In a bizarre turn of events, the governor of Rhode Island - who paints himself as anti-tobacco - is asking the legislature to help protect Big Tobacco from competition. Governor Lincoln Chafee, in his budget bill (), proposes a whopping 80% tax on electronic cigarettes.

Another inexcusable conflict of interest is the fact that Mitch Zeller, the director of the FDA's Center for Tobacco Products and therefore the chief author of the proposed electronic cigarette regulations, came to the FDA directly from a consulting job with GlaxoSmithKline and therefore has a severe conflict of interest regarding the electronic cigarette issue.

The Rest of the Story

Fortunately, there is a simple way to evaluate this hypothesis, at least on a preliminary basis, prior to waiting for the results of longitudinal studies. Enough youth are experimenting with electronic cigarettes, and the increase in youth e-cigarette use has been dramatic and sustained enough, that if the gateway hypothesis were correct, we would be starting to see an increase in smoking prevalence among youth due to the many new smoking initiates that were converted from e-cigarette experimentation to smoking.

There is one thing you almost never hear most anti-smoking advocates and groups say to smokers who have quit via electronic cigarettes ...

In an published in BU Today, I argue that the tobacco control movement has been co-opted by a bureaucracy of large national organizations that are more interested in putting feathers in their cap than actually saving lives from smoking.

The rest of the story is that these tobacco researchers are apparently lying to the public about the legitimate conclusions of their own study in order to mislead the media and the public about the role of e-cigarettes in youth smoking. This is scientific dishonesty. And regardless of one's position on electronic cigarettes, behavior like this should play no role in the scientific debate over the appropriate role for these products.

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