There are currently 73 MEPs in the UK. Elected every five years (although I don’t actually remember the last MEP election). Being involved in Europe means the UK needs a lot of bodies to “fairly” represent the UK in matters being discussed in European committees, councils and so forth.

According to the Euro Parliament (Office of the UK) website, the region I live in has 7 representatives. 7!

• Patrick O’Flynn (UKIP)
• Vicky Ford (Conservative)
• Richard Howitt (Labour)
• Stuart Agnew (UKIP)
• Geoffrey Van Orden (Conservative)
• Tim Aker (UKIP)
• David Campbell Bannerman (Conservative)

What do the MEPs actually do? Other than causing us mere mortals a massive headache at times with some utterly ridiculous policies (yes McAvan I’m looking at you!) they are supposed to:

This is going to be a first. Normally, my posts (with one exception so far) are written entirely by me and me alone. They reflect my thoughts, feelings and opinions on the variety of subjects, points of view and commentary on “science” surrounding the topic of vaping. This time, I’ve enlisted the aid of a few other advocates and vapers to help me compile this post, as I feel this is actually a pretty big topic for just one person to cover. So, without any further ado let’s get started with commentary kindly provided with permission from Lorien, Shannon, and Fergus.

Before I start this post there’s a few points I simply have to clarify:

• Underage vaping or smoking

As an advocate for vaping, I have no issues with teens taking to vaping or smoking if that is their choice. I would prefer that they didn’t do either of course, but if they were to do one or the other, I would prefer they vaped but I have no issue with them doing either.

This is another one of those “something on my mind” type posts where I’m going to try to clarify some thinking, and maybe organise the thoughts rumbling through my addled brain. It may also bring together some threads from previous posts that I’ve mentioned but not expanded upon.

Nothing really prompted this post as such, just a bunch of thoughts that need to be emptied out to make room for more. Time for a rewind.

The thing with journalists is they tend to get friendly with regular sources of information. The “go-to” folks for soundbites and information, no matter how bizarre that information is. The flip side of that, is when they are ‘confronted’ by opposing views the immediately adopt the “hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil” stance by retreating past la-la land up to cloud cuckoo.

This whole thing really started to gather momentum when Public Health England released the recent evidence update on electronic cigarettes. We knew that there would be some responses from the opponents to vaping, the trouble is the evidence update was in fact a response to the multitude of rubbish science and poor media.

What follows here is purely my opinion on what seems to be a subject that is becoming the flash point for a lot of debate, argument and bickering. I’ll try to be as coherent as possible.

Most of you know that the All Party Parliamentary Group on ecigs met last week and a lot of good things came from that, there is already a very good write-up on the meeting from James Dunworth over on the Ashtray Blog, after all he was there. I wasn’t. Most of the information that came from the APPG I know through either that blog, the VTTV show The Haze Hour the following day, twitter (of course), plus the following two blog posts. Sarah Jakes, guest posted on Lorien Jollye’s blog to clarify her personal stance followed by a second posting by Lorien herself.

There’s been a lot going around in the media lately about conflict of interest with regards to research into vapourisers. The biggest mud-slinging has of course been from The Lancet about the PHE Report. Of course, the trouble with the public health industry and science is this. There will always be a conflict of interest. These conflicts range from pure ideological views (Nanny McPhee et al), to funding conflicts. Sometimes the COI is subtle and sometimes not.

There is a saying on Twitter, “If you can’t debate in 140 characters or less, you’ve lost the argument”. Sometimes this could be true, but in others the character limit is incredibly, well, limiting, even with character substitutions and abbreviations it is incredibly difficult to get your point across on a complex subject.

This is one of the reasons I have a blog, so I can take my time and be as wordy as I need to be to explain the things I’m writing about.

Today Sara Kalkhoran and I published “Modeling the Health Effects of Expanding e-Cigarette Sales in the United States and United Kingdom”

Is the beginning of one of Frampton’s latest blogs. It is always amusing (if a little difficult to digest his grasp of the English language) to read these as most of the time (95% CI) it’s all based on mythical hypothesis and conjecture, none of which surprises me when it comes to the “leading tobacco control activist”.

It must surely come as no surprise at all that there has finally been a response to the Public Health England 2015 review on e-cigarettes from the hard-core anti-vaping opponents. So I wasn’t particularly surprised when the excrement hit the whirling blades of the media, no sir.

There had of course been a gleeful comment from Simone Chumpman that “the answer” (and I know someone said “42” to that) was coming “later this week” regarding the provenance of the “95% less harmful” phrase.