco flavored tobacco band creates robust black market. A new report highlights why prohibition does not work. This is an article created by Convenience Dot March eleventh, twenty four.
So flavored tobacco.
Flavored tobacco band creates a robust black market.
Yeah, so flavored cigarette? I mean, yeah, you got like closed cigarettes and menthols are they they're talking about? Really like no more menthols are being sold.
I think that this is all right. So whenever we talk about a tobacco ban in the United States that is vapes included, ah, okay, you put it under that same thing.
And most cigarette companies aren't worried about it because most of their cigarettes are not flavored, so they're not I got you now.
Yeah. So, bootleg cigarette smuggling is an ongoing drain on law enforcements as elicit tobacco seizures surge and state revenue state tax revenue from tobacco sales continue to plummet, According to a new report by the Massachusetts Elicit Tobacco Task Force, the New England Convenience Store and Energy Marketers Association n e c s E M A shit, that's a long
one scam, it says. Despite enforcement efforts and the hard work done by the Illegal Tobacco Task Force, smuggling of untaxed tobacco products remains a significant challenge, said the executive director of the New England Convenience Store and Energy Marketers Association. He goes, smugglers are developing more sophisticated operations to counter the task forces targeted investigations. It's clear that the Commonwealth
is struggling with enforcement, according to the NECSEEMA. The report illustrates how the state's ban on flavor tobacco has not only failed to curb the use of these products, but has created a robust market for illicit, untaxed products and cross border smuggling. The ban has cost the state nearly one hundred and fifty million dollars in lost tax revenue from legal sales since it went into effect in twenty twenty. Moving flavor tobacco products out of the heavily regulated retail
sales environment has been counterproductive and ineffective, he said. While criminal criminals rake in cash and flood the streets with contraband to fund illegal enterprises, expayers have lost, public health is threatened, and retailers who continue to demonstrate high rates of compliance are left to suffer as they follow the law all out all that money.
The government's losing their extortion feel on things that aren't hurting anybody, all those poor things, So it's killing me. They keep calling you flavored tobacco products when this has no tobacco in it, that that's killing me here.
Yeah, well that's that's the legal policy name that it falls under. So the report also notes that new challenges associated with the storage and destruction of electronic nicotine delivery system or ends.
Uh.
So it reports a challenge with the storage and destruction of them. So how do you dispose of them? There's not really a good way to do, so, it says Field Personnel study routinely encountering or seizing untaxed menthol cigarettes originally purchased in other states and flavored e nds or vapes products and cigars purchased from unlicensed distributors operating both within and outside the Commonwealth. Also a decrease of twenty five point two million dollars in cigarette excise tax collections
from twenty twenty three. So yeah, they're they're getting fucking uh, they're not collecting their their their passing go.
Kind of right here.
Uh. And also an overall decline in tobacco product revenues for the fourth consecutive fiscal.
Year, the fourth consecutive year. Yep.
The tobacco product revenues are going down four straight years and that's going to continue.
Oh absolutely.
So if you wonder why vapes are being restricted, that's a big one right there.
As we have always said, follow the money.
Follow the money. So the report acknowledge is the need for continued data collection, compliance resources, and enforcement coordination to uphold state policy. This suggests ongoing challenge is with or in effectively coordinating effort, effectively coordinating enforcement efforts, and addressing
emerging emerging issues within the tobacco industry. It's clear that criminals, including organized crime syndicates, are profiting from bootleg cigarettes and vapes and have made contraband tobacco products a lucrative part of their racketeering endeavors. You mean that, Okay, this is this is really what fucking gets me. You want to talk about people who are selling it on the streets are the criminals. Meanwhile, it's no longer criminalized if you
can make money off of it. Tell me how that works. It's the damn products that are even you, not even the same products, way more harmful chemicals that are going into what you are selling as legal and you want to call everybody else the criminal.
It's the same reason why you can't have prostitution legal because they haven't found a way to tax pussy.
Dude can't do it.
That's that's just the way it goes. It's if they could find a way to tax it, then like, yeah, they're down with it one hundred percent. But now we're in that weird gray area because vapes are taxable. It's very easy to sell them in stores and get a tax from it, right, But now you're stepping on the toes of the organization that's already got the monopoly, and that's bad that's bad news because that organization's got, like we said earlier, very deep ties to the lawmakers. So some's got to give.
Well, And that's the thing is that yes, vapes are being taxed, but they're being taxed like everything else. They're not being taxed like cigarettes. Cigarettes. They slap like one hundred percent tax revenue or one hundred percent tax thing on top of it, which main reason why the government and the states are having an issue with vaping products because they make almost they make more than one hundred percent profit. Bro, Yeah, more than one hundred percent. That
is being lost. Now, whenever you're selling a product, like, what's the state tax? I don't think it's a state tax. I think it varies from parish to parish in Louisiana, but I want to say an ascension parish it's like ten percent, nine percent something like that.
On what on tobacco products?
No, just in general, on on things that you buy at the store. I think it's like nine half or something like that.
It's like a nine point five percent tax. But that's a state tax on a parish tax. Now, there are certain areas that have an additional tax on top of that. That's what's then.
Yeah, So what I'm saying is is that the vapes are only they're getting that tax, but they're not getting the additional one hundred percent or whatever that they're getting from the cigarettes. Yeah, so that's their issue. They just haven't found a way to put a tobacco tax on it because there's no fucking tobacco in.
It, right, And that's the thing. There's a nicotine. If they want to put a nicotine tax on it, then that's a different conversation.
They can't do that because the way that they've built up this tobacco tax has been an ongoing thing for what one hundred years.
No, they're going to put a nicotine tax on then tomatoes just doubled in price as well as much as well as most of your fucking produce section. That's that's the bit of it.
Yeah. So this is the the article that I was talking about the Royal College of Physicians over in the UK, I believe. Yeah, it says nicotine without smoke Tobacco Harm Reduction. This was written in twenty nineteen, says this report provides an update on the use of harm reduction in tobacco smoking in relation to all non tobacco nicotine products, but particularly e cigarettes. Think about how they just wrote that out. Non tobacco nicotine products could be dip e cigarettes non tobacco.
Oh yeah, that dip is tobacco. You're right, So like zen pouches that's nicked, that's non tobacco nicotine products.
Yes, yes, me. And this is the challenge that the United States is facing amongst other countries. Whenever they're trying to label it as a tobacco product, whenever it is clearly a non tobacco nicotine product, right, Okay, So that's why they're they're just they would just rather ban it rather than implement a new system.
Right, They're just going to ban the flavorings on tobacco products, even though yeah, you can go to court and fight it and say, well, this vape has no tobacco in it, so we are exempt from everything that you just said. The problem is that judge answers to the letter of the law, and the letter of the law is written by people who are being bought by big tobacco. So that's just kind of how the cookie crumbles, right, Right.
So it says that it shows that for all the potential risks involved, harm reduction has a huge potential to prevent death and disability from tobacco use and to hasten our progress to a tobacco free society. So this was an article and a study that they did to try and see if if vaping is actually, i don't want to say a healthy alternative, but a healthy er alternative
to cigarettes. So fall following reported deaths and disease in the United States linked to vaping see the RCPs position statement on different Okay, we're not going to read that part. So there are key recommendations that it says it says smoking is the biggest avoidable cause of death and disability and social inequality and health in the in the United Kingdom,
So the biggest avoidable cause of death and disability. So then it says provision of the nicotine that smokers are addicted to without the harmful components of tobacco, of tobacco smoke can prevent most of the harm from smoking. So that's what they found in one of their things. So Nicotine replacement the therapy or NRT is the most effective in helping people to stop smoking when used together with health professional input and support, but much less so when used on its own.
So if you're that could be patches, right, Nicotine replacement therapy so instead of smoking or vaping or dip. Yeah, so you're telling me nicotine gum and patches are seen as very effective ways along with some outside professional help. Yeah, I would agree with that statement.
E cigarettes are marketed as consumer products and are proving much more popular than NRT as a substitute and competitor for tobacco cigarettes. So they give you that fucking nicotine hit those patches suck, dude, the nicotine gum. I'm sorry it's not enough.
I cannot fucking pull out a filling trying to chew that bitch for a second, then tucking it back in your lip. Then those patches. I remember trying to quit while I was in the Marine Corps. Dude, I had like ten of them bitches on my arm. At one point I was rubbing them to try to like cause I keep seeing people you gotta rub it and like that activates it or some shit fucking looks like a meth hit scratching in my arm all day. It did nothing. It did fucking nothing.
Not at all. It says E cigarettes are not currently made to medicine standards and are probably more hazardous than NRT, so that's what they found. Probably more hazardous. Still, obviously they're going to be right because they're not regulated. Some of them are, but not regulated by the World Health Organization or the National Institute of Health and stuff like that, right.
It says, however, the hazard to health arising from long term vapor inhalation from the e cigarettes available today is unlikely to exceed five percent of the harm from smoking tobacco.
Wow, this is.
The receipts, baby, This is the fucking receipts for anybody that has ever said, well, I might much rather you smoke a cigarette because we at least know the outcome cancer.
Hey, like, listen.
To what's coming out of your mouth.
I'd rather use smoke heroin because at least we know the outcome. That kratim shit, You just don't know what it's gonna I'm sorry.
What So it's so ignorant and so dumb to say anything like that. Do a little bit of the research on your own. Uh, that's dangerous, don't do that. Listen to the export. Well, here's the fucking experts right here. Yeah, absolutely, so unlikely to exceed percent of the harm from smoking tobacco, so way healthier or were we way not as harmful?
Yeah, it's again, there's not there's not a no risk answer as far as vapes are concerned. But the ninety five to five comparison, bro that is that's a drastic measure. Once again, let me ask you something. If a glass was ninety five percent full, Jonathan, would you call that a full glass or a partially empty glass?
I would venture to say that that thing is full, sir.
Now, let's flip that. If you had a glass that was five percent full, would you say that that glass is full or would you say it's probably it's more on the empty side as damn near empty. Okay. See, you see it's different when you put it to a different comparison. People are like, well there's still that five percent. Okay, your gas tank in your car's got five percent in it right now, tell me if you think your tank is full or not.
Really just saying, technological developments and improve production standards could reduce the long term hazard of e cigarettes. So instead of trying to ban them and push them to the black market, how about we try and I don't know, make them a little bit safer. Let's actually try to implement them. Fucking forget your big tobacco tax that you
are receiving on the back end every single year. And look, I don't understand why you need to tax something in order to make it healthier, right in fucking sense?
Oh my god. And it's all because of flavorings, or at least that's how they have to list it as because it's flavored tobacco and all of this. It's not even about the fact that it's a vapable with nicotine substitute. It's the fact that there's a flavor associated with it.
It says there are concerns that e cigarettes will increase tobacco smoking by renormalizing the act of smoking, acting as a gateway to smoking and young people, and being used for temporary, not permanent abstincens from smoking.
I'm gonna disagree with that one. I'm sorry, you're not gonna go from smoking blue raspberry or strawberry banana to ooh, let me get the taste of licking an ash tray back. That is such a better alternative.
Like I said, I smoked for I want to say, eleven, twelve, thirteen years something like that, right, and and and I was totally used to it, used to the smell, used to the taste, you know, used to going outside and having to do it and everything. Now I've been vaping for quite a while now, like I don't even know how many years, probably six years ish, I would say, been vaping for that long. I have you tried to go back and smoke a cigarette, bro, I have.
It's fucking gross?
Jad is that disgusting?
And that? Dude? Okay, here's it's much.
It's not It doesn't fulfill anything, No, I.
Mean, at least uh satisfied the nicotine craving. I will give it that. But here's the deal, dude, whenever they had uh even the like views and in all of that, it's tobacco flavored vape, Bro, that's also not a positive taste. And I mean I smoke cigars. I enjoy the taste of good tobacco. That wasn't it. And it doesn't taste anything like a cigarette either, And you can appreciate smoking something natural.
So yes, that's the thing about cigars is that it's not only the flavor. It's more so that like, oh, I'm smoking nature right now, bro.
Absolutely absolutely, But dude, the whole conversation of yeah, well, if you people that are vaping views are more likely to swap to Marlboro Reds because they got for the bold flavor of the of the vape. And then they just want to say, you know what, fuck it, I'm gonna just buy a pack of cigarettes today or whatever. Again, that's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about the sour apples and the white gummy bears and all
these things. You're not going from that to picking up a pack of Lucky Strikes.
I'm sorry, bro, let me tell you it was like two or three weeks ago. I didn't have a vape. Been the place that I went to, we're out of them or something like that. And so I went to this gas station and I was like, you know what, they don't have any of the vapes that I like. I'm just gonna try a jewel. It's been a while since I had a jewel, right, Yeah, two different flavors, just the natural tobacco and like mint, and so I was like, all right, well, at least let me get
some kind of flavor. I got the mint one, right, dude. I mean, if you're smoking that, you may as well go back to smoking cigarettes. Bro on some real shit.
Which is the point that they just said, Right, that's they think that that's how it's gonna be. But again, if you put shit flavoring into something, yeah, you're gonna force the market back into that place. But that's not where we're trying to go with it. Man. If they would come out with a flavorless vape, just throwing it out hypothetically speaking, if this was fuck whatever color it is, if you could give me a flavorless vapable nicotine product,
I'm fucking down. I'm good that alleviates the entire flavoring converse. It alleviates the tobacco. Big Tobacco is gonna just have to find some other way to fight that fight. But it couldn't be because the flavorings. It's not going to be marketed to children's You see what I'm saying. I get it.
Yeah, I don't know.
I fuck. We might even try to start a business like that. That would be dope. The cult of conspiracy, flavorless vapable nicotine, I like.
It, and they have those. So it made me think as I tried that views or not the views the Jewel Right made me think like, oh wow, I wonder if this is owned by Big Tobacco and then what it is today that it is so of course they're gonna make the shitty ones make you want to go back to smoking actual cigarettes.
It's crazy how they've worked that out in their own heads.
Yeah, so it says. However, the available evidence to date indicates that these cigarettes are being used almost exclusively as safer alternatives to smoke tobacco by confirmed smokers who are trying to reduce harm to themselves or others from smoking, or to quit smoking completely. So it said you have tiny odds that you know, once you start vaping that you're gonna be uh, you're gonna have a good chance
of going back to cigarettes. Those are tiny odds. However, you know, it doesn't say a percentage here, but it does say that if you're if you're vaping on a vape, are you smoking on a vape, you are so unlikely to go back to smoking cigarettes, and so that shouldn't
even be really talked about, right absolutely. It says there is a need for regulation to reduce direct and indirect adverse effects of e cigarette use, but this regulation should not be allowed significantly to inhibit the development and use of harm reduction products by smokers. Mm hm, So get your jewels out of here, Get the fuck out of here.
With that, We don't want them. No one wants them anymore. At one point they did when they were flavored decently. Nobody fucks at that shit anymore.
It says, However, in the interests of public health, it is important to promote the use of e cigarettes. Important to promote the use of e cigarettes and RT and other non tobacco nicotine products as widely as possible as a substitute for smoking in the UK. I agree right there, right, that's all you need. Like the doctors, the experts have come out and said, not only should people be allowed to vape, it should be promoted in the interest of
public health. If we really care about our citizens, we really care about our people, we should be promoting vaping as opposed to taking them off the shelves.
But of course we can't do that, at least not in this country.
Royal College of Physicians fucking shout out. Indeed, what a study. Nextly we have here This is another article. This is by www dot gov dot UK. So okay, right there, they're going to talk about pretty similar things. Here says e cigarettes are around ninety five percent less harmful than tobacco estimates Landmark review. So expert independent review concludes that e cigarettes have potential to help smokers quit.
Bro Look at the picture of those vapes, those of those old school ones I was talking about. Oh yeah, little glass tanks on him and you screw them on top of the battery. I don't know what the fuck that lighter looking thing is. That's a wild one. But yeah, this was like the early stages of the vaping craze, at least in America. What year was this article written.
Uh, twenty fifteen.
Okay, around the time where that was your standard vape, you'd be going to a vape shop to buy fuck yeah.
Right right so. An expert independent evidence review published by published today by Public Health England concludes that e cigarettes are significantly less harmful to health than tobacco and have the potential to help smokers quit smoking. The key findings of the review include It says the current best estimate is that e cigarettes are around ninety five percent less harmful than smoking. Nearly half of the population, which is
forty four point eight percent. I believe that's of the UK don't realize that e cigarettes are much less harmful than smoking. So with the propaganda, well with you know, by the AD Council and Big Tobacco and all that other shit. Now, all the propaganda that is being pushed, people are at least half of the people forty four percent or forty four damn near forty five percent of
people are buying into that, which makes sense propaganda. I would say it works at least to that standard, and forty five percent of people are buying that cigarettes are healthier than vapes.
In the UK and again twenty fifteen, that was the big stigma, right, that was all these ad campaigns are going out to talk about the dangers of vaping because there's so much you know, you don't even know what chemicals are in there. There's all kinds of stuff in there you don't even know about. And it's like, again, even back in twenty fifteen, I was able to do a very quick Google search and answer that question.
So, I mean, whatever, bro check this out this next one. So, the the big reason for banning vapes, as we have read, is because they are trying to limit the use for children. Right. They don't want kids vaping in schools, right, you gotta save the children. Read this one rate here it says there is no evidence so far that e cigarettes are acting as a route into smoking for children or non smokers, no evidence to support that.
I believe that one hundred percent. Why would somebody taste something that tastes like candy and then one day be like, man, that ass tray be looking real tasty. Right about now, No kid going into teenage years, going into young twenty somethings are going to make that mental jump.
I'm sorry, just not gonna happen, and so it says. The review, commissioned by PHE and led by Professor Ann McNeil, which is of the King's College, London and Professor Peter Hagick of Queen Mary University of London, suggests that sarets may be contributing to falling smoking rates among adults and young people. Following the review, pH has published a paper on the implications of the evidence for policy and practice.
The Comprehensive Comprehensive Review of the evidence finds that almost all of the two point six million adults using e cigarettes in Great Britain are current or ex smokers, most of whom are using the devices to help them quit smoking or to prevent them from going back to cigarettes. It also provides reassurance that very few adults and young people have never smoked are becoming regular e cigarette users,
less than one percent in each group. So to say that vaping is roping more people in than cigarettes ever did is conclusively incorrect.
That's like saying, all right, so, how many kids are on some sort of amphetamines right now, prescribed by their doctor for add or ADHD or something like that. Many how many of them grow up to be just strung out on crystal math.
I mean there's a percentage, but it's very minute. I would say, I would say maybe one percent.
And it's not because they got hooked on adderall as a kid and they had to get their fix when they got older. That that's simply just not how that works.
I've never once taken an adderall and thought, you know, it would be better some meth.
Exactly, Like, what kind of mental hoops do you got to jump through to say that, oh, yeah, you're getting these kids on adderall and riddling and concerto and all that. It's just a fucking streamline to be in a drug at it. It's not at all actually, but okay.
Says However, the review raises concerns that increasing numbers of people think e cigarettes are equally or more harmful than smoking. So twenty two percent and twenty fifteen, up from eight point one percent in twenty thirteen. So the Ash Smoke Free GB surveyor or they don't know twenty two percent
in twenty fifteen that it's actually less harmful. So that's the problem that they're trying to suggest here, is that people are still being brought in by into the propaganda that's smoking, or that vaping is equally or more harmful than smoking cigarettes. This survey concludes that at least twenty two percent of people thought that in twenty fifteen, and that number obviously going to be raising. We just read earlier that what was at forty five percent now believe
that propaganda's absolutely doing its job. Despite this trend, all current evidence finds that e cigarettes carry a fraction of the risk of smoking. All current evidence finds that e cigarettes carry a fraction of the risk of smoking. Emerging evidence suggests some of the highest successful quit rates are now seen amongst smokers who use an e cigarette and also receive additional support from their local stop smoking services.
So if you're trying to quit smoking, you have a better chance at quitting smoking if you switch to vaping. That's what this is suggesting. Yeah, so yeah, it says Professor Kevin Fenton, director of Health and well Being at Public Health England, said smoking remains England's number one killer and the best thing a smoker can do is quit
completely now and forever. These sprits are not completely risk free, but when compared to smoking, evidence shows that they carry just a fraction of the harm The problem is people increasingly think that they are at least as harmful, and this may be keeping millions of smokers from quitting called England coming through with the clutch information bro.
Absolutely, And that's the other thing too. They say a fraction of the harm that's kind of misleading in a certain regard, right, because like saying it's eighty percent, or to say it's even like twenty percent less harmful means you're still getting eighty percent of the bad. Bro five percent at most is at most in best or in this case worst case scenarios, it is like you're getting ninety five percent less harm full shit into your body
from doing this. I feel like there was a better way they could aworded that.
I'm just saying, yeah, I mean a fraction whatever, I'll take it. It's it's it's worth, it's better than smoking. I'll take that.
That's what I need.
Uh, Because I'm tired of people saying that, you know, you may as well just go back to smoking cigarettes. I'm like, my god, stop stop with that. Uh. To say that in oh wait, yeah, to say that in Portuguese patacail that means stop it. That means stop that. So it says e cigarettes could be a game changer in public health, in particular by reducing the enormous health
inequalities caused by smoking. Professor Peter Hajek I think or Hayak maybe of the Queen Mary University, London and independent author of the review said in his quotes, he said, my reading of the evidence is that smokers who switched to vapor remove almost all the risks smoking poses to their health.
Removes almost all.
Of the risk. Smokers differ in their needs, and I would advise them not to give up on the cigarettes if they do not like the first one that they try. So he's saying, if you don't like it at first, keep with it because it's by all means it is way safer than smoking cigarettes. A professor, So, I.
Knew some old cats I used to work with that they, you know, chain smokers, had been for forever, and they said that they didn't like the babes. They tried it, but it hurt their throat too much and they were too strong and all these things. They just wanted to stick to their Marlboro lights and they were satisfied with it.
Bro you could you could there's some like this one you could turn down the amount of airflow you get, you can turn down the strength level or how much voltage you're sending to the coil, and it's a lighter hit. So like again I had to agree with the doctor here. You maybe you don't need something that feels that you're taking a drag off a full own cigar every single time. Maybe once them is a little lighter because you're try
trying to step down your nicotine intake. Right, I thought that was the point.
Well, he even takes it a step farther and says it may take some some experimentation with different products and e liquids to find the right one. So great, try it, keep trying it, keep finding it, so trying until you find the one that you like.
So with these old vapes, like twenty fifteen when this article was written and we saw the picture of those vapes of the little glass tanks and the battery and all that. So this is before salt nik was a thing. Yeah, you remember these days where it was just regular vape juice yep, and you had to buy however many milligrams of nicotine and they had the threes, the fives, the
twelves and whatever. Else. So to put it to perspective, whenever I swapped from cigarettes to vaping, I had to get thirty milligram juice, which was like it was some of the hardest you could find, honestly, but I needed that hit, like I wanted to feel it in my chest because I was trying to quit smoking. Then I stepped down to twelve. Then I got down over time to three. It was. It was. It was a step down process as it took months, but like that was the point.
Yeah, And the the original vape juice that they were using, I believe that they they separate them by one's sugar and one salt. That's the way I've always heard it. But the sugar ones, which were the initial ones, it just it wasn't doing the job for me. Whenever they came out with the the nicotine salt, they said, this is that this is actually the stuff that you know. It's the same kind of nicotine that's in cigarettes, and so it's a lot easier to make that transition into
this more familiar nicotine style that you're used to. And so whenever that came out, I made the full switch over.
It hit hard enough, dude, It got the itch for.
Sure it did. It did, so let's see. Professor Linda bald bowled anyway of Cancer Research is a UK expert in cancer prevention. An expert in cancer prevention in the UK said, fears that e cigarettes have made smoking seem normal again, or even led to people taking up tobacco smoking are not so far being realized based on the evidence assessed by this important independent review. In fact, the overall evidence points to e cigarettes actually helping people to
give up smoking. Tobacco free stop smoking services remain the most effective way for people to quit, but we recognize the potential benefits for e cigarettes in helping large numbers of people move away from tobacco. Cancer Research UK is funding more research to deal with the unanswered questions around these products, including the longer term impact so cancer experts said, I agree.
Yeah.
Another one which would be Lisa Serdy's, which is the acting director at Fresh Smoke Free Northeast, the first region where all local stop smoking services are actively promoted as e cigarette friendly. She said, despite making great strides to reduce smoking, tobacco is still our biggest killer. Our region has always kept an open mind towards using electronic cigs. As we can see the massive potential health benefits from switching all of our local national hints National Health. Wait, NHS,
that's not National Health. I was thinking of something else. So all of our local NHS stop smoking services now proactively welcome anyone who wants to use these devices at their attempt to quit and increase their chances of success. I agree, it's undeniable. It really is so, and we can go on and on with a lot of these, but just to show you that, like, it's it's not that crazy. So before, right, before we follow the money, I want to get to let me see what else
I got here? All right, So, oh, this is an interesting article right here. This is actually by pub MED, the National Institute of Health Government, and it's this is a government article.
Bro okay, okay.
And it says big Tobacco's dirty tricks seven key tactics of the tobacco industry. The fucking government is coming after their own money. How hilarious is that?
So it says, sorry, I was trying to find something I had myself muted, but yeah, one hundred percent, this is fucking ridiculous.
So it says the tobacco industry has been influencing public opinion and disrupting health policy through sophisticated and deceptive methods. For decades. As evidence has mounted supporting the undisputed deadly effects of tobacco products, corporations have found ways to remain profitable. They have succeeded in attracting enough new smokers to support industry growth, despite the fact that over eight million tobacco related deaths occur annually.
Eight million of eight million.
The sphere of influence of multi billion dollar tobacco companies extends to the fields of scientific research, politics, law, sport, education, and the media. Members of the Tobacco Control Working Group of the World Federation of Public Health Associations reviewed the literature and conducted research into key tactics used by the
tobacco industry, producing written reports on seven of these. Number one tobacco advertising, promotion and sponsorship, number two, front groups, number three, manipulating the media, number four, funding scientific research, number five, political lobbying, number six, electric electronic alternatives as
harm reduction, and number seven legal challenges. So each tactic, including examples of their occurrence and recommendations on how to recognize and counteract them, are comprehensively explored in the casebook Big Tobacco's Dirty Tricks, which can be accessed at the link approved or the link provided. This article summarizes the seven tactics discussed in the casebook. So we know of all their tactics already, and that was just to name a few of them.
It's mind blowing.
So obviously through tobacco advertising, promotion, and sponsorship, that's called propaganda, front groups. I mean, all of it's really propaganda if you think about it. So you have front groups manipulating the media, funding scientific grip research, political lobbying, electronic alternatives as harm reduction. This is an interesting one right here.
Electronic alternatives as harm reduction. This is uh, this would be the tobacco companies coming out and saying that you should be smoking jewel or views or something like that as a harm reduction. Meanwhile, it's actually not true that that's just their way to get you to come back to smoking cigarettes.
Yep.
So just to throw that out there a little bit. There are this is Oh, this is an interesting one. So this is by j Bartlett dot org. It says bans and this is a I believe he's a lawyer, Center for Public Policy Okay, bans and high taxes fuel black markets for tobacco and bait products. So all right, this was an article written it was whenever Biden was
still in office. But it says as the Biden administration gets closer to finalizing its proposed rule banning sale of mental cigarettes and flavored cigars nationwide, a well known aphorism comes to mind. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. The administration's logic behind the federal ban is that doing so will reduce smoking and correspondingly improve public health.
This is the same logic used to justify increasing tobacco taxes or banning tobacco and vaping products at the state level. When a state bans flavored tobacco or increases taxes on cigarettes, legal cigarette sales in the state tend to fall as a result, But what about illegal and out of state sales. So high cigarette taxes and bands on flavor tobacco products create black and gray markets, through which smugglers become the new supplier of these products. So the MACINAC Center for
Public Policy tracks cigarette smuggling in the United States. So this is in twenty twenty one. So it says in twenty twenty one, a report showed how cigarette smuggling increases as tax rates on tobacco products increase. So essentially to say that every single time that the governments of the states raise taxes on tobacco products that's vaping included, every single time that they raise their taxes, you are only pushing people to get them via black market. That's what
you're doing. And this is this is the literal literature that is proving that.
Man, it's almost like we've got that figured out from other things that have been banned in price height for years. Like you know, if the price of alcohol went astronomical, I bet more people would start homebrewing their own liquor and wine and beer like that's been done before.
All right, yeah, well and check this out because I don't know if people know to the extent that the tax rates are with tobacco, well, cigarettes mainly. Yeah, So New York, for example, which taxes cigarettes at four dollars and thirty five cents a pack. That is just the tax that no, that's not the state tax. That is the tobacco tax on top of the state tax, on top of the cigarettes that you're buying.
So you're basically buying for the pack of cigarettes for the price of double the price.
Yet like wow, yeah, unreal. It says that it saw the highest rate of inbound smuggling. So since they it, since they made the tax price up to four dollars and thirty five cents per pack, the smuggling increased almost fifty five percent.
I believe it.
I do the total number of smuggled packs. Listen to this. The total number of smuggled packs, more than two hundred and fifty four million, was second in the country, behind California's more than four hundred and sixty five million smuggled packs. California also had the second highest inbound smuggling rate, which was forty four point h two percent, and a tax rate of two dollars and eighty seven cents per pack.
So of two of the two of the states that are implementing the highest cigarette tax are are are seeing that there is two hundred and fifty four million and four hundred and sixty five million black market cigarettes that are being bought and sold packs not cigarettes, right, packs of cigarettes?
Yeah? Yeah, yeah, shit. At this point we might say cartons.
I don't know, well, yeah, because and you think about it, I mean, I don't know. I know that over in Arizona. I know that you can go to the reservation. Cigarettes are way cheaper, oh for sure, right, I mean, hey, cheaper. And I don't know what the what the tax rate is over there, but I imagine that it doesn't apply since their cigarettes are way cheaper over there.
Bro.
That's why I used to go to the PX to buy my cigarettes because it was tax free there when I was in the military. You go to the exchange and you're buying it like I do. At one point, I was buying a carton of Marlborough Reds for like fifty five bucks. Yeah, these days that would get you five packs.
Oh dude, you go to uh like for example, and I don't smoke anymore, but I thought about it, not that I thought about it, but like I thought about, like, holy shit, this would be a genius thing to do. So I've, uh, I've been on two cruises in my life, and so we usually go down to you know, parts
of Mexico and stuff like that. Right, you go down there and at the ports, literally as soon as you walk off the boat, you go into these port shop centers, right, and they all have Dude, it's nothing but walls of cartons of cigarettes for super cheap, and you bring like, I think you can buy like two or three cartons and bring them back, but you can't bring any more than that. But even still, I think the cartons over there were like forty fifty bucks for Marlborough's, yep. Whereas
now you get a carton. Dude, you know what, you want to know how much a carton of fucking Marlboro's cost in Louisiana.
I haven't looked a hundred ten bucks now? God damn?
Yeah yeah, unreal, bro, Yeah, I mean you're talking about like literally eleven bucks a pack at that point.
And that's the cheapest way to buy them is buy the.
Carton, right, Yeah, good night, I know, I know. So, it says when taxes get high enough to encourage large scale smuggling, tax revenue falls as people stop buying from legal vendors and start buying on the street, as some vendors switch to out of state suppliers and simply don't report or pay taxes on those purchases. As a result of their high taxes, California and New York saw the two largest revenue losses more than one point three billion
and one point one billion, respectively per year. Okay, Like you want to talk about the money that they are losing as a result of this. I mean, it's not even just the vaping shit it is, it's the fucking taxes that are really killing them.
Yeah, and that's what I was saying earlier. Right, the lobbyists have already struck their deal with their political figures. They have to get their cut or the lobbyists will go back on what they said they would do for Big Tobacco. So you gotta pay the piper. So if we can't pay the piper out of our own back pocket, let's make the politicians pass a new tax law to where that's how they'll get their cut.
Well, and what we read earlier, the Big Tobacco essentially made a future's bid with each individual state to where they said, look over the next five years, we're gonna we're gonna make sure that over one hundred million or whatever dollars is going into your pocket. Well, now they
can't necessarily fulfill that. And the reason, if you think about it's actually really fucked up on both ends because you would probably have tobacco companies that are going to the going to the fucking state or whatever and saying, look, we want to keep our cigarette prices the same. We
need our money to keep on coming in. If you want, you can hack up or you can hike up all of the tobacco tax rates as high as you want, as we keep our products, you know, at the same price, or maybe you know, it allows us to go a little bit higher. Right, So everybody's being paid. But whenever you raise them up so high to where the states like New York, whenever you're you're charging damn near four dollars and thirty five cents per pack, I mean that's
a business in and of itself. Just the tax that they are making off of the cigarettes and alone.
It's fucking mind blowing, dude. So it all comes down to the almighty dollar. That's all that it really does. Jesus.
So, with a tax rate of three dollars and fifty one cents per pack, Massachusetts had the fourth highest inbound smuggling rate. See it perfectly correlates higher taxes higher smuggling. It makes sense. It doesn't take a fucking rocket scientist to figure that one out.
Yep.
It said they had the fourth fourth highest smuggling rate at thirty seven point fifty nine percent and the ninth highest number of smuggle packs more than sixty three million, resulting in the sixth largest revenue loss, which was nearly two hundred and twenty four million dollars in twenty twenty one alone. Oh, they're missing out big time. So either they need to reduce the fuck tax grade on all of these cigarette products, or they just need to allow
people to vape. At this point, I mean, you're you're losing an entire economic branch that you're bringing money in.
Dude, And that's the thing. They're not gonna just let it go. There's no way they could do that, not at this point, not as heavily as they've thrown their weight in on this one.
So yeah, there's there's something that is in the works. Now, what are we August? What's the date today?
The thirteen day is August thirteenth, all.
Right, So this was actually an article there was written two days ago, and this says that the USPS or the US Postal Service block shipping of illicit vapes in big boost for big tobacco. So you got the Post Office saying we're gonna be looking out for those vapes. Don't you fucking mail those things?
Well? Shit, that was my next course of action was just go to the website and order something to be delivered to my door.
That's what everybody thought. Everybody was thinking about, Oh, if I can't buy him here, I'll just get the mail to me. Well no, because big Tobacco has said, we know your tactics. You know we weren't born yesterday. We're going to try and figure that all out right now, jesus. So, it says the US Postal Services cracked down on distributor on distributors of unregulated vapes using its services for business shipments.
Letters reviewed by Rutter's show in a blow to a multi billion dollar industry that has dented big tobacco sales. The letters, previously unreported, show that USPS wrote to major New York based distributor Demand Vape, blocking it from using its services after New York City's Law Department, which represents the city's government and officials in legal matters, provided evidence
that its shipments broke laws. Okay, so bootlegging essentially, But it says USPS's the Post Office action stands to benefit tobacco giants, including Altria and British British American Tobacco, which have for years battled against unregulated vapes, mostly from China. Unregulated vapes lack the authorization from the US Food and Drug Administration that is required for them to be legally sold in the United States, the world's largest market for
smoking alternatives. The USPS revoked Demand Vapes mailing exemption last month after it received evidence that the company ship vapes lacking FDA FDA authorization and that and that it violated a local flavor ban. A letter from USPS to the company day to July fifteenth showed, so they're trying to find every single possible loophole that they can to say, well, that's we can't have that right because of policy. And so the policy is not there to save anybody. It's
not there to you know, protect anybody's health. It's there to make sure that the companies that are already following policy don't don't lose and they don't miss out. Yeah, that's the thing. So well, yeah, it says that there are limited exceptions. It says so far the US Food and Drug Administration has authorized only thirty nine E cigarette products. I kind of want to see what those are. What are the oh fucking jewel Okay.
Of course number one would be jewel. I'm sure the next one is.
Going to be a views probably something. Oh doesn't even say all of them. Let's see you do? Yeah, I mean it's mainly yeah, okay, including altrias and joy menthol vate products. Have you ever tried those? Those things fucking suck.
Never do menthols. They fuck up my throat too bad.
So all of the VP products that are sold next to the cigarettes and gas stations, those ones, those are the ones that are essentially like, uh, the soul gotten the companies. Yes, yeah, so that's not a shocker. So well, it says. The limited exceptions include domestic shipments between businesses which need a mailing exception, and their shipments must comply with relevant laws. Some of the other large carriers, including FedEx, refuse to ship vapes. DHL only offers carriage for business
shipments with prior approval. So the USPS provided New York City's Law Department with a list of other vape firms that it has granted mailing exceptions so that it can access whether they should be challenged in line with legal requirements.
Huh, this cold might smell a loophole here, because my business is based out of my home. Could my company buy vapes for for strictly research purposes? Of course? Of course, is that a thing? It might be? Okay, Well, we will discuss this later on, as this.
Could further limit the number of carriers available to the unauthorized vape industry. Other options, such as using smaller carriers or handling freight directly, tend to be more costly. So the FDA registered vape shipments from China in twenty twenty four. In twenty twenty five, it says the impact of tariffs and high caizuars have pushed twenty twenty five shipments well below level seen in a year earlier. So you'll see right here that Yeah, so it started out, It started
out in twenty twenty five. Was the only month that January you mean, yeah, January I met. Twenty January of twenty twenty five was the only month which exceeded the shipments from China from last year. Every other one is significantly lower than last year. So you're seeing the big push to get the Chinese products out of America.
Yeah, I gotta tell you that kind of checks out. It was around March when the vape shop that I go to that was selling vapes like it's a tobacco shop. Let me, let me be clear about this, but they were selling vapes under the table because duh, these are from Yemen. They'll be giving a fuck about American laws, but you're gonna do deport them back home. Oh no. So, like they were selling them under the table March, they
got rated hard, and I'm talking. They had to open every single drawer, even their own personal backpacks that they brought into work that day and they have not carried them since. Now they are carrying these these hookah vapes, right but now, I mean it's still a vapable flavored nicotine product one hundred percent. But I'm just curious who owns hookah it. You know what, I'm gonna google that because this got the blessing somehow, but this did not.
It's the same product. They're both blue raspberry flavor, for fuck's sake. Yeah, but all right, I'm gonna look that up. Keep going.
Oh that's funny. I'm smucking on a blue raspberry vapor right now as well.
Actually, I lie, this one's Baja Blast but usually I'm smoking on blue Raspberry.
This one Baha Blast flavor.
This one's blue raspberry. Yeah, this is Baja Blast flavor. It's not perfect, but it's close. It's close to Baja Blast.
Okay. So now this was as of March thirty first of this year. It says this is an article by Reuters that says big tobacco targets Trump in hope and fear of change. So let's go. So big tobacco companies like British America Tobacco are lobbying US President Donald Trump's administration to crack down on illegal vapes, including via import bands on Chinese devices. Document show and industry consultants said.
Tobacco groups, including BAT and Altria have complained that while waiting years for their own vapes or other products to get permission for sale in the United States, some vape makers have taken substantial market share even though authorities say that they're illegal to sell. Despite efforts to stem the flow of unauthorized vapes, they they currently dominate the market.
BAT estimated last year that unauthorized disposable vapes account for around seventy percent of almost ten billion pounds or thirteen billion dollars worth of US vapes sales annually. Tobacco companies say that this this has hit their own vape and cigarette sales. You know shit. US authorities have said that these unauthorized vapes, including products made by Chinese firms, are illegal to import into the United States or sell there.
BAT and Aultria have expressed optimism that Trump's government will address these issues. It's looking so look that's the case. So Bat's US subsidiary, which is Reynolds American, wrote to the Office of the United States Trade Representative on March eleventh to call for the government to ban imports on all disposable vapes from China and consider additional tariffs on
any other Chinese made e cigarettes and smoking alternatives. The Chinese companies unfair and illegal trading practices harm Reynolds and other law abiding US companies. Reynolds wrote in a letter, God don't okay, it hurts our fucking dollar. Meanwhile, You're products are killing eighty million people yearly, right exactly, That's what we care about. We care about We care about
your dollar. So. Asked about the letter, a Renold spokesperson said only products that follow FDA policies and procedures should remain on the market. The stakes are high for tobacco companies. Changes that deliver more robust enforcement of the rules governing vapes and other smoking alternatives could help them protect their market share in US nicotine consumption even as tobacco used falls, But any shift that removed or lowered legal and regulatory
obstacles for currently unauthorized vapes could accelerate further growth. Big tobacco and vape companies want the FDA's authorization process to be faster and clearer, but not necessarily more wholesale change. To industry consultants said, by the way, they want the FDA to work faster and cleaner and clearer, rather but not necessarily a more wholesale change. AKA that is saying that we want, we want things to be regulated, but we only want all our products to qualify for that.
If there's ever any kind of challenge out there, such as Chinese vapes, I'm sorry, you know what, we should just fucking tariff them. And because it's China and no.
Speaking of this hookhal It company is a Chinese company, so I don't know how the fuck they got approval to be sold openly. And these other vapes have to be sold under the table. Makes no fucking sense.
Well, it says uh. White House Press Secretary Caroline Levitt said that President Trump makes decisions in the best interests of the American public. Sure, okay, so it says no secret tobacco companies as well as vape makers are battling to get the ear of the relevant US leaders or officials to make the case for changes that they support. A total of three industry consultants said they asked not
to be identified in order to speak freely. It says it's no secret that everyone with a steak in this issue is trying to get asset access to the White House, said one of the consultants who works for a tobacco company. Reynolds donated. Listen to this. Reynolds, the tobacco company donated ten million dollars to the Trump aligned super pack Make America Great Again, Inc. Federal Electoral Commission filing show.
So they donated ten million dollars to his war chest.
The cigarette company donated. And so it's funny now that now that Trump is president, we're starting to see vapes fall away and and and vapes being promoted as harmful and you can't trust them and all that shit because Trump is being he's having his fucking pockets padded by big Tobacco ten million dollars so much.
Which here's the other side of that coin, right, two wings of the same shitbird.
Uh.
I would guess that they also donated ten million dollars to the Kamala Harris campaign as well. Because this is how you win the game, bro, This is how you make sure that no matter which side wins the war, you still come out on top. You just fund both sides.
We're gonna get to that by open Secrets, which is one of the best websites ever created where like it it's literally it follows the money. We've we used that website several times where you can see exactly what super packs, what politicians, what money is going into their pocket uh, into their pockets from which organizations. It's yeah, it's beautiful because they're public filings, but they just put it in a real easy to see kind of format.
Because they have to claim that either they have to claim it as personal taxes or their uh you know, financial or excuse me, their political party affiliates or whatever. They have to claim all of that. I work with a nonprofit to a very high degree. Dude, our annual report, we have to have everything specificaloustic to the penny amount of what was spent and on what for what purpose, which other non it was it donated to, what was the check number? All like, everything has to be laid out.
It's the same in politics.
Uh yeah, big time. So yeah, it's It goes on to say that bat which is one of the big cigarette companies, uh, said that it engages with lawmakers across the political spectrum and advocates for policies that helped transition smokers to alternatives, regardless of who is in the White House. Okay, sure, you get right right.
So.
Brian Ballard, president of Ballard Partners, a lobbying firm employed by Reynolds since twenty seventeen. Reynolds Cigarettes, according to official lobbyist filings, chaired the Florida Finance Committee for Trump during his twenty sixteen campaign. His firm also previously employed Susie Wiles, Trump's current White House Chief of Staff, and US Attorney General Pam Bondi. Lobbyist filings show, So it's just Trump,
it's everybody within the cabinet. Yeah, yeah, So the Department of Justice did not respect on to questions on Bondi's link to Ballad Partner or Ballad Partners. Ballard Partners declined to comment. Oh, of course, so Wiles has not had any contact with Ballard Partners or BATS since January, a senior White House official told Reuters.
So.
The FDA has been criticized by companies and some lawmakers for slow product authorizations and for failing to address the widespread trade and unauthorized products. The agency said that it needs more resources to tackle these challenges. Tobacco industry executives are concerned that the FDA Center for Tobacco Products could be gutted or asked if the administration concludes that it has failed. The consultant working for a tobacco company said, oh my god.
They're like, well, we don't want it to go through FDA.
Don't look at us the tobacco look at the vaping shit, because if we have to go through all that and jump through all those soups and we fail, that's not gonna be a good look.
I mean, they did that back in the day. You have to do it again. Y'all already did an audit on us in the fifties and sixties. We are we still talking about this is what really? Come on now, bro, you already know what we got.
Meanwhile, more harmful chemicals and products are being pumped into cigarettes, way more than probably their first audit. I can guarantee you that.
Oh, one hundred percent, dude. The pesticide game alone has changed drastically from the sixties to now for our own food and produce, let alone tobacco.
So the FDA has so far authorized only thirty four tobacco and menthol flavored vape products for sale. Of course, all okay by big tobacco. So the FDA rejected most nicotine product applications out of millions of applications. The FDA has authorized thirty four tobacco or menthol flavored vape products for sale, all made by big tobacco companies, All made by big tobacco companies.
Oh, I believe that one hundred percent. That, Like I said, they've already got the ties. They've already got the the person's name who they need to call over in DC to get things pushed through. That's a homeboy. There they go golfing.
Look at this there are This is the list of the ones that have been submitted, refused to accept, accepted, refused to file, filed, application denied, and then application granted. So in which year was this? Twenty from twenty nineteen to twenty twenty four. So in that five year span, twenty six point six million applications submitted to the FDA, and it says over ninety nine percent of all applications were for e cigarette products, including seventeen million applications for
e liquid submitted by one company alone. Okayeen million by one company. That's crazy, but it was a Chinese company probably now a nineteen point six million refused to accept it. I don't know what it means by refuse to accept, but anyway, it goes all the way down to where it says of the grant applications, of the two point six point six or twenty six point six million applications submitted, only thirty four relate to e cigarette products. All thirty four are made by big tobacco companies.
Twenty six point six million applications were submitted in five years, and only thirty four of those applications were approved.
Were granted, and all of them are by big tobacco. Shoo, my god, you want to talk about a fucking monopoly.
Bro, There's no other way to say it.
Reynolds said that there was a quote unquote urgent need to revisit how new products come to market, but it embraces FDA action to review and authorize them. Altria pointed to pointed rooters to remarks by CEO William Gifford, who told investors in February that Altria wants quicker product authorizations
and proper enforcement against illicit products. The head of the Vapor Technology Association, Tony Abound or Abude, however, said that the current system creates a steep barrier for entry and had essentially out outlawed flavored vapes that can help smokers quit. A significant change of approach was needed, he told Reuters. The association says that it represents industry leading manufacturers of vapor devices, E liquids and flavorings, distributors and suppliers, as
well as retailers. Abud met with Trump in twenty twenty four and afterwards. In September of twenty twenty four, Trump posted on truth social pledging to in quotes save vaping and here we are he Trump wants. He posted on truth social to save vaping. Meanwhile, yeah is meanwhile he is being funded by big tobacco.
Yeah, funny how that works out right. These are those campaign promises that never come through to fruition, just like Killery's going to be in jail, right, that's totally the thing we're going to see, and then like eh, yeah, no ah.
Okay, so now we come to follow the money. This is a website that everybody should get familiar with if you are interested in following the money down all of the political rabbit holes. So this is OpenSecrets dot org. I mean, it is just doing God's work over here, bro, I think so. So this is the Tobacco Summary. It says that it's showing this is data from twenty twenty four because obviously twenty twenty five is not concluded yet.
It says to the tobacco industry, once a lobbying juggernaut has watched his political influence wane as its cancer causing products became increasingly toxic politically speaking, contributions to federal candidates and political committees from the tobacco industry, which include makers of cigarettes, electronic cigarettes, cigars, and smokeless tobacco as well as their trade groups dropped precipitously after two thousand and two,
but began trending upward again in twenty sixteen. So here are the uh right, here we have the top contributors. So this is a dude, wait till you see this shit, all right, So you can see that the contributor. This is two political parties. Okay, this is everywhere. This is not like all their ad campaigns or anything like that. This is just two political parties and sometimes even political
people in general. So the the biggest lobbying tobacco company as far as politics goes, would be British American Tobacco JACOB. While while I'm saying that, can you look up which cigarette companies are British American tobacco?
All right, So I'm gonna look it up. But there may not be a cigarette the Kadbiatrir gas station that's made by them. This might It's kind of like saying the oil lobbying group, like which oil company is? It's it's all of them, right, So when you get lobbying groups, there's a bunch of different companies that will feed into the lobbyists. But I will look up British American tobacco, and let's see we can find.
Yeah, because I know Altria is one of them, and that's Philip Morris. So fritch American tobacco, I would imagine is what maybe it's pools or fucking camels or something I don't know, all.
Right, made by British American tobacco. Yeah.
So while we're looking at that, the total number of dollars that were spent on political uh people running was in twenty.
Okay, I got you, wow wow.
Ye.
There's some of these you probably haven't heard of, and some of them you absolutely have heard of. Okay, And I've got a couple of these here. British American Tobacco or BAT, produces a wide range of cigarette brands, including global brands like Dunhill, Kent, Lucky Strike, Paul Mall, and Rothman's in the US market, BAT also owns and markets brands like Newport Camel and Natural American Spirit through its subsidiary Renolds American Inc.
Okay, there we go.
Other international and local brands include Vogue, Visceroy Cool, and Peter Stuyvesant.
Okay, so that's a lot of heavy hitters, especially Camel in there, dude, that's a.
Camil Cool, Newport Paul mal Lucky Strike, American Spirit.
Come on now, dude, yep, so Brittet, that company or that organization that has all of those cigarette makers has donated just in twenty twenty three to twenty twenty four thirteen million dollars thirteen thirteen million, eighteen thousand and forty one dollars. The listen to where it's going though, so
that they donated to the Democrats. Of that thirteen million, sixty two thousand of it went to Democrats, one hundred and seventy eight almost one hundred and seventy nine thousand has gone to Republicans.
They probably did that because they knew which way the tides were going to shift, so they threw their money in with the crowd they figured was going to. That makes sense to me.
Sure, But that's only one hundred and seventy eight or one hundred and seventy nine thousand of the thirteen million, twelve point seven seven five million went to conservative groups in general, so that's where they were really targeting. They the big tobacco. Yeah, they gave a little bit to the Democrats, but none to liberal groups, none to nonpartisan groups. The majority of their money went to conservative groups, which
makes sense. We got a Republican in office, vaping's getting repealed, smoking getting seemingly going to get.
Some kind of an increase as a result. Absolutely.
Next one, you have RAI Services. You don't have to look up all these but this is just some of them. So RAI Services they donated ten million dollars. Of the ten million, only sixty five dollars went to Democrats.
Whoa sixty five hole doll hairs.
Dude, Yeah, So it was ten million, two hundred and twenty thousand and sixty five dollars total. Sixty five dollars total went to the Democrats. Million, two hundred and twenty thousand went to conservative groups.
So, by the way, our AI is.
Reynolds Oh so, all right, makes sense.
Reynolds American Industries. And by the way, they're a subsidiary of the British American group that we just talked about. So it's the same fucking wallet with a different name on the checkbook.
It's basically black Rock at that point.
The black Rock Vanguard, and uh, what was the other one that owns everything Street State Street. It's that it's that conversation, but yeah, matter of fact, go down the list. I'm gonna look up what's each one of these, Like what cigarettes are made by these subsidiaries? I like this, all right.
The next one is Altria. So they have Altria Client Services and Altria Group, and they're two different sectors, but they're both donating a lot of money. So Altria Client Services, which is a branch of it, donated five point seven million dollars and twenty seven hundred of it went to Democrats, thirty four thousand went to Republicans, but an astounding five point seven million of it went to conservative groups. Okay, Now, big topacco was absolutely in the Republicans pockets.
As of this current political timeframe.
Absolutely sore because that's who's in that's who's in control right now.
Exactly. So Ultra owns Philip Morris, the maker of Marlborough, and John Middleton, the maker of what you might know as Black and Mild. Their smoke free portfolio includes companies like Copenhagen and Skull.
Oh yeah wow, all right. Next on the list you would have, and that's just the client services. The Aultria Group donated four point six million, four hundred and eighty four thousand dollars to Democrats. However, one point seven million to Republicans and two point four million to conservative groups. Also donated five hundred thousand to nonpartisan groups.
So they've made sure that everybody around the board was eaten, but specifically the conservatives.
Yes, yes, uh, fifteen hundred deliberal groups because.
Fuck them right exactly.
Uh.
Then you got Breeze smoke. That's the next one.
Breeze smoke LLC breeze like a wind, breeze b r ee ze. Breeze smoke got you.
They donated one million, a little over one million dollars. Sixty eight hundred of it went to Democrats one million.
Uh.
The rest of the money went to the Republicans. So sixty eight hundred went to Democrats. The rest of the one point or the one million, fifty and sixty four dollars went to Republicans.
Okay, So Breeze does not manufacture traditional cigarettes. They are known for disposable electronic nicotine delivery systems, also known as vape products and e cigarettes. Breeze Smoke was previously a Michigan based company, but seized US distri in late twenty twenty four due to FDA actions and shifted sales overseas. Wow. So Breeze Smoke was a vape company that last year donated to all these political figures. Next year probably not so much unless they're trying to get back in the
good graces and everything. But yeah, let me see Bree's disposable vapes. I'm trying to see if there's some of these that that we might recognize.
Many of them.
Yeah, I'll be honest with you. I'm looking at their product line here. There's nothing that it looks just like your typical vape that you would ever buy from a vape shop.
Ever, however, not a name brand you'd recognize.
It looks very similar to every other vape and no, I don't think I've ever actually seen that name brand in stores.
So Bree's got got nuts leapt they're out, yeah, buddy. However, next on the list is Jewel Labs, which no need to up. Jewel Labs. They donate did four hundred and fifty six thousand dollars. Two hundred and twenty six thousand of those dollars went to Democrats, twenty five thousand went to Republicans, thirteen hundred went to liberal groups, and two hundred thousand went to conservative groups. So still, well, that
one's actually pretty equal. So they put two hundred and twenty six thousand to Democrats, two hundred thousand to conservative groups, and a couple extra pennies to Republicans and liberal groups.
So I think it's worth mentioning here. Jewel Labs was co founded by these two gentlemen as part of pax Labs and started selling the jewel devices in twenty fifteen. In twenty seventeen, Jewel Labs was spun off from pax Labs, after which Altria acquired at a thirty five percent stake in the company for twelve point eight billion dollars on December twentieth of twenty eighteen. So, yes, they weren't originally owned by Philip Morris and all that, but they are well in Altrio, but they are now.
They got bought out, yeah, and that's that's because of all of the things that they were being sued for by Big Tobacco, and so they had they I would imagine they probably just had no choice but to sell.
They I mean, but still they bought in at a thirty five percent steak in the company for twelve point eight billion, So you understand that means that this company was valued way higher than that, but they fucking hit them with so many lawsuits that it was cheaper for them to just sell majority steak in their company than it would have been to fight the good fight in the court system. Because you're dealing with big tobacco that's got the deepest of deep.
Pockets inful trade and tear down from within.
Yep, seems like copard espionage, dude, That's essentially all it is.
How about Swish or sweets Swisher no national They donated three hundred and seven thousand dollars. Sixty seven thousand went to Democrats, two hundred and thirty seven thousand went to Republicans, a thousand went to liberal groups, and zero to the conservative groups. Vector group which I'm not unaware of that one, but Vector Group they put up a one hundred damn near one hundred and eighty thousand dollars. One hundred and
twelve dollars of the one hundred and eighty went to Democrats. Meanwhile, seventy nine thousand dollars went to Republicans and one hundred thousand dollars went to conservative groups. So you can see right here by this list alone, and this isn't even all of them, because after that you got Philip Morris International PMI Global Services. What's the next? Oh, and then you got Swedish match North on Excalibur Imperol.
And I'm just saying that, Like, twisch Er Sweet just made me think about something. Dude, They're coming after flavored tobacco products. We're over here thinking about flavored cigarettes, big dog. They're thinking they're gonna start coming. I'm just curious now if what they're saying on paper is that flavored tobacco products or being marketed for children, does that mean that I won't be able to get my wine flavored wood tip black and mile whenever I get.
The cra I mean, how about the fucking white grape white owls. That's like that's a go to for anybody rolling a blunt great backwoods?
Like, are we saying that all of that is about to go by the wayside as a result.
Or but the children think about the children, or like flavored shit or somehow these products are gonna see no real issue, right, So there was another thing I just found and said, is swiss or Sweet about to be discontinued?
No, they just made it to where they can't sell their products out of vending machines in certain locations anymore. Wow, that that's what they're doing to compensate and say, see, we're being affected by it too. Big tobacco is getting hit just as hard as big vape in these legal precedents.
The fuck uh false so falls next one we have these are check this list out. This is annual lobbying totals ninety eight. Uh, there were. That was the most amount of money that was ever lobbied in politics via Big tobacco, which is crazy. They lobbied seventy three million dollars in ninety eight, and then the farther down you go, Uh,
the farther down you go. You got twenty three million in ninety nine, twenty million in two thousand and so on, and it's it has its ebbs and flows, but it never once even came close to half of the money that was lobbied for in ninety eight, which is pretty interesting because that was the Clinton years.
It is indeed. But also I got some commercials that we're gonna play here in a little bit. Keep that date in mind, you just said, and making sure I fully fully hear you. Nineteen ninety eight was the largest payout that Big tobacco paid to their legal or to the to the politicians more.
Accurate, more than doubles every other year since then.
Okay, everybody just remember that whenever we play a commercial from night te teen ninety seven for a vape ad. But we're gonna get.
There really, okay. And you can see these are the top lobbying clients in twenty twenty four. Altria thirteen million, Phillip Morris six million, British American Tobacco five point eight million, Hey Island holding one point five million, Jewel Labs one million,
everybody else below a million dollars. And check this out, parties, split of receipts or of recipients by election title, by election cycle from nineteen ninety to twenty twenty four, a Republican has taken on more money from big tobacco in every single election cycle since nineteen ninety. Cool, every single year, the Republicans are the ones that are being funded by big tobacco.
I'm sure there's Democrats right now like say they are the evil ones trying to kill us, and it's like, first.
Of all calls Democrats still be getting some cheese out of it too.
They do.
The Big Tobacco prefers a Republican.
I think they prefer Republican because Republicans are more in favor of big business. But I think that it's pretty much a one to one comparison for how many Republicans versus how many Democrats smoke.
Just we're all clear, probably, so yeah, you can see party split of recipients. Check this out. Now we're going to get to specific recipients who have received said money. Okay, in as a matter of fact, this is what's interesting about this. So these are per election cycle, so that is to Democrats or Republicans, but whenever you break it down to the individuals, it looks a little bit different.
Okay.
So, for example, in twenty twenty four, twenty twenty three, and twenty twenty four, the funding that was going towards the two running presidents, which was Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. Kamala Harris received ninety five thousand dollars from big tobacco. Trump only received seventy one thousand dollars. So we got more money from big tobacco than even old DT. Right, and then followed by certain you know, representatives, senators or whatever. Tim Kaine from Virginia makes a lot of sense that
he would get a lot of money. That's where a lot of tobacco comes from.
Yep.
Mike Johnson, how about that, your boy, Mike Johnson out of Louisiana, Speaker of the House, got fifty five thousand, damn near fifty six thousand dollars from big tobacco.
I can imagine. I know that there is some tobacco that's grown in this state, so that checks out.
Next one, David Rooser, North Carolina, So same area of Virginia, all that kind of shit. They got the tobacco going on big time up there, yep. And next day. Won't let me go to the next one. Oh, there's only one, okay. So these are the only ones specific representatives or presidential candidates that receive money in twenty twenty three and twenty twenty four. Otherwise the money was going to said party. But these are just the individuals that received the money.
That's pretty crazy. So I look this up just now because I was curious if there's been a study done to see who smokes more Republican voters or Democrat voters. Oh boy, and just out of the curiosity, right. So, studies indicate that Democrats and liberals tend to have a higher smoking rate compared to Republicans and conservatives. One study found that Democrats had higher odds of cigarette smoking and excessive drinking compared to Republicans. In contrast, Republicans were less
likely to smoke than Democrats. However, the same study also highlighted a nuance individuals residing in Republican majority states were more likely to smoke, regardless of their own political leanings. So that makes sense. But if we're going to just look at the numbers strictly the math, it actually checks out that Democrats pay more into big tobacco by you know, buying more shit than conservatives and Republicans do. But somehow
the Republics are the ones that get most of the funding. Why, you might ask, because Republicans are all about big business. They're all about the corporations. That's why a lot of big businesses, a lot of fortune five hundred companies, throw their lot in way more heavily with Republicans because they're going to be less restricted.
Makes sense, makes sense. I do have one more thing that I did want to bring up I have two other I don't know if I want to talk about the other thing that I just just out of spite and the fucking renegade in me, I was going to teach everybody how to make their own baye juice.
I mean, it's not that hard. We listed the four ingredients earlier, and you could buy that all of these materials. You could buy candy flavorings, you can buy the nicotine salt, and you can buy the vegetable glycerin or glycol excuse me, yeah, you can make it at your home.
The information's out there, so I don't need to give you the ingredient list. You can go and search that. It's really easy to find. It's not like super hidden anywhere now. But that being said, the last thing that I did want to present is just a final overview, and then we got a couple of videos that we wanted to show to but a final overview of vapes versus cigarettes, just to lay it all out there with everything that we've talked about, plus a little bit more so.
I was curious, you know, is there a legal reason why cigarettes have so many chemicals? Or is it to strictly save money by using cheaper filler products. I was like, all right, let's see if it goes there, Like, is that the reason why there's so many, so many chemicals?
Right?
So then I got five things that would back this up. It says it's not really a legal requirement for cigarettes to have so many chemicals. It's almost entirely the result of manufacturing choices, cost cutting, and addiction engineering. So how that breaks down is is cheaper to produce with additives and fillers. Look at the pap industry, it's no different.
Right.
So tobacco companies use reconstituted tobacco sheet, which is basically ground up stems, scrap, and dust, glued together with chemicals and sprayed with flavor enhancers, instead of using only whole tobacco leaf.
Yeah.
So already you're getting the fucking scraps of the scraps.
When you smoke, you're getting tobacco pulp that that's essentially what it is, and it's all glued together with chemicals that are horror before you with you.
Yeah, I mean, if you're a weed smoker, they're giving you the seeds and stems.
That's it. They're grinding up the seeds and stems and putting that sticky ichy on it to use as glue and then trying to sell it like it's already pre ground.
So this sheet in quotes, is it's almost like fucking plywood, is what they're like, pulpwood exactly, yes, same the particle board shit. So this sheet is cheaper, it burns more evenly, and it allows precise nicotine dosing. It also allows or it also lets them mix in cheap filler materials and chemical agents without consumers noticing. So when you're thinking about the fucking thousands of different harmful chemical agents within a cigarette, this this is why they're doing it. It's not that
cigarettes are fucking safer. It's not that they're less addictive or anything like that. No, no, no, no, they're not worried about your health because they're going to cut corners at every single fucking possible place they could. And this is a way that they do it. Another crazy thing I didn't know this. They have addiction optimization. Okay, they find a way to make nicotine even more addictive than
just the natural nicotine. Okay. Chemicals like ammonia are added in the cigarettes to raise the pH of the smoke, which turns nicotine into a quote unquote free base form. This hits the brain faster, much like crack cocaine versus powdered cocaine, making cigarettes more addictive. Oh my god.
This is pre based cocaine. That's Jesus dude.
Bak is soda. Yeah, yeah, that's what that is. Sugar, cocoa, and menthol aren't just flavorings. They also alter the smoke chemistry to make inhalation smoother, allowing deeper drags and bigger nicotine absorption, so they want to try and get you as addicted as humanly fucking possible. Another way is burn control and shelf life, so they add potassium citrate and other agents to make cigarettes burn slower or faster, depending on marketing needs. There are preservatives and mold inhibitors that
extend storage life, especially for products shipped globally. Then you have brand consistency. It says every Marlboro has to taste like every other Marborough, no matter where or when it's bought. Achieving that means standardizing the chemical cocktail so that even different batches of tobacco of tobacco taste exactly the same.
This makes sense for like brand recognition, right do you want to have that standardization across the board, like for a business. I understand that, but you're standardizing it with horrible shit that you know are killing your customer base.
So you want to look at people. Uh, people will say, well, you should invade because it's unnatural. Bro, this is the onmost the the most unnatural fucking cocktail soup that you could imagine. You're not even smoking what you think you're smoking, right right. Uh. They also have legal loopholes, and disclosure doesn't equal ban. So there's no law requiring manufacturers to keep cigarettes as pure tobacco, no law that says that in most countries they must disclose the presence of certain
harmful chemicals. But they're not prohibited. They're not prohibited from using them. As long as they disclose and tell you what's in it, they're still allowed to use it. So governments don't push for removal of this because it would hurt tax revenue if cigarettes became less addictive and people smoked less. And also, tobacco companies have powerful lobbying arms that protect their formulas, so it's not a legal necessity.
It's a corporate strategy cheaper to make more addictive easier to mass produce consistently, and backed by a system that profits from keeping people hooked. If you smoked pure, additive free tobacco leaf, it would still carry health risks, but you'd avoid hundreds of those extra industrial chemicals designed to keep you coming back for more. So I then asked, does China do the same thing with their vapes. Let's
call spade a spade here. Okay, it says yeah in a way, but the motives and methods are a bit different from what big Tobacco does with cigarettes. So here's how it works with China and vapes. China controls most of the world's vape manufacturing over ninety percent of the world's vapes, hardware, devices, coils, pods, and a large portion of the liquid supply comes from China, especially from shen Zen.
Yeah, that's where this company's based out of. As a matter of fact, I looked it up.
Makes sense. So that means whatever standards, shortcuts or substitutions happen, happen there ripple out globally. So additives and cost cutting in liquids in the unregulated side of China's vape industry, especially for products sold domestically or through gray market exporters. Cheap flavoring agents, synthetic nicotine, or even cutting agents can
be used to reduce production costs. Some small factories don't use pharmaceutical grade PGVEG, which is the oil or lab tested nicotine, which can introduce contaminants, heavy metals, pesticide, residue, or solvent traces. This is less about making vapes more addictive like cigarettes, and more about keeping prices ultra low and maximizing profit margins. So they're still doing the same thing it in just a different way. This is why I think that everybody, and even still, even with them
doing all of that, still ninety five percent less harmful. Yeah, don't forget that number, still ninety five percent less harmful. Which begs the question that even if they are putting some negative components inside of the vape liquid or whatever, would that ninety five percent less be significantly less if you were to make your own vape juice.
I think you would, I think so personally. Right, you're taking out the uh, the factory manufacturing of it, which is where those potentially harmful things can really come from, right right.
So, and one final thing here, just to really put a fucking bow on this bad boy. I wanted to see what are the number of deaths related to nicotine and smoking. Let's see what they are, you know, if one's so bad, I mean, maybe we should see the fruits of that.
Right.
Yeah, So here's what the.
Data currently shows confirmed deaths from vaping related lung injuries in the United States. Okay, this was in a evaluation of twenty nineteen to twenty twenty, So it says in the twenty nineteen to twenty twenty Evolley outbreak, which is e cigarette or vaping associated lung injury, the CDC confirmed sixty eight deaths across twenty nine states and the District
of Columbia by February eighteen, twenty twenty. IVALI, however, was linked primarily to contaminated THHC vaping products, particularly those those contaminating are containing vitamin e acetate, not regulated nicotine vapes.
So that sixty nine deaths, sixty eight deaths for the entire year.
Sixty eight deaths, but every single one of the depths of the deaths were using the THHC vaping products, not nicotine.
But right, so, how many people die from cigarettes that year? Just selling it out? Well?
But big Tobacco tried to say vaping kills look at this. Meanwhile, it was all it had nothing to do with nicotine. Yeah, and we're gonna get to those deaths, I promise. So there are nicotine only vaping. If you're only smoking nicotine, you're not smoking the weed vapes. Zero confirmed deaths zero. There are no confirmed deaths nationally or globally attributed solely
to nicotine vaping and regulated products. Most serious evolley cases involve the THHC or black market vape cartridges not approved by nicotine based e liquids. There are other health incidents and poisoning data. So poison control data shows that vaping
related exposures have increased, particularly in children. Among reported cases, point zero point one percent involved life threatening symptoms, but deaths were extremely rare, if any so in children, even when the children smoke or when the children vape, which they should not be doing that, right, A kid's gonna be a kid. They're gonna get their hands on what
they shouldn't be getting their hands on. Even in the kids that did it, point one percent had life threatening symptoms point one That is one in a thousand.
There really is I mean life threatening from nicotine. Now, I know, like nicotine overloads a thing and it can make you puke, right, And I mean I suppose there is a risk of maybe a seizure of some type happening like that. Especially. I mean, have you ever you ever see somebody take a dip for the first time?
I remember my first time as a matter of fact.
Yeah, And it fucked your entire world up, didn't it do?
I thought I was shit faced. It made me feel so drunk right now. If a six year old was to take a dip. Yeah, by the way, it was what it was, Levi Garrett. By the way, Oh.
That's not a dip, br that's a chew. That's different.
It fucked me up.
Oh, dude, dip hits you harder because it got fiberglass in it that cuts into your gums to pretty much give you direct blood to nicotine transference.
Yeah.
Two is just you know, molasses and enriched tobacco that you just two in your lip and it slowly seeps in, so it still gets there. It just takes longer. Right. But yeah, if you were to give like a six year old that weighs I don't know, forty pounds a dip. Yeah, that's gonna knock them on their fucking ass, and it's very possible that that would like hurt them. So I understand what they're saying with this, but I wouldn't say
that that's necessarily life threatening. Like I don't know to what level and to what kind of saturation of nicotine you would need to make it like detrimental to your actual life. But I know that number does exist.
Yeah, it does. But this is in regards to vaping in general. So one in a thousand kids on average had life threatening symptoms. We don't know how much they were taken in. And you know, you got some of those vapes that like they spit out the juice and so it's a lot more concentrated rather than just vaping it because you get a little bit of the juice on your tongue and in your mouth and everything. We
don't know, but there are. It says there are currently no accurate global figures for deaths specifically due to nicotine vaping. Most national agencies, including the World Health Organization, do not report any nicotine only vaping fatalities. Could that be because there isn't any or is it just not something that's documented. However, it says the overwhelming consensus is that nicotine vaping remains far less harmful than smoking, though not entirely risk free.
The death toll from smoking tobacco is staggering, and unlike vaping, the numbers are crystal clear and universally recognized. So globally, the World Health Organization estimates that tobacco kills more than eight million people every year worldwide. About seven million of those deaths are from direct tobacco use, and one point three million, on average are from secondhand smoke exposure. Means roughly one death every four seconds is tied to tobacco.
Every four seconds, somebody dies from smoking cigarettes.
Bro Warow, that's crazy. That's over like years and years of use though, And I get that, But also that doesn't detract from the math.
Right, Well, and that's the thing, I mean, what is that a fifth of the people A fifth, Yeah, something like that, fourth or a fifth maybe every four and a half A fifth of the people are dying from second.
Hand Yeah, I could see that too for sure.
Who's dying from second hand, babe?
Not a goddamn person.
You're not even getting people dying from firsthand? Let alone secondhand exactly. So smoking is the leading preventable cause of death globally, causing more deaths than alcohol. Listen to this fucking stat bro Smoking is the leading preventable cause of death globally, causing more deaths than alcohol, illegal drugs, car accidents, HIV and AIDS, and murder combined. Yeah, holy fuck, that's a lot.
But there's a lobbying group that's trying to make sure that it stays at the forefront, that everybody can get their hands on cigarettes at your local gas station.
Yeah, it says the CDC reports that cigarette smoking causes over four hundred and eighty thousand deaths each year in the United States alone. This includes about forty one thousand deaths a year from secondhand smoke. Holy shit, secondhand smoke forty one thousand people, So that's about one in every five deaths annually in the US are dying from secondhand smoke. And then it says smoking also shortens the life expectancy by an average of ten years compared to non smokers.
So in the final comparison here to nicotine vaping deaths, so nicotine vaping zero confirmed deaths, smoking tobacco eight million deaths worldwide every year.
Yeah, miss me with vaping is more.
Dangerous, miss me with it, because we just got I showed you every fucking receipt that I could possibly find on this.
Well, we just don't know how dangerous it is because it hadn't been out long enough to have people die of it. Wait until they got people that have been vaping for fifty years, and then we'll see what they can show. Listen, I hear that, and respectfully, that makes no sense. There is no known carcinogens inside of this device in my hand right now. There is, in fact, thousands of chemicals and over seventy for sure known carcinogens
inside of every single cigarette. I'm sorry, we are not comparing apples to apples in this conversation.
We're not. Yeah, We're just not.
Wow. So yeah, I would agree that big tobacco lobbyists are the ones that are making all of these moves happen, pulling the strings to make sure that certain political figures will pass legislation, to make sure that cigarettes are going to be sold, get text the fuck out of, and that vapes are getting taken off of shelves and are now being criminalized in states across the country that that makes perfect sense to me.
Yeah, it's I mean, look see what say what you want, but the facts don't lie on this kind of shit, right, Like, I don't know how much more clear we can make it now. This is not to try and tell everybody that you need to go and pick up a vape because it's just a fun hobby. You still shouldn't do it.
I would rather not have this problem. I want to quit it because to say that it's not gonna kill me, that's probably correct, but my allergies are out of control whenever I've ape, like I am constantly with the phlegm and the fucking all that nasty shit in my chest and everything. There's that's still a thing. You're you're still pumping fucking vapor into your lungs. Never again. Thing right, But in accordance or in comparison rather to smoking cigarettes, far and above not as bad.
Oh, it's not even in my opinion, and from all of the data and research we've just looked at on this episode, it's not even a fair comparison. It's it's not it's a night and day conversation.
Yeah, yeah, so you know, do with that as you will. I had one more thing that I wanted to look up, So the amount of deaths, because I know that there's been a large increase in chemicals in the cigarettes now compared to say, nineteen sixty, Right, that would be a pretty easy assumption. So I wanted to see what the number of deaths due to smoking in nineteen sixty compared to today, if we can, more so put it on the chemicals that are in it rather than just the tobacco and
the paper itself. Okay, So, globally smoking smoking claims around seven to eight million lives each year. For example, the World Health Organization states that tobacco kills more than seven people annually, seven million people annually. Other estimates mentioned approximately eight million deaths per year, and so but in nineteen sixty, okay. Unfortunately, there's no precise global figure available for smoking related deaths in that year. However, we can draw on some insights
from historical data. So a retrospective estimate for the entire twentieth century. Okay, so in the nineteen hundreds, for the entire twentieth century, suggests that around one hundred million people died prematurely because of smoking. Most of those deaths occurred in rich countries. This works out to an average of one million deaths per year across one hundred year span, but smoking was far less prevalent in early decades, so the annual toll in nineteen sixty was well below, or
was likely well below, seven to eight million. Data from specific regions like parts of the United States and Europe indicated growing trend in smoking related mortality through the mid twentieth century, but no global estimates from nineteen sixty.
But it is interesting, that's not correct. The smoking was very prevalent. Everybody smoked in the early nineteen hundred.
I thought so too, and maybe just the data collection wasn't Yeah, fair, fair collection on it. But even still, of what was collected, one hundred million people died in the entire century, So.
A million people per year, and that's best case scenario.
Yeah, yeah, that's so. I think that that would in my head that points too. All right, so a million people year as opposed to eight million people per year. You could say that the chemicals and the carcinogens that they have added since then are far more dangerous than they than were originally. And I don't even that's not even a fucking stretch.
One hundred percent with you. So yeah, it's.
Probably getting fucking worse for you, bro, That's really the truth of the matter.
Now, let's talk about some of those things from back in the gap, right, So, I've got a couple of commercials pulled up. The first one is called the Most Honest Cigarette Commercial, and this is from nineteen seventy one. All right, let's let's listen in on sniff your own Patreon, enjoy the viewing. Let's watch.
Dim Ber.
And I need a break from chopping down those four thousand year old redwoods. I turned to Lumberjacks cigarettes. Ah, with your taste of burning leaves, when you want to feel that targoing deep into your lungs, try Lumberjacks cigarettes.
Lumber jackson.
Smell them, they make your clothes smell.
Be me.
They leave stage on your teeth.
Pick the leaves up dead tobacco. Chop them up for lumberjacko, rolled up tighter, dead on the fire, Suck them down to you wet Sparso when you get gens for those gens the Lumberjacks, you ball taste like cigarettes off.
So again, that's nineteen seventy one for a the most honest cigarette commercial. However, that was obviously for an anti smoking campaign, but I still thought it was.
Funny, beautiful. I loved it. That was good.
Now let's talk about a cigarette commercial from the nineteen fifties. Okay, do you inhale? This is a ridiculous cigarette commercial. Get ready for this one.
Do you inhale? Then you're better off smoking Philip Marris. And here's how you can prove it. Right up a Philip Marris, Take a puff, get a good mouthful of smoke, and slowly let the smoke come directly through your nose. Now might up your present brand and do exactly the same thing. Take a puff, get a good mouthful of smoke, and slowly let the smoke come directly through your nose. Notice any difference, Yes.
But Philip Morris is so mild by my own brand seems sort of harsh and burning.
That's irritation. And remember the irritation you felt in your nose is the same irritation that occurs in your throat every time you inhale your own brand. So over a more enjoyable smoke than you've ever known before. Smoke to that, Morris. The one cigarette proved definitely less irritating, definitely milder than any other leading brad. Do you inhale, then you certainly should do.
You now that that's called irritation. You know that my nose is burning, that's called irritation. It is definitely better, definitely to definitely smoke.
Philip Morris on fucking real, dude, that's crape.
That was on TV back in the day. Now, does everybody remember these ridiculous Blue E cigarette commercials?
Uh, let's see negative one.
I'm tired of being a walking asterisk.
Negative two.
I'm tired of feeling guilty every time I want to light up.
I'm Stephen Dorf.
I've been a smoker for twenty years, and I just found the smarter alternate, Blue E six. Blue lets me enjoy smoking without it affecting the people around me because it's vapor, not tobacco smoke. That means no ash and best of all, no offensive odor. With Blue, you can smoke in a basketball game if you want to. And how about not having to go outside every ten minutes when you're in a bar with your friends. The point is you can smoke Blue virtually anywhere. We're all adults here.
It's time we take our freedom back. Come on, guys, rise from the ashes.
Yeah, blue e cigarette. Do you remember those things?
Doo? Yeah?
And they sucked.
They sucked, not good at all.
They never ever made me feel like I had actually like gotten my nicotine fix.
No, it was always a shitty substitute.
It was. But that was the first red available e sig that was like it looked even like a little black cigarette, and he kind of made you feel like you were just out there having a smoke with your people or whatever the case was, but you didn't have to go outside. It's so crazy. Oh my god. Now let's talk about the first vape commercial ever to air on television.
Okay.
It was so nuanced that there was a one eight hundred number that you had to call to order your vape because it wasn't something you could just buy right. This is from nineteen ninety seven. Now, in nineteen ninety eight, the tobacco companies spent more money than ever before in the political sphere. Is there a connection here? I am personally of.
The belief that there was no coincidence.
Let's check it out.
I thought you quit smoking.
I did.
Really, what's up with time and tails?
It gives me the nicotine I need to fight my cravings and help me quit.
Really, you can only use it for.
For six months, and you have to use it as part of the stop smoking program first. Then you can't use it with anything else containing nicotine.
It's important to tell your doctor if you have harder lung disease or are pregnant or nursing.
The most common side effects are mild thrower, mouth irritation, cough an upset stomach.
How surprisingly, intelligently.
Ask you doctor for product information.
Call now to learn more about the new nicketrol Inhaler and get a free copy of Pathways to Change, nic Cotrol's personalized plan full of tips to help you quit smoking. The nicketrol in Hailer and Pathways to Change should be used as part of a total stop smoking program. Call now and you'll also receive a coupon worth five dollars off your prescription, plus a sample and hailer mouthpiece.
So call now to get started nicketrol Inhaler. That you had to get a doctor's prescription for wow well, or you could call the one one hundred number and just buy it out right. But if you went through a doctor, your insurance might even be able to help you.
Well, that's it's like what Australia is trying to do.
Right, But again, this was in ninety seven, so let's just make sure we're all on the same page of the facts. In nineteen ninety seven, it was understood that you could vape nicotine to get off of tobacco and it was going to be readily available. Yeah, this time you had to go through your doctor or whatever the case was, and cool, but they understood that the technology was there and that it was only a matter of
time before it went on the mainstream. So the very next year, Big Tobacco spends all of this money to shut that shit down in the public zeitgeist. Then let's cut to the annoying ass metal monster vape ad four years ago. If anybody was watching TV back then, you'll probably recognize this anti vaping commercial because it puts metal in your lungs. Let's check this out.
If you vape, you could be in hell and ToxS and metals unto your lungs.
Just so, how scary that is.
We made metal monsters, But nothing is as scary as the facts vapor can deliver it.
ToxS, and metals like nickel and lead into your lungs. Nickel and lead into your lungs. And he didn't say that it does. He says that it can deliver these things into your lungs. Is there any fucking study to show that whatsoever that was from the real cost?
It can uh send unicorn farts into my lungs too, right?
I mean, there's a greater than zero percent chance that you could swallow your vapor and choke to death. Will somebody think about the children? I'm telling you, bro, it's oh, it's mine numbing.
There's a chance that somebody queathed into your e juice. Do you really want to inhale that? It's ridiculous.
So, yeah, when we're talking about the amount of money that Big Tobacco is willing to spend to make you buy their products and to make you not consider their competition, which is vaping, it makes perfect sense that they have pulled out all of the stops. It's just it's mind blowing to see how things have traversed time.
So the next time you hear we're doing this for your health, remember the same people saying that they are fine with selling cigarettes, pesticide, lace, food, toxic tap water, and NonStop mental poison in the media. The vape ban isn't about saving lives. It's about keeping control, keeping money flowing, and making sure your choices only exist inside their marketplace. The real danger isn't your vape, it's in the system that it tells you what you can and can't do
while cashing in on both sides. And until people see that, they'll keep falling for the same play. That's all we got for today. So hopefully it shed a little bit of light on people with smoking and vaping. And to be honest, this might be more of a call for if you're still smoking cigarettes, change the vaping.
Well if you can. They're making it more and more outlawed by the day. So if you can go get your hands on a vape, I suggest you do that that rather than buy another pack of cigarettes.
That's you know, this is just another episode of follow the money and see what their real intentions are. I think we found out what the real intentions are. They don't care about your health, they care about their pocketbook. And so yeah, uh, hopefully somebody or you know, y'all learned a little something on this show, because this is something that I've I've honestly, I thought about doing this show for years and I kind of put it off
because I was scared of what I might find. But then I was like, you know what, dude, let me just fucking figure this out because it is worse. Then that'll be more more so a reason for me to want to quit, you know what I mean? Like that was that was my mindset. It was either I'm either gonna prove that these are safer than cigarettes or I'm gonna quit. Those are the only two options, right, And
I'm still going to quit eventually. But yeah, all of the propaganda saying that they're worse than cigarettes, wrong goo.
Yeah, I mean, I'm definitely gonna be quitting this here in the next few months, realistic. I just started working out again this week, like actually giving a fuck about working out this week. My cardio is so trash that, yeah, I am going to be quitting vaping for sure. But that being said, I'm certainly never I and for years now, I have never considered going back to smoking cigarettes. That was never a part of the conversation. If anything, I go back to chewing like real shit, But no.
I feel that. So, I mean, if nothing else, then this will just be a little something that you can compartmentalize in your mind. But yeah, with all that being said, if you want to come check us out on Patreon support us, that would be the best way to be able to do so, but we do have a couple of other ways that you might be able to do as to do so as well.
Indeed, if you would like to support the show as well as your own financial future and freedom, then now is the time to get invested in the silver and gold, the precious metals, the buoy and the minted coins. The best place to get your start with that would be to go to the link in the description below to cocsilver dot com. When you fill out your information, our homeboy, Wayne Clark's is gonna be the one to reach out
to you and get you squared away. You want to buy a little bit, you want to buy a lot of it less talk to your financial advisor see if you can get a fraction of your four to one K or whatever you might have for a retirement and instead of investing it in a stock market which is going all over the place depending on what the political space is doing, put a section of it into precious metals, gold and silver, minted coins and bullion, they are going
to just increase, They're going to go higher in value. That's how the math maths. Like we said, best place to get your start bat to go to cecsilver dot com. Link is in the description below, as I mentioned, But another way that you could support the show would be too.
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And with that being said, this was another beautiful episode. I'm the Cult of Conspiracy and my name is Jonathan.
I'm Jacob, and there's one very important.
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