Sunday, April 6, 2014

CASAA is truly grassroots, not a 'front group'

I recently came across a blog post about e-cigarettes that had this in the comments:
What strikes me about CASAA is that the board is stacked with power players: lawyers, smokeless tobacco lobbyists and web marketing experts. Not a random assortment of Americans, but exactly what a company would seek out as a PR front.
Once I stopped laughing at "stacked with power players" and picked myself up off the floor, I wanted to set the record straight.

CASAA, The Consumer Advocates for Smoke-free Alternatives Association, was formed in 2009 on an online e-cigarette enthusiast forum. Here is a thread discussing the creation of the organization, before it even had a name: ECO - Organization Charter: Administration and here you can see a lot of the democratic process that went into the name and organization. Clearly, CASAA was not formed by e-cigarette or tobacco companies as a "PR front."

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