Please STOP making bitter enemies of Democratic e-cig users who have escaped smoking.

You are losing voters. Worse, you are losing voters TO the other major party.

Many of us are fast becoming single-issue voters who are being alienated by a party we have voted for in the past. And Big Tobacco is benefitting.

Even though it is WELL-ESTABLISHED science that it is SMOKE that kills, not nicotine, there is a huge anti-ecig movement fueled by nicotine prohibitionism and a Puritan mentality that implies that smokers who can't quit should just keep smoking and die.

Until now, Democrats have championed harm reduction -- leading initiatives in reproductive rights, sex eduction, needle exchanges, and promoting the use of condoms. It has been Republicans who promoted abstinence as the only viable choice. President Obama promises to put science over ideology.

But now, Democrats all over the country are using ideology and quoting junk science to put up barriers to switching to electronic cigarettes.

California State Senate Majority Leader Ellen Corbett is encouraging cities in and near her district to ban vapor shops, while a Sacramento Democrat introduced AB1500 to prevent buying ecigs on the internet. When the patchwork is stitched together, it will wipe out small American e-cig businesses and cripple vapers who need new, innovative products to STAY off of combusted tobacco.

The beneficiaries of this activism will be, ironically, Big Tobacco and the big Pharmaceutical companies that profit from smokers continuing to smoke, using gum where smoking is prohibited.

The leaders of this anti-choice, “Quit or Die”, movement are Democrats and misguided Pharma-funded organizations like the American Lung Association who loudly spread a misreporting of the FDA's 2009 analysis of a few Chinese cartridges, or of Dr. Tom Frieden's misrepresentation of CDC data.

The result: exponentially-growing numbers of Democrats are so upset with our own party that there will be defections at a time when Democrats need all the support they can get.

Nobody is going to switch votes TO the Democratic Party over this legislation, nor switch to the Republicans if the Dems switched to honest science in this matter. So the only point is feel-good slapping each other on the back, with no benefit to the Party.

Democratic Vapers are so intensely disenchanted with this junk-science-driven legislative activism that numbers of us will begin voting Republican. We are fighting for our very lives, and for the lives of the growing group of smokers who are switching to this Reduced Harm alternative. And the Democratic party, at the national, state, and local levels, is sending a very clear message to vapers: YOUR LIVES DON'T MATTER. As if it would be good for our children and grandchildren to watch us die.

Please talk to well-known and easy-to-look up experts such as:

Former Surgeon General Dr. Carmona, the founder of Smoke Free Pennsylvania Bill Godshall, Cardiologist Dr. Farasalinos in Italy, Former American Lung Association president Dr. Charles Dean Connor, Father Jack Kierney from CAADE.org, to get pointers to how to get the science straight.

(None of the above experts were consulted about this petition or have any connection with it at the time of writing.)

Jan Parcel, engineer, grandmother, ex-smoker, vaper.