Eeee-cigarettes
Meet Mr Jeremy Mean. In his day job he is the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency’s group manager of vigilance and risk management of medicines. Pardon? It’s true I tell you! I suppose he must be someone important with a job title like that.
He helpfully explains his latest wheeze in a YouTube video[1]. This really must be seen. Is he the world’s worst actor? He appears to be reading from a teleprompter with the camera angled from slightly below. He’s not actually looking at the camera, which is slightly disconcerting especially in conjunction with his orthodontically challenged teeth and Essex accent. How does he manage to wrinkle his forehead and frown at the same time? Maybe he practised in front of a mirror. But what is he actually saying? Here are some snippets:
The Government’s bin weighing the risks and benefits of how electronic cigarettes and other nicotine containing products are regulated…advertising can be controlled…long-term safety can be monitored…the quality of the products will be [inaudible]…the Government want quality products to be available to help smokers to quit, to cut down, or just to cut out particular cigarettes…
Now, which particular cigarettes does he think the Government wants smokers to cut out? May I make a suggestion? There is only one cigarette which smokers need to cut out: the first one of the day.
It is depressing how the Government and those in the ‘tobacco control community’ are still playing the same old tune. Well, I suppose it keeps Meany in a job and taxes on nicotine products flowing into the Government’s coffers.
The confusion around e-cigs is further illustrated by Dr Michael Siegel of the Boston University School of Public Health, who thinks people use e-cigs to “develop a new identity” and that “there are elements of kind of a hobby”.[2]
This reminds me of the scene in Oscar Wilde’s famous play, The Importance of Being Earnest, (1895), where Jack Worthing (Earnest) is being interviewed by his formidable future mother-in-law, Lady Bracknell.
Lady Bracknell: …Do you smoke?
Jack Worthing: Well, yes, I must admit I smoke.
Lady Bracknell: I’m glad to hear it. A man should always have an occupation of some kind…
One should not get too carried away by the alleged benefits of switching from cigarettes to ‘vaping’, as inhaling vapourised nicotine from an e-cigarette delivery device is called. A man by the name of Shawn in a promotional video[3] for Zee Cigs® has uploaded his chest X-rays from 2006 and 2011. He switched to e-cigs in 2009, he says, and claims his lungs look cleaner in the latter. This is nonsense. The difference in the appearances is because the later X-ray is slightly more penetrated (a higher dose of X-rays was used) so the lungs appear darker. Both films are normal. One cannot tell from a chest X-ray whether anyone is a smoker.
Do e-cigs help smokers to quit, to cut down, or just to cut out particular cigarettes?
It is common sense that if you are going to inhale nicotine repeatedly every day for years or even for the rest of your life, it should be safer to do this using the relatively pure form of nicotine in e-cigs compared with ordinary cigarettes whereby you unavoidably inhale thousands of other chemicals in addition. So, I suppose that if e-cigs are found, after appropriate scientific studies and clinical trials, to be safe or to impose very low health risks, then there shouldn’t be any objection to allowing them to be on open sale.
Whether they should be allowed to be used openly in public is another matter. Will it become acceptable for them to be used in places where smoking cigarettes is currently forbidden? Will it be okay to use them in restaurants, theatres, concert halls, churches, and on planes? Will it be okay to use them in front of children? They emit no fumes hateful to other people’s noses and are, apparently, not harmful to the user, so what’s the problem?
The objections to the use of e-cigarettes are: 1) They perpetuate the widely held but mistaken idea that ceasing to be addicted to nicotine (in whatever form) is terribly, terribly difficult unless you have an external agent to take over the task for you. 2) Using these products provides a ready excuse to relapse back to smoking cigarettes. The user can claim that e-cigs, as a smoking cessation aid, didn’t work! 3) They buy into the mind-set which nearly all smokers have, that they don’t really want to stop using nicotine, so e-cigs provide superficially credible justification to carry on doing it because it is apparently less harmful than ordinary cigarettes.
There is a further potential problem, that ever-inventive Big Tobacco, fearing progressively decreasing cigarette sales, is positioning itself to jump on the bandwagon and be in the forefront of production, promotion and selling of e-cigs. After all, it has the most experience in peddling nicotine to the public. This may well result in many people using both e-cigs and conventional cigarettes while labouring under the illusion that reduced cigarette smoking results in health benefits.
Even so, it seems likely that e-cigs will be promoted as a safer alternative to tobacco. This is curious. Why does anyone need an alternative to tobacco? Do you need an alternative to the flu when you have recovered? It remains to be seen whether smokers will abandon cigarettes en masse and migrate to being e-cigarette users, and whether young people who haven’t yet started smoking will not take up e-cigs or tobacco or both so that the cigarette market will die an unlamented natural death.
Well, I wouldn’t hold your breath waiting for the results of this experiment. Nobody yet knows the long term effects of using e-cigs. My guess it that it won’t do you any good. The glaring inconsistency in the debate over whether to regulate e-cigs (the UK Government has already decided to do this) is, of course, that dangerous conventional cigarettes are largely unregulated – they are on open sale to all of legal age who wish to buy them – but the apparently much safer e-cigs are now to be regulated in the same way as medicines and medical devices. It is intended that e-cigs will “meet the new quality and safety standards.” So, the Government is going to have a finger in the pie: if you want to poison yourself you will have to use a good quality, Government approved, poison.
Here is a golden opportunity. E-cigs are to be regulated but ordinary cigarettes are to continue to be allowed to be sold. By all means let e-cigs be regulated, but ordinary cigarettes should be banned (or a ban gradually phased in) at the same time. If e-cigs are really a safe, or safer, satisfactory alternative to cigarettes, no smoker will be able to complain he or she is left high and dry to suffer intolerable cravings and withdrawal effects. E-cigs – much healthier and cheaper – are at hand! Give up smoking and take up vaping!
But why would anyone in their right mind want to inhale nicotine in any form, at all, ever? Is it because they need a new identity or a hobby? Does it provide an occupation of some kind? Do those who inhale nicotine see visions of heaven? Do they experience a wonderful pleasurable sensation?
One promotional video for e-cigs which I saw shows a happy crowd in a bar, chatting with their friends while imbibing alcohol and extolling the virtues of this new nicotine delivery device. They can have doses of nicotine without annoying other people and, apparently, without damaging their health. So there they are, all doing it together and having such a lot of fun.
Alas and alack. Why, Oh why can’t these good people enjoy a drink in a bar with their friends without inhaling a poison at the same time? Some try to make a virtue out of an apparent necessity and wear a badge proclaiming: I’M NOT SMOKING, I’M VAPING. The etymology gives a clue: it is derived from Latin vapidus, meaning insipid, disagreeably bland. In the archaic medical sense it meant exhalations arising in the stomach affecting the health, and vapour (US vapor) as a verb means to emit vapour, or to brag, make empty boasts, show off.
The only thing vaping shows is that the user is a nicotine addict getting his next fix.
© Gabriel Symonds, November 2013
[1] http://t.co/OyYxkWrL0I Accessed 29 July 2013
[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ARSDOs6Ngg Accessed 4 August 2013
[3] https://www.zeecigs.com/electronic-cigarette-xray-results.htm Accessed 4 August 2013