Skip Murray and the Radical Kindness

The unwavering commitment and fierce determination of an activist who challenges misinformation about nicotine with a strategy as simple and subversive as it is revolutionary: tenderness.

Brainerd, Minnesota. A small town stitched together between pine trees and lakes, nestled in the frozen heart of the American North.

There, in a quiet corner of the Midwest, lives a woman with a serene voice and seismic presence. Her name is Skip Murray —and her mission, though it may seem simple at first glance, challenges entire structures: to save lives. Her instrument? A gesture that today borders on insurrection in times of ideological trenches and a cultural fetish for apathy, surface impressions, and the speed of judgment: tenderness.

Skip Murray is an American activist who has become one of the most respected voices in the fight for tobacco harm reduction. A former smoker, former owner of a vape shop, mother, and grandmother, her body not only holds stories but also carries scars—like a map that not only recalls her paths but also serves as an archive, a compass, and a living testament.

Diagnosed with autism and ADHD in adulthood, Skip turns her life experience into a political tool. She weaves science and lived reality, theory and affection, in an effort to return to the nicotine debate what was long ago stripped from it: listening, empathy, respect.

In a battlefield littered with alarmist headlines, invisible lobbies, corporate interests, and public institutions repeating falsehoods with the accent of truth, Skip wields an unlikely weapon: a hashtag —#BeKind.

While the world roars, she speaks softly. And, against all odds, she’s beginning to be heard.

The Trauma That Became a Mission

Skip’s story could easily have faded into just another number carved into the cold gravestone of smoking statistics.

She started smoking at the age of ten, in an America where cigarettes were handed out on airplanes and doctors recommended them in weekly magazine ads. She tried to quit countless times. She failed—like so many others— caught in a dependency that refuses to yield to willpower.

But sometimes, tragedy strikes like lightning: brief, brutal, absolute.

Her son, just 29 years old, suffered a major heart attack. The memory of that moment lingers like a wound that won’t close: her granddaughter, still a young child, waving at the helicopter carrying her father away. “Goodbye, Daddy. I love you. Please don’t die.” The words still echo in Skip —not as memory, but as echo, the kind of sound that never fades.

Her son survived. He opened a vape shop. And one day, he offered his mother an e-cigarette. He didn’t ask her to quit smoking. He simply asked her not to smoke inside the shop. She agreed, reluctantly. She would vape only when she couldn’t smoke. A concession, not a conversion.

Months later, almost without realizing it, she had quit smoking. No plan. No promise. As if her body had made a decision that her mind had yet to understand.

A Couch, a Shop, and a Mission

Her son’s shop was not just a business. It was a refuge. A clandestine harbor where former-smoking truckers docked, desperate mothers sought relief, and young adults arrived determined to save their parents from tobacco. At its center stood a worn-out couch —part stage, part confessional— where the voices of teenagers and septuagenarians, nurses and laborers, would intersect, all united by a quiet, shared desire: to stop dying by combustion.

But that improbable home closed its doors three years before Skip’s recent interview with GFN.TV.

The shop didn’t fall to economic hardship but to something subtler —and more devastating: it was brought down by systematic disinformation, manufactured panic, the deliberate withdrawal of essential products—and, above all, by a single narrative imposed by institutions that, instead of protecting, chose to sow fear.

Skip emptied her personal savings to keep that space alive. She held on until the end. And when the last customer walked through the door, it didn’t feel like closing a business —it felt like the symbolic death of a child. Because what was sold there wasn’t just vapor. It was dignity.

The Silent Collapse of Mental Health

It was during the pandemic lockdowns that Skip went through what she would later call her “silent collapse.” Vape shops closed. Her husband —diagnosed with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD)— remained isolated for years. Night shifts changed, as did everything else. But it was inside her where something essential broke —quietly, without witnesses, the way the deepest fractures always do.

With the help of a friend, she decided to ask for help. And then came the diagnoses that had been ignored for decades, swept beneath the rug of so-called normality: depression, anxiety, autism, ADHD. That revelation was not an ending, but a kind of key —the beginning of a new chapter in her mission to understand why neurodivergent bodies and minds, like hers, are more prone to nicotine use.

What had once been read through the cold lens of stigma —the “vice”— began to take on more complex hues: nicotine as a tool for self-regulation and vaping as a mediator between internal chaos and a hostile world.

In that new frame, the enemy was no longer vapor. It was silence. Ignorance. The brutal simplification of human experience.

“If It’s Not Working, Why Keep Doing the Same Thing?”

For years, Skip fought like so many other activists: through confrontation. She pointed fingers, called out, and clashed with those she saw as complicit in spreading misinformation. She referred to her opponents as “ANTZ” —Anti-Nicotine and Tobacco Zealots. She viewed journalists as enemies entrenched in editorial bunkers and each alarmist article as one more nail in the coffin of harm reduction.

Until one day, exhausted after so many lost battles, she asked herself a question that would change everything: “How many people have I actually managed to change their minds?”

She couldn’t name a single one. But she could list, with painful precision, the territories where she had been defeated. And then something in her way of acting collapsed —not as surrender, but as a reset.

She stopped preaching to the converted. Fell silent in the daily trenches of Twitter. She stopped calling the public health volunteer a “Karen” for parroting myths like sacred verses. She decided to talk to her. They had coffee. And in the end, they discovered they wanted exactly the same thing: to make sure no one else had to bury a loved one because of tobacco.

That shift wasn’t just ethical —it was deeply strategic. Instead of attacking, Skip began to listen.

The most revealing example of this transformation came with Florida State Representative Allison Tant. After being vilified by the vaping community for using the term “popcorn lung,” she was met with something rare: kindness. Skip approached her —without sarcasm, without anger.

And the result? The representative thanked her. She called. She listened. She began meeting with consumers and small vape shop owners in her own state. The bridge was built with soft words. And with Skip’s gentleness. Which doesn’t mean the road was easy —but it was possible.

The Media as a Vector of Death

For Skip, the media is a lost ally —but not an irredeemable one. She doesn’t see it as the enemy but as a sick institution that has forgotten how to listen.

When British tabloids like The Mirror published a so-called “scientific bombshell” linking vaping to dementia and multiple organ failure —without peer review, without official publication, without rigor— Skip reacted. But not with rage.

She immersed herself in the research for three days. She wrote on her blog. Compiled a list of outlets that had amplified the false alarm. She denounced the practice as unethical. But she refused to share the sensationalist links. She would not feed the beast. Instead, she chose to amplify the voices of experts like Clive Bates, who wrote a formal letter addressed to the study’s author and the university involved.

“The goal isn’t to destroy the researcher —it’s to make sure this doesn’t happen again,” Skip says, with the calm of someone who understands that ethics are not shouted; they are built —with persistence, and resistance to spectacle.

At 65, Skip shows no signs of slowing down. She takes part —even if remotely— in every edition of the Global Forum on Nicotine, the event that gathers, year after year, scientists, consumers, and activists around a simple yet transgressive idea: to listen to those who live in the skin what so many decide from their desks.

The forum will take place in Warsaw in 2025 under the motto “Challenging Perceptions”—and Skip will be there, as always, challenging silences.

For her, this is the only possible path: to return to nicotine users what medical and media discourse has stolen —their humanity. And to the scientific debate, what it has lost in the rush and the panic —complexity.

“It’s not just about smoking or not smoking. It’s about listening. About understanding why people smoke. About offering real alternatives,” she repeats, like a mantra woven from pain, empathy, and clarity.

She knows: the future isn’t shaped in offices, labs, or clinics. The future speaks from the body of the person who uses.

Epilogue: The Courage to Be Kind

Niterói, Rio de Janeiro. In 1961, after the fire that consumed the Gran Circo Norte-Americano and took with it hundreds of lives —many of them children— José Datrino ceased to be an anonymous merchant. He became a Prophet. He traded private life for the public mission of sowing words of compassion on the streets of Rio. Wearing white robes and writing handmade phrases on concrete columns, he turned kindness into a radical act. His motto —“Kindness begets kindness”— was not naïve utopia, but an ethical challenge: to resist barbarity with affection.

Decades later, in Brainerd, Minnesota, another kind of tragedy—silent, chronic, often invisible—would mark Skip Murray's life. A former smoker, activist, and grandmother diagnosed with autism in adulthood, she too chose to listen where so many chose to shout. She too made kindness not an ornament but a method, a strategy, a way to survive—and to resist.

Like Datrino, Skip doesn’t wear a cape. She carries stories. And within them, a revolution that doesn’t impose itself —it insists. Her struggle is not forged through shouting, but through the smallest of gestures, charged with power. Through calm words. Through open ears.

While so many cry out “fight!”, she whispers “listen.” And maybe —just maybe— the world is finally listening.

And when she’s asked about the future, she answers with quiet resolve, as someone who rejects the superficial:

“I’ll keep doing this until I save vaping or I die.
Whichever comes first.”

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