(Why this is no longer the Facebook Page you thought it was…)
More than five years ago my wife Donna quit smoking and began vaping exclusively. Soon after people started asking her what that “thing” was she was putting in her mouth and, not long after that, Donna started selling the old 808-style e-cigarettes out of her purse in bars. Not to make money but to help other people stop smoking as well.
A few years later a company was born, a company which many thousands of you used to stop or keep from smoking cigarettes. During these same years I spent an enormous amount of time working on what was to become Vaping Advocacy - writing articles, blogging, attending meetings, and so on. Many of you still see these things on Facebook today.
Donna and I invested a fortune in time and money.
Why? My entire household (children, children’s spouses, friends, family) no longer smoked cigarettes: where there had been five or six smokers at the table for Sunday night dinner every week now there were none.
Thousands of customers stopped smoking, too.
Why invest a fortune? Wouldn’t you to save the lives of the people you loved?
What’s the price of not seeing someone you love die of cancer?
In early January of this year, though, everything changed and the company our customers came to rely on was irrevocably changed… We were closed for several days, products dwindled, things tumbled out of control.
And finally, as something you came to rely on that kept you from smoking was down for the count, came a lawsuit.
We all know lawsuits are about one thing and one thing only: money.
Not about saving lives, not about seeing family members smoke free, not about any of that.
But Donna never gives up and from the ashes of what had gone before her new company has risen like a Phoenix from the ashes of the old.
This time around things are much, much harder, though. The market has changed, the products have changed, the world has changed, we’ve lost inertia, regulations loom.
I don’t know what will happen or what the future will be.
We will struggle…
Maybe the FDA will win, or the State of Pennsylvania will tax vaping to death.
We’ll have to invest more to keep things going so I hope that you out there will come to Donna’s new shop and buy some of her products like her new e-juice.
As for me, I’ve been somewhat AWOL from the vaping and advocacy scenes for the last several months - mostly to take on a job to keep things going.
Now I am back and I hope to contribute much more on the Vaping Advocacy front.
Perhaps to release a Primus II.
In any case and whatever happens, Happy Birthday dear… I’m still here and I still love you!
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