ACSH's Gilbert Ross attacks California Dept of Public Health for releasing sensible brochure on e-cigarettes

The California Department of Public Health recently released a low key brochure on e-cigarettes, Protect Your Family from e-cigarettes, that explained that e-cigarettes contain nicotine, which is not harmless, that the aerosol they produce is not water vapor, that they should not be used indoors, and warning people about the dangers of drinking the e-liquid.
 
This brochure, like effective action by the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network to block pro-industry Trojan Horse bills that nominally restrict e-cigarette sales to kids while writing technical protections for industry into law, was attacked by the reliably pro-industry American Council on Science and Health's Dr. Gilbert Ross.  I had to chuckle when I read his bio at the end, which said

Gilbert Ross is medical and executive director, and acting president, of the American Council on Science and Health, a public health nonprofit founded in 1978, based in New York with a panel of science and policy advisors numbering 360. Dr. Ross got his M.D. from NYU School of Medicine in 1972 and practiced internal medicine for twenty years on Long Island NY. He joined ACSH in 1998. He is boarded in Int. Med. and Rheumatology.

As Mother Jones reported in connection with another pro-industry position Ross took,

Although the biography posted on the organization's website doesn't mention it, Ross actually had to abandon medicine on July 24, 1995, when his license to practice as a physician in New York was revoked by the unanimous vote of a state administrative review board for professional misconduct.
Instead of tending to patients, Ross spent all of 1996 at a federal prison camp in Schuylkill, Pennsylvania, having being sentenced to 46 months in prison for his participation in a scheme that ultimately defrauded New York's Medicaid program of approximately $8 million. During a three-and-a-half-week jury trial, federal prosecutors laid bare Ross' participation in an enterprise, headed by one Mohammed Sohail Khan, to operate four sham medical clinics in New York City. For his scam to work, Khan needed doctors who could qualify as Medicaid providers, and Ross responded to an ad in the New York Times promising "Very, very good $$."
 

Needless to say, this brochure is a step forward for California, but what we really need is the kind of hard-hitting television and radio advertising that California used to run.  Hopefully at some point they will catch up with Alaska and San Francisco in public education on e-cigarettes.