ATNF 2025 - Consequences of Misperceptions – This Time, It's Personal
Correcting Consumer & Health Care Provider Misperceptions panel.
Good afternoon.
My name is Skip. I’m your friendly neighborhood advocate with lived experience. I have been rather vocal about the lack of inclusion of people who use nicotine in these conversations, and I am honored to have the opportunity to use my voice to represent them today.
The first time I spoke at a conference was at GTNF in 2022. I shared stories about some of my former customers from the vape shop. I pointed out what a mistake it is to use fearmongering and misinformation to deter people from using smoking harm reduction products.
I concluded that presentation with a heartfelt plea: “I am begging all of you to please help me put an end to allowing people who smoke to die from our mistakes.” The urgency of this issue cannot be overstated. The number of people who have misperceptions about nicotine and alternatives to smoking tobacco is increasing.
So, once again, I’d like to take a few minutes of your time and share stories about the harm caused when people aren’t given accurate information about the various types of recreational nicotine products. But this time, it’s personal.
In 2014, my 5-year-old granddaughter cried while she watched her dad, who smoked, curled up on the bathroom floor, suffering a heart attack. She was terrified that her daddy was going to die. I will never forget her waving at the helicopter that airlifted him to the hospital. As she sobbed, she said, “Goodbye, Daddy. I love you. Please don’t die. Please come home.”
Last year, my now-teenage granddaughter told me what she had learned about vaping in school. She said that vaping will give you cancer or a heart attack, that it will damage your brain, and give you popcorn lung. She was fighting back tears, and I wondered if the memory of her dad on the bathroom floor was haunting her as she asked me to stop vaping.
I asked if she had learned about smoking, and she said no. When I asked why she thought they didn’t learn about smoking, she said, “Because vaping is worse.”
I struggled to respond. How could I explain that what she was told was utterly wrong without destroying her ability to believe information about other vital topics she would learn about in school? If she knows they didn’t tell her the truth about vaping, will she believe teachers when they talk about safe sex or the dangers of texting and driving?
A couple of weeks ago, I got a text from my granddaughter’s mom. She had caught my granddaughter smoking. My reaction was one of anger towards the educators who didn’t think it was important to teach about the dangers of smoking and instead told children falsehoods about vaping causing things like popcorn lung.
Misperceptions about reduced-risk products not only steer some at-risk kids to choose to smoke when they experiment with nicotine, but it also keeps some adults smoking instead of switching to something less harmful.
My husband’s best friend was a lung cancer survivor who couldn’t stop smoking. I suggested he try vaping, but his doctor said vaping was as bad as smoking, and his wife believed the doctor, not me. How could I be right and a doctor be wrong? So, he listened to his wife and kept smoking.
One day, he sat on the couch, complaining about the weather. He had a cup of coffee in one hand and a cigarette in the other. In the middle of a sentence, he suddenly collapsed. His wife called for help. By the time help arrived, he was dead. We will never know if it would have made a difference if he had quit smoking when he beat lung cancer, but we do know that continuing to smoke increased his odds of an early death with every puff.
I take no joy in having been right about smoking harm reduction when his wife wishes she had listened to me. I regret that I didn’t find a way to change her mind. I feel her pain and loneliness. And I feel the pain of their kids and grandkids.
I can only do so much as one person, but I am encouraging my granddaughter to take a stand and pursue youth advocacy around the importance of truthful health education to young people. I also intend to raise my voice to try to correct the misperceptions held by so many people who smoke and the people who love them.
Will you join me in this effort? What are you prepared to do so that what happened to my husband’s best friend, his wife, and my granddaughter doesn’t happen to other families?
Thank you!
Notes:
My blog is a personal project. It is not affiliated with any current or past employers or groups with which I volunteer. I receive no financial compensation for my efforts to create this content. Thank you to those who have offered to fund this project and compensate me for my time and effort. This is my gift to those interested in nicotine. Community service is important to me. Volunteering is something I have done since I was a child.
My blog, Skip's Corner, has an X/Twitter account.
My personal accounts are on BlueSky, LinkedIn, and X (Twitter).