For better or worse, many people are addicted to a nerve toxin (nicotine) in a weed (tobacco) grown commercially in the Americas and Africa. A new solution has emerged that allows smokers to reduce the amount of poisons entering their lungs and reduce the ill effects of smoking a noxious weed. E-cigarettes are a better means of fixing on your nerve toxin than tobacco!
This piece will discuss the hype against them and look at safety issues around this safer alternative to the evil weed…
1. Safety
Tobacco smoke contains over 1000 carcinogens. E-cigarettes contain far fewer. The principle ingredients of e-cigarette fluid are formaldehyde, nicotine and flavourings. Where inhaling any drug is going to have ill effects the composition of e-liquid is far simpler than tobacco and there are fewer compounds entering your system.
The jury is still out as to how much safer e-cigarettes are, and I have no doubt that a number of monkeys and rats in cages are sampling a range of e-liquids to see how much of it will cause cancer and kill them due to increased media interest in e-cigarettes.
Nicotine is such an effective toxin it is used in many forms of insecticide and is partially responsible for the decimation of honeybees. A teaspoon of nicotine will kill a human very quickly. It isn’t a good drug as drugs go, putting it mildly! In terms of administration of the drug itself, e-cigarettes are not always about giving up nicotine.
However in my own experience of giving up nicotine, those around me are far safer when I can have my fix than when I can’t. Withdrawal can really turn my temper, so in terms of a loved one not being yelled at by an irrational nicotine junkie in need of a fix, e-cigarettes are a far safer alternative to cigarettes.
2. Second hand smoke
Again, the jury’s still out as to e-cigarettes’ ill effects on the public at large. Monkeys and rats are finding out about its toxicity right now. It is perceived to be safer than tobacco and probably is.
The vapour from e-cigarettes is much heavier than the smoke from tobacco, though without impartial scientific research one cannot properly judge the ill effects. When one considers that walking the length of Oxford Street in London is the equivalent of smoking two cigarettes due to the pollution from cars and buses? Bringing it closer to home, how healthy can it be walking down Preston Beach Road on a hot July day with a three mile traffic jam? 5 cigarettes worth of car fumes whilst having a walk to ‘enjoy the sea air’?! There are far more toxic ways to enjoy your day than someone puffing an e-cigarette on a bus beside you…
3. Stench
Walking around smelling of mint is far more appealing than smelling as if you’d rolled around in an ashtray. Ash gets into your skin and many smokers have a greyish pallor associated with their addiction. Kissing us is like licking an ashtray, as against when we have been ‘vaping’ when we have one of a large range of other flavours on or breath and clothes.
4. Wealth
E-cigarettes are currently not taxed as cigarettes are. Given the far reduced public health costs associated with this safer means of fixing on our chosen neurotoxin, this is just as well. E-cigarette smokers are wealthier despite fixing on the same poison as we did from tobacco. Greater wealth means we can spend our money on something other than paying for our otherwise almost inevitable future stay on a cancer ward as we choke to death with throat or lung cancer. We are opting out of that future so should rightly pay the exchequer a similar amount to non-smokers.
5. Children
All children make the mistake at an early age of wanting to be older. This changes after your wild years in your late teens and early 20’s when you often look back to your days of innocence and want to be a child again.
Amidst this delusion that being older is somewhat better, children pick up drugs. Smoking ages your skin prematurely and yellows your teeth. It gives you blackheads on your skin too, so you do look older (and smell it). Finally, you wheeze as you run after a bus, so you sound older too.
Children will always pick up something they see an older person doing. If it became fashionable for 20 year olds to defecate in the street, children would leap on the bandwagon and soon enough taking a crouch on St Mary St at lunchtime will be the thing to do.
Tighter, statutory regulation will make it harder for people to sell e-cigarettes. Though children have always found a way to get drunk on cheap lager and cider from the local corner shop (an age old tradition which most current adults did at some point themselves) the threat is there that the local authorities can fine the shop into the Dark Ages if they are busted for selling children under the age of 18 alcohol. Applying similar regulation to e-cigarettes would make it so much harder to get hold of them.
6. Nanny state and conclusions
I have been a heavy smoker for the last 21 years. I regret every last puff. I have tried every other means of quitting tobacco, and only this week have cut my tobacco intake in half by buying a high quality e-cigarette. All my problems with the other alternatives to nicotine are dealt with. When I want a hit, it hits me instantly. When I want the tingle of the poison on my throat, I get it. It is cheaper so I am no longer on the brink of homelessness and bankruptcy. My partner tastes mint when she kisses me, and I worry less that she will be tending to a cancer patient in the next decade (such stop smoking adverts terrified me as I tried to quit). She isn’t at risk of a nicotine temper tantrum either. I may well be free of tobacco in another week.
Big Tobacco stands to lose billions as more and more people take the leap into fixing by alternative means. As such I am morally certain it is behind many scare stories and weird government decisions. Governments in the face of public pressure react in favour of the mob. We are threatened by the hubbub demanding fast reactions to something which is fairly innocuous and far cheaper to manage than tobacco induced illnesses.
In my time as a journalist I have met 12 year old alcoholics, crack and smack addicts, and frequently see children having a crafty fag in the park as I once did. You will never stop children from doing what the big boys and girls do. Yes, have a strongly worded regulation or two, backed up with large fines for selling to underage consumers, which would stop newsagents from selling kids e-cigarettes, but go no further. Vapers are far better members of society than smokers and we deserve to be treated as such!
Richard Shrubb
