Five years smoke free! For me that is a truly remarkable achievement. Especially when I look back to March of 2010. At that time my almost fifty year struggle with smoking had caught up with me. I survived a heart attack, had been diagnosed with emphysema and I developed peripheral neuropathy. My lungs ached, were full of phlegm and wheezed whenever I took a breath. I could not even laugh without enduring a fifteen-minute coughing jag. The neuropathy progressed from the bottom of my feet up to my waist and from my fingertips up to my elbows. If a cop had wanted me to walk a straight line I would have been taken to jail because I stumbled along like I was drunk. My wife had to button my shirts for me. Of course I understand that smoking was causing these problems. I have no one to blame but myself but it??s not as if I didn??t try to quit. I followed most of the advice that came from the government and the anti-smoking associations/Big Pharmas??And their advice was? If quit smoking strategies or cold turkey or hypnotism or chewing gum or 1-800-quitsmoking.com or sucking on a straw don??t work try only FDA approved quit smoking medications. I tried ??dozens upon dozens of times??for decades. Nothing worked for me long term. I had arrived at the finish line??quit smoking or die. And the government was certainly encouraging?? if you don??t quit smoking we are going to make you a pariah and then squeeze you till you squeal with punitive cigarette taxes. After all they had to make up for the revenue they would lose because of my demise. And after decades of peddling nicotine gum, inhalers, pills and patches, with dismal cessation success, Big Pharmas decided that they would go in a different direction with FDA approved Chantrix (varenicline). Brilliant??lets give psychedelic a try. Suicide will definitely stop them from smoking??No thank you. I was desperate but not frantic enough to give that one a shot. I was resigned to the fact that using only FDA approved solutions I never would be able to quit smoking entirely. In April of 2010 I learned about the Electronic Cigarette and decided to give that a try. I have not inhaled one puff of smoke since then and because of that my life has completely turned around. All of my doctors are happy now. My lungs have cleared up substantially. I can laugh again. My medical tests continue to show positive results and my neuropathy has improved considerably. My wife no longer has to button my shirts for me. My doctors are supportive of what I am doing. To be very clear they would rather I not inhale anything but air but if vapor will keep me from smoking they approve. My pulmonologist told me at the time (2006) of my diagnosis of emphysema that I would be on oxygen therapy in less than ten years if I continued smoking. On my last visit he told me that looking at my resent chest x-ray, he would never believe I was a 50-year smoker. Oxygen therapy is not in the picture for the foreseeable future. With out a doubt switching from smoke to vapor was the best decision I have ever made to improve my health and well-being. I feel like a kid again. I even took up golf. Not just take up golf??I am captivated by it. For health and economic reasons I walk and I push around thirty pounds of golf equipment over 18 holes with no problem at all??well almost?? #15 is a problem. It??s straight uphill and I do get winded there but walking around the rest of the coarse is manageable. For almost two years I have been golfing 5 days a week in weather conditions from 40 to 100 degrees. Five years ago even one round of golf would have been a very daunting task and certainly a miserable experience. So where would my life be today without the Electronic Cigarette? I don??t think it is farfetched to imagine that I would still be smoking off and on?? mostly on. My physical condition would have continued to deteriorate and other ailments would probably have cropped up. I would still be paying through the nose to Big Government, Big Pharma, the medical community and Big Tobacco. And instead of pushing around a golf cart I would be dragging around a tank of oxygen every time I took a step. I am not the lone ranger here. Millions of former smokers are having the same success as I have experienced. So why do so many media reports portray this device as being risky or even dangerous and something to avoid? In my opinion the electronic cigarette has a genuine potential to end the smoking epidemic forever. That is what makes it dangerous to the powers that control the news. I have little doubt that the ??Big Three????government, pharmaceutical conglomerates (and their fanatical front groups) and big tobacco??understand the effectiveness and level of safety the electronic cigarette represents and what an utter catastrophe it is to their bottom line. With unlimited budgets and over a decade to analyze the product they can only report hypothetical hazards. That is why they have become unhinged and reduced to spreading detrimental propaganda, financing witch-hunts and telling lies about it. They have gotten so desperate to find negatives that they manipulate their own studies to force menacing outcomes. Apparently for the ??The Big Three?? money is much more important than carnage. Unfortunately for current smokers financial preservation, political influence, zealots and endless amounts of money are being used to try and destroy the electronic cigarette. Adding to that is a clueless media that laps up the propaganda and treats it as if its gospel. With little or no attempt to verify what they are being told they are simply a giant mouthpiece for the ??Big Three?? and in turn doing an appalling disservice to the public. The tragic result of this is that people who are in the same situation as I was five years ago and who are contemplating quitting smoking by using the e-cigarette are now avoiding it. They are being lead to believe that it is 10 times more dangerous than tobacco cigarettes. That is a manufactured lie that was reported as serious news worldwide. It is absolutely absurd. This is a heinous situation and the press is directly responsible for propagating the lies without verification and not investigating and reporting on the very real and positive aspects of this life saving technology. The bottom line is that over 40 million people in the United States are smokers. Almost half a million of them die every year from smoking related issues. By any measure those are epidemic numbers and they haven??t changed with any significance for years (until the electronic cigarette showed up). Taxes, anti smoking campaigns, browbeating and drug therapies have thoroughly failed to solve the problem. Free markets and the simplicity of the idea allowed the smokers themselves to kidnap a brilliant concept and through trial and error refined it and made the second and third generation electronic cigarette a viable and substantially safer alternative to smoking. We now have a glimmer of hope to make a tremendous dent in the number of smokers and the government is hell bent to construct roadblocks to protect state coffers, and the pharmaceutical and tobacco industries. Their justification to the public for demonizing the ecigarette is based on half-truths, lies and ??future?? hypothetical danger. Certainly safety is a valid concern but hypothetical danger pales in comparison with the momentous aspects that the electronic cigarette represents today. So here is a novel idea for the politicians to consider?? in lieu of punitive taxation and erecting roadblocks to protect commercial interest, focus on solving the tragic epidemic that is causing a half a million deaths per year. Encourage an idea that actually works and is saving lives. Understand that getting greedy with people who are desperately trying to save their own lives is not only counterproductive it is utterly reprehensible. People might believe you are serious about solving the real problem if you take taxation out of the electronic cigarette picture and put the burden of funding on Big Tobacco companies. There is already enough money to solve the problem by putting some of that 250 billion dollars from the tobacco settlement to productive use for a change and use it to monitor the safety of the eliquid and hardware. Set an age limit and then get the hell out of the way. The smokers themselves have done a remarkable job solving their own problem by becoming Vapers. They are the real experts at smoking cessation so follow their lead and smoking could be eliminated forever.