E-cigarettes have attracted much controversy since they were introduced some seven years ago. The anti-smoking lobby, long used to getting their way in a quantifiably quite successful war on cigarettes, immediately took to attacking e-cigarettes as just another form of the demon weed.
Whether there is the link between e-cigarettes and lung cancer is unclear, but they do not produce ash, unpleasant smells or toxic fumes for bystanders. The vapour produced by someone using an e-cigarette is from electronic vaporisation of water that contains nicotine and nothing more. The vapour is no more insidious than a hot breath on a cold day.
A study just published in the journal Addiction by University College London’s Dr James Brown has found that in real world conditions, e-cigarettes are 60% more successful at helping someone give up smoking than willpower alone. E-cigarettes beat, hands down, quitting aids like nicotine patches. Dr Brown and his team were looking at data collected since 2009 by the Smoking Toolkit Study in the UK, which is funded by Cancer Research UK and the Ministry of Health.
People who are addicted to nicotine require a substitute in many cases in order to successfully quit. E-cigarettes are, according to this research, more than twice as effective at helping them do that as previously available aids like patches. E-cigarettes reduce harm to the individual using it and those around them versus regular cigarettes.
Bizarre attack with no basis in fact
It is, then, quite bizarre that e-cigarettes have come under attack such as they have. With no basis in fact around public health, people have been banned from using them in all sorts of places to mimic the strict bans on smoking regular cigarettes. Shopping centres, DART and rail stations, hospital campuses and various other places have banned the practice of inhaling a harmless vaporised liquid.
Someone considering banning e-cigarettes from public places will, I hope, support my forthcoming campaign to ban noxious fast food from being consumed in public. Kebabs and curry chips, I’m looking at you. Oh, and Red Bull and associated energy drinks. And people wearing too much perfume. Not to mention those of you who are sweaty on the way home after a wet November trudge to the train station. Take a bike. If e-cigarettes are to be banned because folks don’t like the look of them, there’s a long list of otherwise harmless substances we could talk about.
Source: Aaron McKenna, thejournal.ie, 15/11/4
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