What's Selling e-Cigarettes? Are they being UNsold by supporters and SOLD by Opponents?

Here’s a proposition for smokers – we’ll make cigarettes safe, we’ll take you out of the cold and we’ll save you 70% to boot.

You’d think Americans would drop their Marlboros and head for these products in a heartbeat!

But they're not – at least not anywhere in the volume you’d expect.

This is despite the fact that some e-Cig Co’s are practically giving away the devices so you only have to pay as you go - the nicotine version of giving away the razor to sell the blades.

If you’d done your homework on how the tobacco companies understood their customers’ motivation and then spoke to your average smoker, you’d quickly understand why.

Smokers don’t necessarily want a safer cigarette. They say they do but they are much more neurotic about their habit than that – and self-flagellation is part of the deal. Paying too much and being forced out into the cold to smoke has become a misery-loves-camaraderie ritual. Then there is the familiarity of the always-available soft little tube of reassurance – something that can’t be found with an electronic tube.

The amazing irony is that the people whom you might think would support eCigarettes, health groups and government officials are not. We get the revenue issues – both are dependent on the fabulous tax bounty of smoking. But this where it gets sticky – they also claim these products are not safe. Or at least, not proven safe – unlike cigarettes, which are proven deadly. In other words, once they’re proved deadly then they can take a position on eCigarettes.

That’s the irony – once they’re proven deadly, they become appealing to smokers again! So the eCigarette people (sometimes referred to as vapers) are effectively un-selling eCigarettes while the anti-eCigarette people, by claiming these are not safe are actually selling these products.

Welcome to the looking-glass world of marketing!

© 2009 Alan Brody

eCigarettes and Cigarette Seduction

It is hard to read this New York Times article with a straight face because the line-up of interests are so nakedly obvious: the FDA watching its turf, the drug co.s, the state taxes, the health groups with their self-righteousness and mysterious funding.

Nevertheless, the promises and challenges of a reconstructed, artificial cigarette are immense.

The bottom line – at least from the perspective of quitting the Cigarette Seduction way - is that when you take away the brand magic, and smoking is reduced to a nicotine delivery system, people find it easy to quit. Or at least cut down significantly.

There is very little magic in nicotine addiction. As drugs go, this one doesn’t do much for you. If you’re addicted you need it, and that's about it. Without the magic of a real cigarette and its brand power – you'll find that you don’t need all that much nicotine. And it will be easier to control. For the rest on how to jump the last chasm, I’m afraid you’ll have to read the book.

But since there are other issues raised by eCigarettes, I’ll answer them.

Yes, of course it is silly to argue that a product which tells you on the pack that it is deadly – cannot be replaced by something that may only be merely dangerous. But its a turf war – the FDA is only acting the way a government agency typically does while the lobbyists obviously represent drug companies that not only want to stave off competition but also possibly own this idea. Health groups – which should want the ameliorative possibilities of these cigarettes explored - just want cigarettes to go away. There is no place for discussion.

Like so much of the old economy, we have become boxed in by our usual thinking. Some version of the eCigarette was developed here about 10 years ago - Philip Morris' Accord and R.J. Reynolds' Eclipse (both had the idea but not the LED technology) and were quickly dropped, thanks to all the forces above plus the fact that no one really liked these devices.

So the eCigarettes were developed in Asia and at the same time, society changed: smokers became segregated and th eprice of cigarettes rose dramatically.

From the perspective of society however, the bigger issue is: do we want to sell a drug delivery system?

There are 2 answers. Wake up, we already do in – in many different ways from Ritalin to kids to Viagra and estrogen to adults.

We may also have a way to ensure that dangerous people who must take meds – do so: you addict them to the delivery system. Think of the mass killers who somehow went off their anti-depression medications…..if they were addicted to their meds, we wouldn’t have that problem……

The bottom line is:

1. Thanks to the internet, the people who want this product will easily beat the bureaucrats who don’t.

2. A cigarette without marketing magic is a product you can easily quit.

eCigarettes - My Comments in the Wall Street Journal

eCigarettes in the Wall Street Journal

It is laughable that a product that is labeled as deadly cannot be replaced by a product that may be merely dangerous. Especially when no one ever started smoking for their good health in the first place.

The truth is that smoking is really a form of psychological self-medication.

You could argue that’s true for the interested parties too: the FDA, the States, the drug and tobacco companies and even the Health Groups are far more interested in preserving their own point of view – and funding base - than actually helping smokers.

The really interesting thing is that when you deconstruct smoking – take out the branding and all the marketing hoopla – it comes down to an odd practice that people seem able to take or leave with ease.

It also brings us face to face with the idea that tobacco is explicitly a drug and yet we don’t seem to want to have that conversation.

Bottom line – when you understand why people smoke you’ll understand that they need more than a “just say no” approach.

The fact that we now have alternatives to the very old fashioned smelly cigarette is a plus. Back in 1907 public health groups actually praised cigarettes as a health benefit over spit tobacco! (But that was before cigarette taxes and TB was the big bugaboo.)

What we now know is that debranding practices always make it easier to quit or a least confront the psychic issues that underlie smoking - so people can much more easily move on with their lives.

Yet, as always, the so-called do-gooders don’t care much about whether you live or die, just that you do it their way.

How Come School Shooters Don’t Seem to Smoke?

[Tragically we revisit this chillingly cogent argument - should cigarettes be considered a form of self-medication? Or, since cigarettes are addictive and consumed like clockwork whereas most shooters are set off because they quit their antidepressants - should not the two should be combined?]

by Alan Brody

After the horrific shootings, there is always a swarm of agents with alphabet soup windbreakers that rummage through the wreckage. Leading this group is the BATF, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, which is generally there to find casings and match them to the weapons.

It’s hard to imagine how much difference this information will make since we already know who the shooter was and just how legally they got their top of the line weapon technology.

So why aren’t they making good use of their time on the "A" and the "T" - looking for alcohol bottles and discarded cigarette butts? Granted, psychopaths seem to shun alcohol on their highly organized trails of retribution. But what about cigarettes?

Good and bad people - even sober judges - smoke. So how come there never seems to be a trail of smoldering butts? No unfinished Marlboros to mark their High Noon moment? Never a cruel cigarillo to show their contempt for society and its second-hand smoke regulations?

This is not just the Virginia Tech killer, the mad boys of Columbine seemed to be similarly abstemious. Then there is the shooting at Pearl, Miss., Jacksboro, Tenn. - and even the Amish country schoolhouse where I just can’t think of any one of them puffing on a stick, Bogey-like. John Hinckley shot Reagan with nary a puff, ditto for Chapman with John Lennon.

It seems like bad form to talk cigarettes at a time like this, although Virginia Tech’s shooter Cho, did mention Hitler, and Hitler as we know, was a non-smoker. (A vegetarian too, but that is another issue).

Is this to suggest that smoking a pack or two a day might have helped? Maybe - studies like the St. Louis survey and a recent American Journal of Psychiatry paper show that smoking and depression are profoundly linked.

The Secret Service psychologist, Dr. Robert Fein, in his study of stalkers and assassins, called the "Exceptional Case Study,” agrees. He adds there is another connected and recurring issue in the profiles of these diverse killers – with the possible exception of Hitler: that they were all at first suicidal. Once they had accepted their own demise, everything else in their terrible quests seemed to fit in rather nicely.

Now cigarettes, that much maligned flourish of youth, have the reputation, at least as far as former secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare Joseph A. Califano, Jr. is concerned, as being little more than a form of slow-motion suicide. Normally, you’d agree - who wants to be suicidal? But now we know what suicidal and depressed people can do once you free them of their bad habits, smoking may not be such a terrible thing after all.

Most reports, including those on the ASH.org website will tell you that 88% or so, of smokers have started by age 18. Except for these fellows, of course. (And it usually is fellows.) Obviously, smoking serves as a much needed form of initiation and these outcasts seem to have missed the boat.

Maybe we should invite them back. There’s something to be said for the idea of troubled people taking their suicide in slow, twenty minute increments rather than letting go in a hail of gunfire. Second-hand smoke may be a small price to pay. Besides, these shooters tend have been prescribed antidepressents but then stop taking their meds. That never happens with smokers – once they’re hooked they keep taking their smokes like clockwork.

So maybe we need to rethink the value of smoking. Of course, this would take some revisionist compromising. But dusting off the old “Reach for a Lucky Instead of a Glock” campaign is worth another look. And Lucky Strikes could be a good thing in a world of calculating psychopaths. Kool could have done just that - cooled a killer down. Camel - that could have meant nothing more than a trip to the zoo.

Realistically though, our current cigarette brands aren’t quite suicidal enough. We may have to develop a more compelling, more clinically informed family of brands that communicate the idea: “Why shoot me when you could be smoking one of these bad boys?”

This is not necessarily a call for the resurrection of the tobacco companies. After all, Philip Morris recently left New York in a puff as mounting taxes and regulation seemed to pull the rug under their Park Ave. welcome. So they moved their headquarters back to Richmond, Virginia which didn’t help the situation anyway. Apparently, easy guns trump easy cigarettes.

What we really need are prescription-strength cigarettes that health professionals can custom-design for troubled souls. We could call them Cig-Rx. They could have clinical names like Pufficide DX, or 2 Paxil-a-Day. Or they could go to the heart of the problem with displacement fantasy brands like Death Rays, Anti-Harmony, Bad Deeds, My Punishment and the freshly mentholated, Unhappy Days. These solutions are cheap, generate taxes and nourish our farmlands.

All of this really happening anyway, we just don’t control it properly. Psychcentral.com reports that doctors Cheong, Herkov & Goodman found in the St. Louis study, that depressed smokers use their cigarettes quite successfully as a way to self-medicate. This approach appears to be growing. A September 2003 study in the American Journal of Psychiatry (160:1663-1669), shows that smokers today are now more 3 times likely to be depressed than non-smokers. This is a relatively new phenomenon: back when smoking was widely accepted, there was no significant difference in depression rates between smokers and non-smokers.

Twenty five years ago that all began to change. Fewer people were smoking, but those who did were more like likely to be depressed. Note how that coincides with the beginning of this wave of suicidal, depressed, well-armed and non-smoking killers with Chapman in 1980 and Hinckley in 1981. Could it be that the health movement got to the wrong people? If so, could they call off the dogs and let them smoke again. Could the troubled people just blow off their steam again, please. It may not be good for their lungs but it could save my life. If that didn’t work at least their aura of smoke and puffing would serve as an early warning system. If you could at least smell them coming, the head start alone might be worth all the horses in Marlboro Country.

Alan Brody, a/k/a "The Smoke Whisperer" is the author of Cigarette Seduction, www.cigseduction.com