This is a ten-minute video about regulation and ecigarettes. The host is a little bit obnoxious, kind of like a ten year old in a 45-year old’s body pretending to be a grown-up newscaster. But if you can get past that, it’s worthwhile mostly in the guest, Canadian anti-tobacco crusader David Sweanor talking about the mentality of the anti-tobacco crusaders who have fixed the turets on ecigarettes.

There is a bit of a mixed feeling about this in some vaping circles. Simon Clark makes some really good points about vaping advocates and their propensity to swarm committers of journalistic sin in a way that is ultimately counterproductive.

He goes on to tut-tut the movement for embracing some academics that may have played fast-and-loose with science in the past to demonize tobacco and/or alcohol unfairly. Most particularly Linda Bauld, who has become an icon in vaping circles for her take-down on an awful study that came out of San Diego and some terrible reporting that occurred afterwards.

There are a number of bad studies on ecigarettes, but just in time for the New Year UCSD ran an unusually bad one, which the media accepted uncritically. San Diego Union-Tribute’s Bradley Filkes asks “What went wrong?” and more generally why the science reporting is so lazy.

Bauld came to the rescue with this piece. She’s not the only anti-tobacco crusader to join us.

Which exemplifies some of the oddities of the politics of vaping, where you have people who are still fighting the last battle (passive smoking and smoking bans) with people who have joined in on the new one. It’s a commonplace feature on his blog that vaping advocate Michael Siegal gets more crap for his anti-tobacco crusading than his strong advocacy for vaping.

Theoretically the science should be the science and those who have been wrong in the past (on passive smoking, or as is often the case smokeless tobacco) should be taken into account. From a tactical standpoint, though, allies are allies. Their history as dragon slayers makes them particularly useful allies, now that they’ve turned their spears in the opposite direction.