Yikes! This is my first blog post in more than six months. I’m writing less than ever (obviously) as I gradually ease into what a friend calls “rewirement.” But I can’t let go of the story of vaping and smoking, largely because the US government gets it so wrong, as does much of the coverage in the mainstream press. Meantime, the so-called public interest groups that continue to oppose safer nicotine products and demonize the tobacco industry continue to do more harm than good.

As a new administration takes over in Washington, the issue is more timely than ever. Trump & Co. have an opportunity to, quite literally, save millions of lives by fixing the FDA’s approach to e-cigarettes and other reduced-risk nicotine products. Interestingly, just before the transition in DC, FDA regulators authorized the marketing of 20 Zyn nicotine pouch products including those in flavors citrus, cinnamon, chill and cool mint. This was a welcome sign that the FDA’s Center for Tobacco Products will support the idea of tobacco harm reduction—that is, the idea that people who can’t or won’t quit smoking traditional cigarettes should be encouraged to switch to safer nicotine products, like Zyn.

If you haven’t been paying attention — or if you’ve read the often wrong-headed coverage of e-cigarettes — you may be surprised to learn that vapes and other means of delivering nicotine without burning tobacco are, first, much safer than traditional cigarettes and, second, one of the most effective, if not the most effective, way to help people who smoke give up their deadly habit.

Cigarettes kill about half of long-time smokers; e-cigarettes have yet to kill anyone, as best as we can tell. Well-regulated safer nicotine products have helped to drive down smoking rates in Japan, Norway, Sweden and the UK, among other places.

But not here — thanks in large part to the FDA. Last week, the nonprofit drug-policy website Filter published my story about the agency’s regulation of vaping under the headline “How the FDA made a “gigantic, chaotic mess of the US vapes market.” Here’s how the story begins:

Twenty-one years ago, a Chinese pharmacist named Hon Lik patented the first electronic cigarette. Lik smoked heavily, and hoped to help people quit smoking by giving them the nicotine they crave in a safer way.

His invention succeeded wildly. It spawned a $28-billion industry that is disrupting the global tobacco business. Leading tobacco control experts say that vapes have begun to reduce the disease and deaths caused by smoking, which kills about 480,000 people a year in the United States. Vaping is much less harmful than smoking, and more effective for smoking cessation than nicotine patches or gum.

Yet US regulators have made a dismal mess of the vapes market.

Instead of promoting safe and effective vaping, the federal government, led by the Center for Tobacco Products, a unit of the Food and Drug Administration, has gone to great lengths to keep vapes and other reduced-risk nicotine products out of the hands of consumers who want them.

The FDA’s unwillingness to authorize the sale of flavored vapes has created a vast, unregulated black and gray market of e-cigarettes, many imported from China. This was entirely predictable. Banning a product that people want almost never works — a lesson that regulators should have learned from Prohibition but did not.

Unfortunately, FDA was heavily influenced by congressional Democrats and anti-tobacco groups like the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids which, true to its name, focuses narrowly on protecting kids from tobacco while ignoring the needs of about 28 million American adults who smoke, Teen smoking and teen vaping are both way down, as it happens, and the Tobacco 21 law passed during the first Trump administration is expressly designed to keep tobacco products out of the hands of people under 21. But the adult smokers are being denied access to innovative nicotine products, like e-cigs, that could save their lives.

There’s much in my story for Filter. You can read it here.

Nerd alert: Here comes another story on tobacco policy. This one looks at what appears to be the undue influence of Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire former mayor of New York City, and his philanthropic arm, Bloomberg Philanthropies, on the World Health Organization.

Bloomberg, his foundation and the nonprofits they fund, including the Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids, crusade against e-cigarettes, particularly those with flavors that appeal to kids. Tobacco-control experts, including most of the former presidents of the Society for Research on Nicotine and Tobacco, argue for a more balanced approach—one that strives to keep e-cigarettes out of the hands of kids but makes them available to smokers who use them to quit combustible tobacco.

The WHO, as I reported the other day, is a fount of misinformation when it comes to e-cigarettes. The question is, why? Today’s story explores the influence of Bloomberg and his allies on the WHO. Bloomberg Philanthropies also spends considerable sums trying to shape tobacco and vaping policy by directly supporting nonprofits and government regulators in low and middle-income countries; this is why he’s been accused of what’s been called “philanthro-colonialism.”

Mike Cummings, a widely-respected tobacco control expert and a professor at the Medical University of South Carolina, told me:

As an important voice in public health, WHO should be basing its advocacy and communications on science, not emotion and the private view of wealthy donors. Mike Bloomberg is well respected as a champion for public health, including tobacco control, but on the issue of smoking harm reduction, he appears to be blind to the science that is emerging and the real potential to end the deadly epidemic of disease caused using smoked tobacco.

Neither the World Health Organization nor Bloomberg Philanthropies responded to my emails asking

You can read the rest of my story here at Medium.

Last week, I gave a talk titled "The unchecked power of philanthropy" at an event called The Global Nicotine Forum in Warsaw. I explained how and why I'd decided to write about Bloomberg Philanthropies' campaign against electronic cigarettes, beginning with a long article in the Chronicle of Philanthropy in March of last year and continuing to this day.

The talk, delivered via Zoom, turned out to be timely. The campaign by Bloomberg and its allies surely contributed to the FDA's decision this week to ban products made by JUUL, a popular brand of e-cigarettes. That decision is misguided, in my view.

For reasons that I don't fully understand, the edited version of my talk, which I posted to Medium, has generated a lot of praise and become by far my best-read story ever on Medium. Here's a link.

Here we are, with summer coming to a close, and I am more than a little surprised to find that I have devoted most of my working time during 2021 to a single topic--electronic cigarettes. I’ve never been a smoker or a vaper, and paid no attention to e-cigarettes until late last year, when I began reporting a story about Bloomberg Philanthropies and the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids for the Chronicle of Philanthropy.

The more I learned, the more I came to believe that the topic meets the three criteria that I try to apply when deciding what stories to report. (1) Is it important? (2) Is it being covered well by others, i.e., do I have something to contribute? (3) Can my coverage in some way, big or small, make a difference?

(Those of you familiar with Effective Altruism will recognize those criteria as the framework of importance, neglectedness and tractability used by EA-influenced organizations such as the Open Philanthropy Project when deciding where to allocate resources to solve a problem.)

Yesterday, I posted a story with the headline “Vaping can benefit public health.” That’s not my opinion. It’s the conclusion of 15 former presidents of the Society for Research on Nicotine and Tobacco, who argue in a new paper that a growing body of evidence suggests that vaping, which is safer than smoking, can be an effective way of helping today’s smokers quit. “The potential lifesaving benefits of e-cigarettes for adult smokers deserve attention equal to the risks to youths,” these scientists write. “Millions of middle-aged and older smokers are at high risk of near-future disease and death.”

This is rebuke to, among others, government health authorities in the US and elsewhere, Bloomberg and Tobacco-Free Kids, all of which are pushing to restrict access to vapes. You can read my story here.

Stanton Glantz, one of the world’s best-known tobacco researchers, had everything going for him — a first-class brain, financial support, a tenured professorship and a passion for the task at hand. No scientist, it seemed, was more committed to reducing the death and disease caused by smoking

Glantz led the creation of archive of tobacco-industry documents at the University of California at San Francisco, where he was a professor of medicine. He famously called attention to the risks of second-hand smoke, which helped turn public opinion against smoking. He inspired many.

“He was a hero of mine,” says Michael Siegel, a physician and tobacco control expert who worked with Glantz at UCSF.

Glantz is no longer a hero, not to Siegel and not to other critics who fought alongside him in the battle against smoking. They say that Glantz’s hard-line opposition to all things tobacco has led him to exaggerate the dangers and downplay the benefits of e-cigarettes, which have helped millions of smokers quit.

His bad science has enabled bad policy, which makes it harder for people to switch from deadly combustible cigarettes to vapes, which are safer although by no means entirely safe. Misinformation about vaping promulgated by Glantz and his allies has sure kept many people smoking. That’s tragic.

Undark, a web magazine about science, has just published my 5,000-word story about Glantz. (It was republished today by Mother Jones.) Please read the story, which goes into great detail about Glantz’s work.

The philanthropy of the very rich is an exercise of power, says Stanford professor Rob Reich. As such, billionaire philanthropy deserves scrutiny and not automatic gratitude.

With that in mind, I began a deep dive three months ago into a campaign against electronic cigarettes funded largely by a $160-million, three-year grant from Bloomberg Philanthropies. Much of that went to the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, the US's most powerful anti-tobacco nonprofit. Meantime, Michael Bloomberg, the patron of Bloomberg Philanthropies, billionaire founder of the Bloomberg media empire and former New York City mayor, spent millions of dollars of his own money fund political anti-vaping efforts, notably two ballot measures in San Francisco that led to ban on e-cigarettes in the city. A city where, not incidentally, you can still buy combustible cigarettes -- which are much more dangerous than e-cigs -- and marijuana. That makes no sense if what you care about is public health.

My research and reporting, which included 30 interviews, led to a story published today by The Chronicle of Philanthropy. The tobacco control movement is "neck-deep in intractable, internecine warfare" over vaping, Cliff Douglas, formerly of the American Cancer Society told me. Bloomberg, Tobacco-Free Kids and the major lung, cancer, and heart charities are on one side, opposing vaping, and pointing to its impact on kids and teens. Public health experts, by contrast, argue that e-cigarettes are a disruptive and potentially valuable technology that can and do help people quit smoking.