Thank you for reading and commenting, Ida!

So there definitely is a lot of money that gets tossed around to researchers, advocacy groups, and so on, and that definitely does make it harder to sort out the honest folks from the folks with ulterior motives. I’d never disagree with that.

I should note however that a fair amount of money does get passed around on the anti-vaping side as well. For instance, Richard Hurt of the Mayo Clinic has received thousands of dollars over the years from GlaxoSmithKline and Pfizer, both of which make NRT products of their own (like the patch). Hurt hasn’t had many nice things to say about vaping, and neither has the Mayo Clinic.

Of course, I obviously can’t get inside the minds of the experts on either side of this issue, so I won’t pretend to know who can be trusted and who can’t (that’s why I decided against even touching on this subject in the piece). I just feel like, given the vast amount of research showing that vaping is significantly less harmful than smoking, we should be making it easier, not harder, for smokers to switch to vaping if they think it can help them.