🔎 Let's talk for a minute about why the Supreme Court amicus brief from Sen. Dick Durbin might actually be a good thing. It's because Durbin's fanaticism and hyperbole are on such lurid display that it'll give the Court a clear sense of just who's pushing vape prohibition.
1/🪡 The first thing SCOTUS law clerks will notice is the Durbin brief is strictly partisan -- all the signatories are part of Durbin's particular wing of the Democratic party. On political issues, that's fine -- but in this context it signals there's no unanimity, as Durbin pretends.

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We need to talk about the debacle of 22nd Century's bet on low-nicotine cigarettes -- not only as an asinine business model but what the implosion says about @FDATobacco and the news media that covers nicotine policy.
1/ 🪡 Here is the company's stock chart for the last year and it's a complete wipeout. It's hard to overstate just how bad this is -- but if you invested in this company, you have basically lost your shirt.

By granting cert in the Triton case, the Supreme Court is now poised to rebuke @FDATobacco's unlawful and destructive vape regulatory scheme. But readers of the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, the nation's two biggest papers, would have no idea. They didn't cover it.
1/🪡 It's not like these papers don't obsess over SCOTUS / FDA. They've each got scores of stories in just the last few days, including this one on Loper fretting how the agency's "critics" (read: the American people) may confront the agency. (Shut up and eat your spinach, peasants!)

It’s literally incredible. The world’s leading public health authority, @WHO, is now getting regularly lit up by @CommunityNotes for brazen and calculated deceits about nicotine vaping. Let’s take a close look.
THREAD 🪡 There is a widely-held scientific consensus that vaping is vastly less harmful than smoking. Yet with zero supporting evidence, WHO flatly insists the opposite, with the clear intent to dissuade the public.

Deceptive headline, half-truths and a whole lot of scaremongering. @USATODAY's @Mary_Walrath just wrote maybe the most irresponsible anti-vaping story we've ever seen. Let's do the fact-checking her editors should have done before publishing this train wreck. THREAD 🧵 Reporting on a study from @EmoryRollins, Walrath's piece veered off the rails immediately with the headline. There isn't a shred of evidence (in the article, the study or anywhere else) to support the claim that vapor poses a risk "like secondhand smoke."

🔎 This is horrendous. In a forum at @SMPAGWU yesterday (on misinformation!) @DrCaliff_FDA once again misleads Americans with the false notion that vaping is just as dangerous as smoking — thus deterring people from switching to a vastly safer alternative. 1/ Here's the verbatim remarks. Notice the false equivalence and the bunk gateway theory and how he lumps vaping in with lethal diseases -- even though vaping has injured or killed precisely no one and in fact saves lives.

🧐 Can we just talk for a second about the crayola math that @FDATobacco is using to rationalize its attack on open-system vape products? As @Vaping360 reports, the agency showcased an erroneous figure in its own press release.
1/🪡 And as our @GregTHR notes, the 2023 National Youth Tobacco Survey reported that 7.7 percent of middle and high school students had used an e-cig in the prior 30 days. AMONG THOSE respondents, 11.3 percent said they used a Smok product — which is 0.87 percent of total respondents.

🚨 BREAKING 🚨

Blistering ruling against @FDATobacco just dropped in the 5th circuit vape case. Here's our statement, along with analysis.
THREAD 🪡 Here is a link to the full ruling, which is chock-full of hard-hitting language that rebukes FDA's methods, duplicity, and the horrendous outcomes it has caused.
theavm.org/s/bb9i.pdf

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Here's a crucial piece just posted in the prestigious Chronicle of @Philanthropy by renowned journalist @MarcGunther. It examines the blinkered intransigence that is blocking progress on tobacco harm reduction. Let's dive in.
THREAD 🧵 The piece centers on Cliff Douglas @cdoug, a conscientious voice in this debate who has tried mightily to foster an open and principled discourse on the most effective ways to help people quit smoking.

Sponsored content site @statnews is hyping a “scoop” that Biden officials…met with people they wish to regulate. In other news, the sun came up. But the piece also peddles intellectual dishonesty that deserves a closer look.
🔎 THREAD 🧵 @NicholasFlorko is on the byline, natch, and he complains about how big bad “tobacco industry allies” used ulterior influence to oppose flavored vape bans.

The bureaucrats @FDATobacco boast about authorizing just 23 vaping products out of the 26 million applications they've reviewed, rejecting more than 99.9% of them. To illustrate how absurdly low this is, let's take a look at some other outcomes with similar odds. THREAD 🧵 Killer tornadoes are, thankfully, relatively rare. Your odds of fatality are about 1 in 13,000,000. Nevertheless, you are more likely to get swept away by a twister than get a flavored vape product application through FDA.

The @washingtonpost often complains about the spread of "misinformation." But then they gobble up spoon-fed, vape-bashing clickbait even when it's contradicted by leading health authorities and their own prior reporting. Let's examine. THREAD 🧵 The Post recounts the experience of a young man named Davey Bauer, who developed severe influenza and needed a double-lung transplant. His doctors devised a novel stop-gap measure to save his life.

@FDATobacco honcho Brian King talks a big game, like when he said he would authorize more vape products if the industry would only show him "the science." But in reality, he keeps reciting the same tired talking points and recycled analogies. Let's examine.
THREAD 🧵 "As far as I am @FDATobacco director," King declared last winter, "we will continue to make decisions based on science, not ideology." (NB: King's own staff told Reagan-Udall “decisions of scientists are being overridden” by him and that there was a “got-to-get-them” culture.)

https://twitter.com/i/status/1639060070062526464

🔎 Insightful piece here by Dave Dobbins, former COO of Truth Initiative, in the Journal of the Food and Drug Law Institute. All about @FDATobacco's chronic intransigence, or what's commonly known as Calvinball. Here are some highlights:
fdli.org/2023/06/sugges… Dobbins zeroes in on the staggering disconnect between the number of submitted new tobacco product applications (26 *million*) and the number of approved products (only 23).

Politico finally features a nicotine manufacturer angry at the failure and incompetence of the federal government. Objective journalism at last? Nope, it’s the fire-starter of that very same regulatory arson, Mitch Zeller.
THREAD 🧵 The interview is behind a $10,000 paywall (health equity, FTW!) but AVM lassoed the key excerpts. First up, the feds must do more to help folks quit smoking, says the architect of the ban on the most effective smoking cessation method of all time.

Is @nytimes simply printing @truthinitiative press releases? The journalism could hardly be more slanted and error-filled if they were. Let's take a close look at this latest agitprop disaster.
THREAD 🧵 Times pop culture scribe Callie Holtermann recites the long-debunked youth-vaping mythology: that our industry uses pretty colors and flavors to market to teens. We don't, and that's clearly reflected in the latest @CDCgov, @US_FDA data—which shows youth use at all-time lows.

Here's why it is crucial to document how the @nytimes and @By_CJewett willfully slant vaping coverage by routinely excluding harm reduction voices. She rarely interviews anyone in THR and never any actual Americans who quit smoking with vaping, the heart of the issue.
THREAD 🧵 We've cautioned Jewett about prohibition causing black markets and how FDA bans drive people back to cigarettes and how law-abiding American small business is getting crushed. Yet this recent piece blows through all that guidance and urges yet more crackdowns on vape products.

The new NYTS stats from @CDCgov and @US_FDA are trouble for the anti-vaping zealots: just 2.5% of teens vape daily in 2023. Let's see how the Bloomberg-funded busybodies are trying to spin the results to excuse their assault on our life-saving products. THREAD 🧵 From @BloombergDotOrg's @drkellyhenning and @TobaccoFreeKids: the "take credit where it ain't due" gambit combined with "the crisis continues."

AVM has obtained the full video and transcript of the recent Potemkin Moms conference, featuring members of congress and federal officials genuflecting to these Hamptons dilettantes with promises to outlaw the most effective smoking cessation method ever known.
THREAD 🧵 Remember, this whole thing is a charade. PAVe is a pure, astroturf front group with virtually no organic support. They are influential only because they are backed by a man worth $100B and they provide the manufactured pretext for prohibition policies.

https://twitter.com/VaporAmerican/status/1702763609171034274

Not satisfied by simply bribing established news organizations to push his prohibition agenda, Michael Bloomberg @Bloombergdotorg has launched a new outlet called The Examination @examinationnews as a mouthpiece for his puritan obsessions. Let’s have a look. THREAD 🧵 The Examination launched last month and by pure coincidence, the editor would have you believe, it has a dedicated focus on three distinct issues that have been longtime fixations of Michael Bloomberg.

Something's missing from the press hype on FDA's pending menthol cigarette ban. The agency's own metrics for success hinge on smokers switching to menthol vapes—and @FDATobacco has outlawed all such products. Why are reporters ignoring this central fact? Hint: 💰💵💰.
THREAD 🧵 Everyone knows demand for menthol-flavored nicotine won't disappear when menthol cigarettes are banned. But FDA-funded research projects that hundreds of thousands of deaths can be prevented *if* smokers have access to low-risk menthol alternatives.
reason.org/commentary/the…