Stand up, be counted

Ah social media. Both a boon and a burden. I had the dubious pleasure to be introduced to another anti group yesterday which set me to headbutting my desk repeatedly.  I posted a (relatively) short blog yesterday which covered some of their tactics.

Unfortunately for them, the ever lovely bigsparklesShannon, found this little gem buried in the rough.

Cue more head/desk action on my part. Given the diabolical nature of @sacstand I just had to have a nose around, just to see what other mischief these folks were up to.  It does seem that the entire site went up in November 2013, so it is pretty old and doesn’t appear to have had any updates to it.  Either that means they can’t be bothered to maintain it, or they believe that the information contained on the site is sufficient to secure more funding.

The first page I spot is this little beauty.

So, in 2007 these folks ‘received funding’ from public health to create a toolkit to counter the tobacco industry marketing techniques.  This website appears to be from 2013, and they are posting stuff from 2007. Seems legit.  As far as I can tell, the _Attack Project _is still alive and kicking, which no doubt includes continuing to stigmatize smokers as often as possible.

So it isn’t just hide-bound office flunkeys propagating this nonsense then, they actually ‘recruit’ (by that I mean indoctrinate) other students to “take action”.  Not content with public health nannying smokers, but now other students are doing it too.  This can’t be ethical can it?

This gets very old, very quickly.

Uh, what? Nicotine dissolved in water. OK, I’ll grant this page is a little out of date, but c’mon folks if you are going to put information out, at least make sure that it is freaking accurate.

Oh yes, beating the “think of the children” drum. Again. I suppose folk believe that if this is said often enough it’ll become fact. Oh wait.

Quick, sound the alarms! Nicotine is baaaad! Right. Just FYI folks, I’m male, I smoked for 20 years, I now vape. Impotence is not part of my vocab.

Everything in that text, is pure and utter bantha poo-doo. No other way to put it.

They obviously haven’t seen that ‘second hand smoke’ is actually just a public health myth.

A post like this wouldn’t be complete without highlighting a call for regulation now would it.

Think I’ll just give the short answer to the “questions” they are asking. There’s minimal risk to the user, and ZERO risk to bystanders. How many freaking times do you have to be told?

In a rare display of self-restraint, I decided to send a lengthy, yet detailed e-mail to the program manager which I started composing last night. I finally finished it about lunchtime (yes, I should have been working, but bollocks to it) and sent it off.

It is well passed time that these entities are told straight up, stop stigmatizing and demonizing real people.

Update 10/4/15

After sending the e-mail (see PDF above), I resigned myself to being ignored, after all that is what these types of folk do isn’t it.

So you can imagine my surprise when this dropped into my inbox this evening.

You can almost hear the “you bastard” tacked on the end of that can’t you?

Yes, I’m sure you do. No doubt any and all concerns I’ve raised with them will be completely ignored.  Doubly so as I don’t actually live in Sacramento.

In other words, you’ll look at it for about thirty seconds before completely dismissing everything I said as anecdotal.

Not sure about you, but I read :

Well, quite.  Don’t worry Carol, I _will _be keeping an eye on sacSTAND and will send another mail over if I feel you’ve ignored me. So, reconvene in about a week then?