People who use electronic cigarette devices are called ‘vapers’. They ‘vape’. They don’t smoke. Because instead of noxious shit and tar and dead leaves and stuff, WE now instead inhale our nicotine in a harmless… stuff. In fact not just harmless but I’d say totally beneficial to the vaper and all those around him. I base that on nothing. Except trust. Perhaps naive trust, that what I’m now doing is not only ‘harmless’ to me but to those around me, those secondary vapers. Rotten freeloading cheap bastards too mean to buy their own e-liquids, they sneakily inhale all my left-overs.

But more and more people are switching to electronic addiction aids so obviously the tobacco companies are hedging and getting into that market too. Rather than leave all those addicts they’ve nurtured over the years to the cashflow of others. But it is reckoned that thousands of lives a year will be saved from smoking related illness and death by using e-things. Which is good news. Particularly for me.

Yet now, in a similar vein to the tobacco companies, the anti-smoking lobbies are quickly becoming anti-vaping lobbies, worried as they are that they’ll all be out of a job if the world stops smoking. And their argument is that ‘we don’t konw enough about e-cigarettes and their potential to harm’. Even though learned professors have made quite remarkable claims for weaning smokers into vapers.

But the best argument made against e-cigarettes was that ‘a baby accidentally swallowed his mother’s e-cig cartridge!!!!!’ Genuinely made as a supposedly valid point against electronic cigarettes specificallly.

In which case we must seriously consider banning of the following items: buttons, coins, stones, caps from almost any container, scraps of paper, fluff, keys, earth, sand, screws and nails, nuts and bolts and dog shit. All things (but by no means an exhaustive list) regularly thrust into the mouths of babies by their own hands that are swallowable.

Babies under 1 live in an oral world. And they analise that world by shoving eveything possible into their mouths. Indiscriminately. How much of that analysis is useful is an unknown, but it certainly attracts parental attention.

Freudian psychosexual development theory which termed this ‘oral phase’ is more famous for its next level, the anal one. Because people who have problems leaving that level remain ‘anally fixated’ and become of the obsessive compulsive variety of humanity. Who we term, ‘a bit anal’ for that very reason. Though it should be mentioned that Freud was a touch weird and every action at any stage of life, according to him, was sexually-linked in some way.

The anti-smoking lobby are a bit weird too. A bit anal. If a baby eats a toaster, its not really the toaster’s fault, is it?

Happy vaping Wednesday

A xxxx