Thursday March 22nd is World Vaping Day, and is being celebrated in countries all around the world from Canada to Australia. We celebrate the enormously popular and fast-growing trend for smokers to exchange their tobacco cigarettes for the new electronic cigarettes or e-cigarettes, and exchange the harmful smoke for vapour. We’ve exchanged smoking for ‘vaping’ and invite you to join us.
Many smokers do not know about e-cigarettes, or personal vaporisers (PVs) as some call them, and National Vaping Day will help to make this new and far safer method of nicotine supply more widely known. When people smoke, it’s the smoke that causes the harmful disease and death – not the nicotine. If nicotine can be supplied by a clean delivery system, it’s problem solved, and e-cigarettes are likely to have less than 1% of the risk of tobacco cigarettes. Responsible nicotine consumption has about the same health risks as coffee drinking – it’s not the nicotine that causes the cancer and heart disease in smoking [1].
A long list of senior medical figures have endorsed e-cigarettes – even many anti-tobacco campaigners support them. Doctors’ associations have endorsed them. E-cigarettes cannot cause cancer as there is no smoke, only a water-based vapour, and the carcinogens are present at the same microscopic level as in pharmaceutical products such as nicotine skin patches. E-cigs cannot cause heart disease as there is no carbon monoxide or toxins. The nicotine strength can be varied to suit the individual, in order to provide the best possible alternative to smoking. And not only that, all sorts of wonderful flavours can be added to the mist, to make it even more attractive.
Many smokers who have repeatedly tried and failed to quit have had no problem switching to an e-cigarette. The average success rate for pharmaceutically-assisted quit attempts is about 5% – a failure rate of around 95%. Many smokers try and fail repeatedly as their quit attempts are doomed to failure by the very poor performance of the usual NRTs and drugs prescribed by doctors and health services. In contrast, very high success rates are reported even by anti-tobacco campaigners who have carried out research on e-cigarettes – a 78% success rate after a year, for example [2].
How do we know e-cigarettes are safe?
Simple – there is nothing in them that is toxic. Indeed, the main ingredients are used in asthma inhalers and the nebulisers that lung transplant patients use. If these ingredients can be supplied to those with the most delicate and sensitive lungs, and who are subject to vastly increased vulnerability to irritation or infection, they can certainly be consumed by healthy people. Add nicotine and flavouring and that’s all that is in there. We know all there is to know about what is in e-cigarettes. The FDA lost a court case to ban e-cigarettes in the US because the judge stated there had not been any report of harm caused or any evidence presented that e-cigarettes might cause harm. Millions have used them for years, worldwide, without incident.
In contrast, we still don’t know what’s in tobacco cigarettes – at the last count 5,300 chemicals had been identified in the smoke, but there are more to be found (perhaps as many as 10,000). In fact we know a great deal more about what is in e-cigarettes than we do about tobacco cigarettes. There is nothing in the mist produced by e-cigarettes that is known to be toxic. It’s true that we don’t know the full effects of inhaling chocolate flavour but there is absolutely no way it can compare with the number of carcinogens and toxic agents in cigarette smoke.
That’s why, despite use by millions of people worldwide for many years, there has never been a single report of a death or serious harm being caused by e-cigarettes. Compare that with the hundreds of suicides, thousands of heart attacks, and thousands of violent psychotic events caused by a licensed quit-smoking drug that was also introduced at the same time as e-cigarettes and has been available for exactly the same timeframe [3]. Electronic cigarettes are demonstrably safer, more effective, and a thoroughly better choice in every respect.
E-Cigarettes are the #1 weapon in the fight against smoking deaths
Notes
[1]Prof. Siegel on nicotine:
http://www.tobaccoharmreduction.org/faq/nicotine.htm
10 facts on nicotine in e-cigs:
http://www.ecigarettedirect.co.uk/ashtray-blog/2012/02/nicotine-electronic-cigarettes.html
[2] http://live.psu.edu/youtube/Ejcnzho95FA?mid=5295763
[3] There are now two separate clinical trials that report the risk of a cardiac event for a patient on Chantix (varenicline) is about 1 in 30.