VAPING AWARENESS PUBLIC EDUCATION SOCIETY

Our Mission:

The Vaping Awareness Public Education [V.A.P.E.] Society’s core mission is to improve the general public health by facilitating informed communication between those who benefit from and/or understand vapor devices, and legislators, public health officials, the medical community, and the general public who would benefit from becoming more aware and better educated as to the life-saving potential of vaping.

This year alone, nearly half a million Americans will die from smoking related diseases, and in the next century, smoking tobacco is forecast to claim 1 billion lives. Smoking tobacco is still the number one preventable cause of death worldwide, and vapor devices are proving to be the single greatest tool we have in the fight against tobacco-related death and disease.

Vaping is successful at replacing smoking because it is a comprehensive solution that best addresses all elements of cigarette addiction, not just nicotine replacement. Vaping addresses crucial psychological and social elements of the addiction that only smokers understand, and all other nicotine replacement therapies ignore. Vaping was a solution created for smokers – by smokers – and that is why it is so effective.

Vaping is not merely a replacement of one bad habit with another. All current credible scientific evidence indicates vaping is just plain safe. After almost 12 years of intensive study, only trace amounts of potentially harmful chemicals have ever been identified in vapor, and even then, in concentrations far too low to warrant any concern for the user, much less a bystander. The scientific evidence indicates that vaping is effective at replacing one of the most harmful products on the planet, with a product that carries the same or lower risk as eating eggplant parmesan in an outdoor café, or walking down a city street, or even drinking too much water.

V.A.P.E. Society believes legislation should be based on scientific fact and medical evidence, and the evidence clearly indicates that replacing smoke with vapor benefits both the individual and the overall public health by reducing the harm caused by tobacco smoke. Unfortunately, across the nation, uninformed legislatures are ignoring facts, science and truth, and are treating vapor devices exactly the same as tobacco cigarettes; imposing the same strict use restrictions and ‘sin taxes’ that make sense for combustible tobacco products, on a product that is categorically different. Such ill-conceived legislation has the effect of encouraging continued cigarette smoking by imposing harmful restrictive barriers to an indisputably healthier alternative.

Government regulation has reached a point of near absurdity.  The current ‘deeming’ regulations released by the FDA on May 10, 2016 go so far as to ‘define’ metal tubes, plastic bottles, computer screens, batteries, and even software as “new tobacco products”.  The FDA actually mandates that vaping manufacturers deceive the general public by mislabeling products – that contain NO nicotine – as being “made from tobacco”.  A mission of the V.A.P.E. Society is to fight for truth and reality, both in labeling, and in legislative definitions.

In an effort to improve our community’s well being, it is a primary V.A.P.E. Society mission to provide the necessary resources and tools of truth to all those affected by the ills of smoking, to fight for their right to pursue healthier alternatives, in the face of massive distortion and outright falsehoods.

We believe that the facts speak for themselves: vaping saves lives. To ensure that vaping can continue to save lives, legislators need to be held responsible to the facts. Whereas facts presented by one person can be ignored, facts presented by thousands – or millions – cannot. By connecting scientific and policy experts with the Vape Community, and connecting the Vape Community with legislators and the public at large, V.A.P.E. Society hopes to ensure vaping can continue to save lives, one smoker at a time, based on fact and reason – not ignorance and fear.

Simply put, the Mission of the V.A.P.E. Society is to educate ignorant, uninformed, or misinformed politicians, health officials, journalists, and public citizens, and foster a healthy awareness of the transformative and disruptive technology called ‘vaping’ as a solution that has the potential to save more lives than any public health invention in the last century.