by Pippa Starr
6 August, 2020
Last night I had a full-on debate/argument over the issue of kids access and use of flavour concentrates being in the home and used in a school home economics class environment.
I took on the affirmative by the narrowest of margins and my wife took on the against with a huge margin of “not acceptable”. It was not one of those arguments where you finally get to the underlying cause of frustration being that one person is really frustrated with the other because someone hasn’t put the bins out for the last 2 weeks. It was a genuine adult level debate.
In the right corner is my wife who has degrees in philosophy and law and can out debate most, while convincing you how the sky really isn’t blue. We have healthy challenging debates like this from time to time because we enjoy being intellectually challenged, we are weird like that.
And in the left corner!
I enjoy a good debate, especially when it comes to defending the life saving potential of vaping and protecting our kids from it. I don’t have extra letters with dots and dashes next to my name, but I am very well researched on the topic. Don’t get me wrong, my smoke & vape free wife is all for adults finding a way to quit safely through the use of ecigs and fully supports my smoke free journey but what I didn’t realise was it seems the anti-vape lobby has got to her mind through the power of fake news media and a construct that seems to have blindsided a generation.
On a side note note, I am so fair skinned that if I go in the sun for longer than 5 minutes without an umbrella and 3 layers of sunscreen I need to bath in aloe vera for three days, but what my wife said during our healthy debate made my face turn a whiter shade of pale. Luckily that fair skin is also thick.
I run a closed FB page designed to assist those who would like to try and make their own vape eLiquids. Last night a gentleman posted the following:
“My daughter made Pineapple lumps at school today using TFA Pineapple Juicy concentrate. These are awesome!
Has anyone else used concentrates for other purposes besides e-liquid?”
My wife said “when are you going to ban that post?
May the "Great Debate" begin!
“Why? What’s wrong with that? It’s a food flavouring being used in a food application” I profess with enthusiasm.
My wife returned fire with “no it’s a flavour used for making vape eLiquid! If I were another parent in that school and heard that someone was using a vape flavour in the home economics class I would be beyond disgusted!”
Right then, as if in slow motion I could feel any colour that I have in my freckles washing out of my face while a feeling of despair and sadness washed over my very core. I had to ask her to repeat herself because I could not believe what I just heard.
It became apparent to me right in that moment that the anti-vape soccer mum’s rhetoric had somehow infiltrated her, and I was beyond astounded.
I have been creating eLiquid both for myself and sharing recipes both at a commercial and personal level for over 4 years. I have over 2100 flavours and take this artform super seriously. My wife knows that. She fully understands the process.
Let’s touch on that process for a minute while I get the colour back in my face.
What makes up an e Liquid that goes in vape products is essentially 4 components.
1/ Propylene glycol-based flavourings.
2/ Propylene glycol (PG)
3/ Vegetable Glycerine (VG)
4/ Diluted Nicotine in PG (sometimes in VG)
Items 1-3 are also commonly used in and around the food industry in everyday supermarket products. Nicotine can be found in Tomatoes, eggplant’s, potatoes, cauliflowers, among other plants.
Now let’s put into perspective what the gentleman posted in the DIY eLiquid FB page.
He found a food purposed flavour concentrate to assist his daughter to make pineapple lumps at school. It so happens that this same flavour concentrate is also commonly used to flavour eLiquid.
“It’s a vape product!” my wife shouts with authority. “It’s a food flavour!” I rebut with further authority. “It’s wrong to have a vape product in a school and I for one would report that if I was a parent in that school”, my wife explained.
As I her heard those words echo in my ears it was as if I was sitting next to a robot that had been programmed by an anti-vape lobbyist and at that moment it felt like my wife’s brain had been taken over and it saddened me to the point of numbness.
My wife is my life and for the most part it’s like we seemingly share the same consciousness and are like two peas in a pod that are meant for each other. At that moment I could not believe what I was hearing.
I explained again that they are food flavours firstly and vape flavours secondly.
I delivered the hypothetical scenario of “what if that same exact flavour was brought at a cake supplies shop then taken to school, then another student recognised that product as being the same as they saw their Mum using to make their own DIY eLiquid with?”.
“That’s different she said, it’s a cake flavour in that situation. I suddenly go to the colour of red whilst veins are popping from the surface of my skin as I shout with a conviction of truth that even the greatest of evangelists would be in awe of,
“It’s the same bloody product!”
No matter what the scenario was that I presented from comparing fudge makers, boiled lolly manufactures and more the answers in this debate were never going to be changed by my seemingly converted wife.
It was like looking into the eyes of someone you have known for 6 years and suddenly seeing another side that you did not know existed. Her conviction would not wither.
“If that flavour concentrate came from a place where vaping eLiquid was being made it is a vape product. If it comes from another purpose, then it’s ok”, she explained with a laser focus that I have rarely ever seen.
She further explained that she often finds herself defending me regularly to others in and around her workplace and day to day life on how vaping isn’t actually as bad as smoking and not designed to hook kids to the other “fake-news converted” populous. I respect her for that, but it seems now she has been infiltrated to the point of where she believes a food flavour in a school ground being used in a pineapple lump is a vaping hazard to kids.
She kept explaining to me, “not everyone understands what you do, not everyone walks in your shoes”. She is right and it was those words that I needed to hear to really open up my eyes to be able to see how the general public robotically spew out repeated information without any knowledge, just because they heard it somewhere.
The fact that "Bloomberg funded anti-vape soccer mums" that are essentially shills for big pharma have entered the psyche of my wife brings it home to just how well they have done a job. They have sold a narrative that Kids are the main issue and it’s working to prevent vaping from being a thing to help adults quit smoking.
There is no regard for the facts as they created a campaign that was by it’s very design made to create a teen vaping epidemic. They knew by fear mongering kids that it was the best possible way to overcome the growing adult vaping population.
They knew that teens were always the best target because as any one with more than 5 minutes of experience with a teen knows that more often than not when a parent says “Don’t” to ANYTHING the teen thinks
“Yeh, should try that”.
It’s a built-in malfunction that science hasn’t been able to solve through epigenetics yet, but we all know it’s true.
I hypothesise that adults more often than not, have a simple genetic malfunction that involves believing what they hear if they hear it enough. In fact, Solomon Asch worked this out nearly 70 years ago, yet we still allow ourselves to be the subjects of conformity.
The main issue here is that some non-conformists have sinister motives that aim to take advantage of this conformist science and sell us what they want, even if it means demolishing vaping so Big Tobacco can still keep making huge profits. Big pharmaceutical is not immune here, in fact they are the ones that sowed the seeds of the “Kids teen vaping epidemic” in the first place.
My parents did not encourage smoking. The more they said not to, the more curious I was to try smoking. If there were posters in school bathrooms saying don’t try smoking, I would have tried smoking sooner. That is what teens do. Now replace the word smoking with vaping.
The kids vaping epidemic was created with that in mind. Once you follow the flow of the money you will see that. A lot of parents, kids, pollies and do gooders have fallen into the narrative of the Big Pharma initiated campaign to hook kids with vaping & quite frankly it’s disgusting. If vaping takes hold of the quit smoking market, big pharma stand to lose many billions of dollars of business.
Adults enjoy flavours just as much as kids. We were all kids, often we just grow up to be big kids.
Adults want to save their lives from a lifetime or a 2/3rds risk of smoking.
They do not want kids vaping!
They want more time with their kids!
That’s the real story here.