Jacob Grier offers a sneak peek of his #GFN25 keynote on how the media misrepresents tobacco harm reduction. He unpacks the narratives driving public fear, the criminalization of safer nicotine products, and the explosive growth of the illicit vape trade. As millions turn to vaping despite the headlines, is tobacco control losing its grip on the narrative?
Featuring:
JACOB GRIER
Author, Freelance Writer
The New Prohibition / The Rediscovery of Tobacco
@jacobgrier
Transcription:
00:02 - 01:21
[Brent Stafford]
Hi, I'm Brent Stafford and welcome to another edition of RegWatch on GFN.TV. Well this is it our final episode before we pack up the studio here in Vancouver and head off to Warsaw, Poland for the 12th edition of the Global Forum on Nicotine. GFN 2025 kicks off next Thursday, June 19th. And if you can't attend in person, you can still catch every moment via the free live stream. Just register at gfn.events. We hope to see you there. Joining us today for this special episode is author and freelance writer Jacob Grier. Grier is a US-based journalist known for his sharp critiques of tobacco control and his principled advocacy for harm reduction. He's written for reason slate the atlantic and more and he's the author of two influential books: The New Prohibition, The Dangerous Politics of Tobacco Control, published in 2023, and the groundbreaking 2019 work, The Rediscovery of Tobacco, Smoking, Vaping, and the Creative Destruction of the Cigarette. Jacob, it's great to have you back on the show.
01:22 - 01:24
[Jacob Grier]
Hi, Brent. Great to see you again. Thanks for having me on.
01:24 - 01:42
[Brent Stafford]
You bet. So, Jacob, you're delivering a keynote at GFN 2025 that takes place on June 19th, as I mentioned. And the keynote is on how the media covers tobacco harm reduction. How would you characterize the mainstream narrative today around nicotine?
01:42 - 03:04
[Jacob Grier]
If I had to pick one word to characterize it, I would say it's outdated. And specifically outdated by about 25, 30 years. And this is the point that I bring up a lot, which is that the mindset that a lot of people have about tobacco control and about nicotine now is really grounded in the 1990s and before. And when you look at that period, pretty much the only game in town when it came to nicotine was cigarettes, which are incredibly deadly. And you had them pushed by tobacco companies, which were incredibly dishonest. And so that's the framework that a lot of people bring to the current debate, even though things have changed substantially with regard to development of much safer sources of nicotine. But people haven't updated their framework for understanding now that we no longer face the same very harsh choice that we faced back then, which was either abstinence or just being okay. with a massive death toll due to smoking, whereas now there's a lot of different ways that things could go, thanks to the development of safer products like snooze and vaping, where we need to think a lot more carefully about nicotine and how it might be consumed and continue on in the future in a way that doesn't have this massive death toll that cigarettes had, and where tobacco companies aren't necessarily only selling something that is remarkably deadly.
03:04 - 03:12
[Brent Stafford]
So what do you see then as the key blind spots, the distortions underlying the assumptions that shape the narrative?
03:14 - 04:27
[Jacob Grier]
How much time do we have, Brent? Because I feel like we could discuss that for a long time. There's so many ways to go with that. And I think one that we talk about a lot in the field of harm reduction is just the evaluation of evidence and how nicotine becomes demonized. And we don't really see a fair assessment of products like snus and vaping where statistically rare harms that stand out a lot become the mainstream narrative. Like we saw this in the debate over vape lung, so-called vape lung in the United States in 2019. where there were these isolated cases of people being severely harmed, in some case dying, from the use of vapor products. But there was no, both the media and the CDC at the time did a terrible job of explaining that it became clear very quickly that these were due to illicit cannabis products that had been adulterated with vitamin E acetate, which is completely irrelevant to nicotine vaping. And then, but that became the dominant story was that vaping was, nicotine vaping was causing this. And the far larger harm caused by cigarettes just kind of fades into the background.
04:27 - 04:48
[Brent Stafford]
You had said that, you know, it needs to be updated. It's out of date. And that, you know, people are, have, you know, gone back to the 1990s kind of a frame. But as you said, there was only one kind of nicotine available. Are they... I think they've innovated, haven't they, a little bit? And speaking about how they handled Evali, they really jumped on that.
04:49 - 06:57
[Jacob Grier]
Yeah, absolutely. And I think in professional tobacco control in academia and in the nonprofits that are funded, like Bloomberg, for example, there is a very strong ideological commitment to demonizing nicotine. There's a view that... sort of discredits the idea that anyone does it for reasons that they might enjoy. They never center the actual consumer. It's always seen as the person who is vaping and using nicotine as a victim and needs to be liberated from this. You've seen this in a lot of work on prohibitionist approaches as tobacco, where they contrast it with alcohol. And they say that, well, of course, adults, a few of them have problems, but for the most part, adults can decide that they can enjoy alcohol responsibly. And then they deny that anyone does that with nicotine or smoking. And it is a different product, but I think it's completely irresponsible to deny that pleasure plays any role in this and then why people do it. And so that's a huge blind spot in the narrative. And it also ties back, I think, to the smoking ban debate of the early 2000s, where regardless of what your stance is on where smoking should not be allowed and how comprehensive these bans should be, a lot of the evidence that was brought out to pass smoking bans was not very well grounded. And, you know, I wrote about this extensively in the Rediscovery of Tobacco about how there were cases in California or in, sorry, in Montana. But they'd use very small sample studies to show a tremendous effect, like claiming that a smoking ban would reduce heart attacks by 60% in six months. I mean, it's just a completely outlandish claim, but people in tobacco control were okay with it because it helped them achieve their ends. And now we're dealing with the legacy of that attitude towards being responsible with science, where a lot of the same people who are involved in those debates on the pro-prohibitionist side are now the same people doing it for vaping. But they've accustomed both the media and everyone else to accepting these narratives.
06:58 - 07:21
[Brent Stafford]
It's almost as if they're protecting the old narratives that were used in order to bring in what they see as successful tobacco control measures. So, but for the evidence around secondhand smoke or but for nicotine being addictive, tobacco control would have never have achieved the control that they've got.
07:22 - 08:16
[Jacob Grier]
Yeah. And I think the other... thing that arises out of that is that's also how we de-center the ultimate consumer user of the product. Because to have the political success that people had when passing smoking bans, they had to delegitimize tobacco use. And that is carried over now into the debate about vaping, where it becomes much harder to advocate on behalf of vapers or on behalf of people who smoke that might transition into a safer product when you've spent 30 years demonizing the same people. and delegitimizing their choices. So I think the tobacco control community as a whole, both on the prohibitionist side and even among people who are pro harm reduction, have dug themselves into the hole that it's now a bit of a challenge to get out of and to have a better narrative about how we talk about people's right to access these products.
08:17 - 08:20
[Brent Stafford]
Do people have the right to access these products?
08:21 - 09:42
[Jacob Grier]
Well, I'm obviously, I come from a libertarian background. I'm very pro bodily autonomy. I live in Portland, Oregon, which is one of the most drug-friendly cities in the United States. We have a great thing of alcohol production here. We have more than 100 breweries within about an hour of the city. We have a wine industry. I believe we were the second state or third state to legalize cannabis recreationally in the United States. We've recently legalized psychedelic therapy There's a big scene of people using magic mushrooms here. For a brief time, we even decriminalized all drug use. And I'm in favor of all of these things. But at the same time, it was really interesting seeing the narrative of being in a very liberal, drug-friendly city at the same time that the county that we're in has to ban on all flavored nicotine products. And it really speaks to how inconsistent people are thinking about nicotine and tobacco as a completely illegitimate product for anyone to be interested in when you can go to any retail store here in Portland and get flavored booze, flavored cannabis, you know, cannabis that looks like candy, and we're a harder drug. We're relatively available. But to have a menthol-flavored snus or a fruit-flavored vape would be illegal.
09:43 - 09:55
[Brent Stafford]
If this is all about Save the Children, do they have no concern or care that a child might end up using fentanyl or heroin or any other harder drug?
09:56 - 10:52
[Jacob Grier]
Of course they do. But they don't look at the numbers. They don't come at it in a very empirically grounded way. Like if we were to run the numbers on the harms of alcohol to use versus the harms of vaping, I think it's pretty clear that alcohol comes out as far more dangerous. I don't have the numbers in front of me, but I think we have... in the united states like a few thousand around 3 500 uh deaths per year associated with alcohol use uh in minors and the associated number for vaping would be zero to one per year probably depending on on how you look at it obviously there's long-term potential long-term risks with vaping uh as with you know any nicotine or recreational product but if we were to actually look at the scale of these issues uh more objectively, instead of what our biases are about what is an acceptable product and what isn't, then nicotine should be coming out well ahead of where it is right now.
10:54 - 11:03
[Brent Stafford]
It's mind-blowing to me a little bit. I mean, I wonder, is it just as simple as cognitive dissonance? Is that it? I mean, they're just suffering from that and everyone needs to go.
11:03 - 11:48
[Jacob Grier]
I think it comes back to, like I said, this 1990s mindset where if you, one, there weren't safer products at any kind of scale, at least in the 1990s when it came to recreational nicotine. And two, tobacco became themed or defending tobacco or nicotine became themed as a right-wing issue. And so people on the left are just kind of conditioned to being anti-tobacco, anti-nicotine, and anti-corporate, which if they don't dig into the issue, then it's hard to reframe that and look at what the actual evidence is to put nicotine up against other drugs that people in a more progressive or left-wing mindset find, if not completely acceptable, then at least in the view that it should be completely legal.
11:48 - 11:54
[Brent Stafford]
Let me ask you this. Is recreational nicotine legal in the United States?
11:54 - 13:37
[Jacob Grier]
Certainly in some forms. It is for now. And as far as I know, everywhere, if you are over 21, it's legal to possess and to use in your own property. So in that sense, it is. We have to get into the forms of nicotine use. And so far, at least, it has always been focused on the sellers and the marketers as opposed to users. And I hope that it doesn't get worse in that sense. I hope we never start targeting users again. Although we have in the United States. So interestingly, one of the first prosecutions for cigarette use was right here in the Pacific Northwest where I live at the turn of the century. And it's good history for people to know because it was a big labor leader. So it was a left-wing labor organizer who came out to the Pacific Northwest on a tour, and the state of Washington had banned the consumption and possession of cigarettes. And he was seen rolling a cigarette and having the makings to do so. And even though this law was very rarely used, it was used to target him. And that was, I think, his only conviction. He had been charged at one point with murder. And Clarence Darrow actually defended him, and I have no idea what the facts of the case were. He managed to get off that charge, but he was actually convicted of smoking cigarettes and possessing cigarettes. Luckily, that's not the case today, but it is interesting to look at that history of how these laws were used when they were in effect in about 15 states at the turn of the century.
13:38 - 13:49
[Brent Stafford]
Let me ask you, in the past, Jacob, I know I've asked you, is there a war on vaping? But now the question is, has that war morphed into a war on nicotine?
13:51 - 15:35
[Jacob Grier]
Yeah, that I completely agree with. All forms of tobacco use are being targeted. I mean, there's a lot of things that's really frustrating. I don't want to say the thing that's frustrating, because as we know from having these conversations, that's a long list. One of the frustrations that I have with people who advocate for prohibitionist tobacco policies is that they don't necessarily care that the prohibitions are really badly targeted. And so an example, flavor bans are a great example when we talk about banning certain flavored products. And there's various ways you could go about it. And one of them is to ban all flavors of all products across the board, which, of course, many people are on board with. Another is to only ban flavors in vaping or with some other newer products. And another is to, say, ban menthol, which as of now is the last flavor involved in cigarettes in the United States. And one thing that's really striking to me is that more places have banned flavored vaping than have banned menthol cigarettes. And so, and there's no question in my mind which of those is a more dangerous product. Like menthol cigarettes, clearly far more dangerous than flavored vapes. So even people who think that prohibition is a good idea have to reckon with the fact that when prohibition is actually enacted, it's often very poorly targeted. And so I think that makes it, that should be a bit of a warning to people who wanna take a prohibitionist approach. that it's hard to control what actually gets done and what gets targeted in the end. And it can be done very irrationally.
15:35 - 15:53
[Brent Stafford]
What do you think of the fact that Big Tobacco is actually effectively making a switch of their products over to safer nicotine? PMI, I think is 42% of their revenue right now is now safer nicotine products. BAT is around 25%. I mean, they're not there yet, but they're moving.
15:55 - 17:31
[Jacob Grier]
Yeah, and that's another big way in which the landscape has changed politically that I think people who don't follow it closely haven't picked up on. Again, if you go back to this 1990s, early 2000s view of how things worked, you would look at big tobacco and say, oh, big tobacco is anti-government, anti-regulation, laissez-faire. If you oppose big tobacco, then you're pro-regulation and against laissez-faire. Clearly, the development of safer products has been seen as an opportunity by the big tobacco companies like Philip Morris and Altria and Reynolds, which is, I guess, a mixed blessing is how I would put it. It's obviously a very good thing that they are developing safer products and transitioning people away from smoking. I think that's unequivocally good. The challenging thing is that they, of course, see this as an opportunity to shape regulations in ways that benefit them. Whereas if you're a big tobacco company, the play for you is no longer stave off regulation as long as you can. It's actually shape regulations so that it's favorable to you, which... basically means taking the gamble that if you put in a very opaque regulatory process that you have to go through to bring a product to the market, that companies like Altria or Philip Morris will be able to navigate it while smaller competitors will not. And I'm sure we'll get into this a lot, but that is exactly how it's worked out. So in that sense, And writ large, if not always in specifics, I think that bet has paid off for big tobacco and made it a lot harder for small retailers and small companies.
17:32 - 17:50
[Brent Stafford]
So, Jacob, in fact, right now, it looks like we're going under a tectonic shift in the U.S. nicotine market. According to Goldman Sachs, in 2025, safer nicotine products will surpass combustibles in volume. What do you make of that? It's pretty extraordinary, isn't it?
17:51 - 18:32
[Jacob Grier]
Yeah, absolutely. It's an amazing transition. I mean, it shouldn't be that amazing because we've seen it happen before. We saw it happen in Sweden and we've been seeing it happen to a lesser but still striking Fed in England. I mean, on the one hand, this shouldn't be surprising at all. People know that cigarettes are incredibly dangerous. Even people who smoke, many of them really want to quit and just have a hard time doing it. And so when a product comes along that is much, much safer, but at least competitively satisfying for people to use in delivering nicotine, And it shouldn't be surprising that this transition is happening and that it becomes much more popular.
18:32 - 18:51
[Brent Stafford]
Isn't what's surprising is that there's been so much resistance by tobacco control in the mainstream media? I mean, you know, so many people have a bad understanding of the harms for vaping, but yet still the safer nicotine products are overtaking combustibles almost in spite of what tobacco control is doing.
18:52 - 20:48
[Jacob Grier]
Yeah, and that's the other question is how much better could this transition be if we lived in a better media and regulatory environment? Because, you know, most people have completely skewed perception of the relative risk of vaping and smoking and other products. And also it's just most of the people who are using them are having to get products that aren't even legally marketed in a lot of cases. Because basically, almost every flavored vape, which is what people generally prefer, is illicit in the United States. And we've got shades of how illegal they are. But for the most part, they're not legal. And so this is being accomplished with somewhat shady products that seem to be not necessarily any worse from a risk perspective than the fully legal ones, but it's clearly a hostile regulatory environment. If I could add one thing to that, too, is I think One notable change that especially some of my generation has noticed is that when I was growing up, I knew lots of people who smoked. Not necessarily my own age, but people from my parents' and grandparents' generation. People from all different social statuses were smoking cigarettes. There's been a tremendous shift in who smokes cigarettes in the United States, where it's one, far few people are doing it, but it's generally concentrated among people who are lower education, lower income. And so there's a stratification there where the people who are involved in these debates about vaping and smoking probably don't know a lot of cigarette smokers personally at this point, but they do see people who vape. And so the people who are being harmed by smoking are kind of invisible in the calculus that these people have because they're so worried about you know, their own teenagers or young people around them and vaping. But they miss the vast harm of smoking that's still going on.
20:49 - 21:19
[Brent Stafford]
Let me bring up another data point that I think we should put out there. And this is really, this is huge. According to Altria's 2025 Q1 earnings report. So this is 2025 report says in 2024, there were 18 million vapors in the US. Today in 2025, that number is now 20.5 million using e-cigarettes to use a bad term. And 14.5 million of those are using disposables.
21:22 - 21:49
[Jacob Grier]
Yeah, it's a massive shift. And I don't think you're going to put that genie back in the bottle. In many cases, you wouldn't want to, because for many of these people are former cigarette smokers or people who might have become cigarette smokers. But yeah, it's a massive market. And so we do need, regardless of perspective, we need to face up to the fact that this exists, that it's not going to go away, and somebody will supply it.
21:50 - 22:17
[Brent Stafford]
We don't actually talk enough about the, say, 20 million Americans who may vape for the rest of their lives. Who's going to take those vapes away from them? Are they going to be forced to have to quit nicotine for some reason? Or are we going to start realizing that that's a market? Those are people. They're human beings. They use nicotine. They quit smoking. And now we have to make sure there's enough products and variety and flavor to service that market.
22:18 - 24:02
[Jacob Grier]
Yeah, and I think the answer is that there will be those products whether the government wants them to be there or not. And I think Australia is a great illustration of this. Australia is much more hostile to vaping and to smoking as well compared to the United States. It's also an island. And there's a massive illicit market for vapes in Australia. completely all over the place. And it's really hard for people to wrap their mind around if they don't follow what's been going on there for the past two or three years, where organized crime has taken over the market for cigarettes, which are, I think, the highest or second highest in the world when it comes to taxes, and vapes, which are even worse than America when it comes to trying to get them legally. And just in the past year and a half or so, there have been more than a hundred arsons on tobacconists. And again, this is one of those things that shouldn't be surprising because we know how alcohol prohibition worked and led to organized crime. We know how the drug war works and leads to organized crime. But there is this mindset that nicotine is different and we can control this market from the top down. Like this time it'll work. And Australia should be a massive warning sign that it's not going to work. that there is this demand for these products and someone will supply them. And it's really just a choice of whether you want them supplied legally or illicitly. And one thing that I think is worth bringing up is the more you demonize nicotine, like the more you are convinced that nicotine is an incredibly addictive drug, the more skeptical you should be that you're going to be able to simply outlaw it and the market will go away.
24:02 - 24:20
[Brent Stafford]
Jacob, the last time we had you on the show, it was back in 2022 when you wrote a piece for Reason titled, Who Will Be the First Person to Go to Prison for Selling Flavored Tobacco or E-Cigarettes? So what were your fears then at that time and have they come true?
24:21 - 27:00
[Jacob Grier]
Yeah, so the fear is that there are multiple laws at play at the state level and the federal level and local level when you talk about these specific bans on flavored products. And the advocates always dismiss the fears that this will result in criminal justice issues because the way these laws are written, selling the flavored products is a misdemeanor. But every state also has laws on the books against selling untaxed tobacco. or selling tobacco without paying the taxes. And that is generally a felony. And obviously, if you are selling illicit products, you're not filing to pay the taxes on them. So these two go hand in hand. And so the warning from the very beginning when these laws have been considered was that the seemingly misdemeanor violation would be something very easy to escalate into a felony. And so that was my warning when I wrote that article, that these laws are on the books in several states. It was only a matter of time before it happened. And we have reached that stage. We have at least reached the stage of a lot of arrest. And one of the things that's clear when you start watching this is that the criminal justice system moves incredibly slowly. And there is a specific case that I talked about in that article of a man in Massachusetts who'd been arrested for selling flavored tobacco and quite a large volume of it. And his case is not resolved yet as we speak here in spring of 2025. So it's really hard to even measure the impact of these laws yet because people can rightfully say, well, we're not sending a lot of people to prison yet. And well, yeah, because these cases take forever to resolve. They literally take years. But on that note, a different case has come up. It was also in Massachusetts. It was a man who owned a tobacco shop. who was selling flavored products of various kinds. At first, he was selling them in the shop, and then authorities cracked down, and so then he was selling them from a car outside the shop, and that got reported as well. And so the things that happened were the things that advocates of these laws said would happen, which is that he got fined, he lost his license or had his license suspended, but then he also got sent to prison for six months and to probation for five years. And that's even the low end of the penalty. The Massachusetts law could go up to five years behind bars for selling untaxed tobacco. And there are at least a few cases pending where that's a penalty that's on the table.
27:00 - 27:09
[Brent Stafford]
Goldman Sachs says that the entire e-vapor market in the United States, 60% is illicit.
27:09 - 27:51
[Jacob Grier]
Yeah, I completely buy that. I mean, you look at the polls of vapers themselves. They don't want tobacco-flavored vapes. Overwhelmingly, their preferences are fruit or menthol or something sweet. They're trying to get away from tobacco. So yeah, it's not surprising at all that the legal market, which until recently was nothing but tobacco-flavored vapes, and even now is mostly that and a last account of just a few menthol options. And even then, we're always... Even on the tobacco flavors. I don't remember the exact numbers now, but it's a couple dozen products out of over a million applications.
27:53 - 28:05
[Brent Stafford]
So what do you think about that, about how FDA has handled regulation of this product so far? And do you think that it's going to change considering there's a new president and a new administration and so forth?
28:07 - 29:57
[Jacob Grier]
Well, I think the FDA is kind of doing things the way the law was intended and that the law was written by Philip Morris and Altria in the early 2000s. So the regime that was put in place was never meant to be speedy. It had language that implied that it should be. It had intentions that seemed to be clear, but I think... the people behind the law were well aware that there were going to be a lot of roadblocks to getting any new products approved. And they've been correct in that, even more correct perhaps than they thought based on the fact that Altria acquired Juul and then was not able to get that through the regulatory hurdles, which was a bit of cosmic justice from some perspective. Yeah, the FDA, the fundamental approach of it is just not making sense in that it demands far too much of every single product, when it would make much more sense to just have some broad guidelines, where if your product fell within those guidelines on, say, nicotine content and power, and clearly didn't have some marketing campaign that seemed to be appealing to kids. If you can do all that, you should just be allowed on the market with relatively little application process. And instead, we've been in this absurd situation where products that we know, even the people at the FDA know that as a class, e-cigarettes are far lower risk than combustible cigarettes. But they still want every single one of them to submit studies unique to their e-figure to prove this. And it's just an absurd ask. And so, you know, if that's the regulatory structure, then obviously it's not going to work. As for what's going to happen now, I have honestly no idea.
29:58 - 30:11
[Brent Stafford]
It seems to be the only thing that we hear about from the FDA is enforcement action. And for those who are concerned with regulators and enforcement, what can we expect? Or is it just talk?
30:11 - 31:08
[Jacob Grier]
That's what's hard to say because, you know, the first Trump administration, we at least got Scott Gottlieb at the FDA, who I disagreed with on a lot, but he was a sensible person. He had a plan. He at least attempted to implement it. He at least talked about harm reduction. I don't really see that now. And I also don't see anyone paying attention for that matter. We've We've had a lot of firings at the FDA. You know, my impression is that Trump administration is clearly focused elsewhere. And honestly, so is everybody else in America. And I say this as someone who has a career writing about tobacco policy, even I'm not following it. closely as I would under a normal administration because we're in a full-blown constitutional crisis in the United States. It's hard to focus as much on whether flavored vapes are going to make it through the FDA right now.
31:08 - 31:14
[Brent Stafford]
I think that was the concern for a lot of people, including myself, was that it would just get lost in the issues.
31:16 - 32:01
[Jacob Grier]
Absolutely. I criticize the technocratic approach of bureaucracy a lot. I think we're seeing that the opposite of that is not very reliable either. We need a better plan than having people like RFK Jr. on our side. We actually do need to win a war of ideas with people who can implement plans well and who can have good intentions about running government. So this sort of burn it all down approach and installing crackpots and hoping they'll do what you want is not a sound approach. We actually do have to get through that before I think we'll see any real progress.
32:02 - 32:06
[Brent Stafford]
So tell us, what are you hoping to get out of your participation at GFN this year?
32:08 - 33:07
[Jacob Grier]
One thing, I'm very excited to meet a whole lot of people, including yourself, who I've known online and never met in person. I left Washington, D.C. in 2008. D.C. was a great place to be if you're into public policy. I moved to Portland, Oregon. Not a great place to be if you're in public policy. We're kind of on the fringes out here. So I'm really excited to meet a lot of people that I've interacted with online or whose work I've admired for a long time, but it would have never gotten to see in person. And hopefully bring a little bit different perspective to the conference. We've got a lot of great people talking about the science of vaping and the harm reduction, which I think is really, really important. Like if that wasn't on our side, we wouldn't be having this conversation. But I also want to talk about the narratives and how we talk about centering the people who use these products ultimately and building the case around them.
33:09 - 33:19
[Brent Stafford]
How do people in harm reduction participate in changing the narrative when that narrative is held by mainstream media, regulators, and public health?
33:20 - 35:30
[Jacob Grier]
You know, I think a lot of it is showing up and we have to get in front of media. And I'll give an example. As I went to a couple hearings that were held in Multnomah County, which is Portland, Oregon, when our flavored vape proposals came up. And, you know, I had two big takeaways from both of those. One was you've got to show up early because the news media comes. Like, they came and they covered these events early. They left. They didn't pay for the whole thing. They got people right at the beginning, filed their story, and they were out. So I spoke at both times. Both times I spoke, all the journalists were gone already. That was on me. I showed up late. The other takeaway from that is there's one framing on these stories, which is always you have the advocates for the bands who have very public health style names, who are probably funded by Bloomberg, who might show up in matching t-shirts. And they will come out, and they are seen as the good guys right from the beginning. Again, it's this 1990s mindset of we've got to fight big tobacco. Big tobacco is evil. Whoever is fighting big tobacco is therefore good. So they get very positive press. They're there to protect the children and to protect people from these dangerous products. And then the opposition side, because as a journalist, you try to tell both sides of the story. So the side that they get is the convenience store owner. And they just have a convenience store owner talking about how this is going to impact their sales and it's going to be hard on their business. And that's fine. That's a valid point. But to someone who doesn't follow these issues, if all they see is the activist on one side saying we're to protect the children and the convenience store on the other saying I'm going to lose money, it's clear what side people are going to take in that. And so we need to get in front of the cameras, we need to get in the interviews and have, one, both public health experts talk about this from a scientific perspective, but also to have the people who actually use these products out there and testifying about how it helped them stay away from cigarettes or how it could have really saved their life.
35:30 - 35:44
[Brent Stafford]
So considering everything that's been going on, which seems to be a massive shift off of combustibles to safer nicotine products, are you as hopeful or more hopeful than you were before?
35:45 - 36:48
[Jacob Grier]
Yeah, well, I feel like we're in a race between how bad the crackdowns can get before facts change on the ground. And so maybe the optimistic scenario here is Everything that's happening right now is taking some of the wins out of the sale of the more prohibitionist approach to tobacco and nicotine in the United States. And at the same time, if we can implement this transition, if we can get more and more people to leave cigarettes behind and take up safer products, then we can at least change the facts on the ground before the government has fully cracked down. And that gives us a chance to then say, look, here's how it is. You know, cigarettes are fading out. People are using the safer product at the huge market that's not going to go away. What are you going to do about it? So I'm a little bit more optimistic now than I might have been a few years ago that somewhat just that the chaos that's happening, which is terrible in lots of ways, might give us an opportunity now.