Ashtray Blog: An Electronic Cigarette Blog

Ameican soliders in the Vietnam war had a different way of smoking, as this movie shows:

Weed Smoking from smoke4me on Vimeo.

Condescending or amusing?

Phil, then an EFL teacher working in Korea, was up to a pack a day, two when he went out drinking. He wasn’t helped by the fact that his girlfriend was a sixty-a-day girl .

He was smoking Korean government cigarettes – which, ironically enough, were named long life!

What helped him to give up was exercise. He had always been competitive, running races, playing cricket – he liked to be the fastest, and when he was smoking he wasn’t.

“Running just stopped being fun.”

It’s perhaps something all of us have felt after exercise. I used to remember coming out of a swimming pool, feeling good and refreshed, breathing air deep into my lungs – at that time, the thought of smoking a cigarette felt horrible.

Meanwhile, smoking impedes our ability to do exercise by slowing the respiratory and ciculatory systems. When we do do exercise, though, we feel good, as the endorphins released by exercise give us the same feel good sensation as nicotine does – only this time we have the pleasure of knowing we have done something good for us.

Perhaps that’s why exercise has been proven by research to help people to quit smoking. In one study in 1999 in Center and the Division of Cardiology at The Miriam Hospital in Providence, R.I. women smokers were found to be twice as likely to quit if they were partaking in vigourous exercise as compared to doing no exercise. Although the research focussed on women, it was thought exercise would also benefit men trying to quit. This was backed up by a 1996 Gallup poll, which also found that smokers who exercised were twice as likely to give up.

The numerous benefits of exercise include several specific to that of smokers. Smokers suffer more from depression, but exercise is effective in combatting depression. Those suffering from stress often tend to turn to cigarettes or alcohol to overcome their stress, yet exercise is better than both at relieving stress. It also helps combat the weight gain that some smokers experience when quitting cigarettes.

“Quitting smoking was horrible,” said Phil. “It was the hardest thing I have ever done. But, ultimately, smoking is just not compatible with exercise.”

If you are interested in using exercise to help you give up smoking, check out UK Charity Quit’s exercise programme for smokers.

Tobacco advertising wasn’t always banned. This movie is from a time when you could even use children’s cartoons to advertise cigarettes!

If you need some additional motivation to quit smoking, check out the Smoking Calculator on this ThisIsMoney.co.uk. By entering your age, the age when you started smoking and how many cigarettes you smoke a day, you can see how much you have spent on smoking throughout your life. Rather more positively, you can also see how much money you can save if you do stop smoking, and how much money you would make if you saved the money you were currently spending on smoking!

It’s a frequent debate between smokers and non-smokers.

“Why should I pay for smokers out of my taxes?” complain the non-smokers. To which the smoker will point out the incredible tax they pay every time they light up.

But with half of all smokers dying of a smoking related disease, is the tax on tobacco really enough to pay for the strain on the NHS?

In fact smokers need not feel guilty. Despite huge rises in the cost of treating smoking related diseases, smokers are actually subsidising the NHS to the tune of several billion a year.

According to a recent report in the BBC, smoking costs the NHS 2.7 billion pounds a year. This huge figure compares with 1.7 billion a year ago, and the only reason it is not higher is because so many smokers have given up in recent years – a fall from 12 billion to 9 billion.

This is still a fraction, however, of the amount of money the government raises from tobacco. According to figures from the Tobacco Manufacturers Association the government raised a huge 10 billion in revenue in the tax year 2006/07.

In fact smokers have no reason to be ashamed of what they cost the NHS – in fact they are paying for the health treatment of those grumpy non-smokers. They may, however, feel grumpy about having to pay out so much money. Nevertheless, the government does have a serious justification: raising prices has been shown to be one of the most effective methods of reducing the amount of cigarettes smoked and, as a result, of saving lives.

The World Health Organisation once estimated that a price rise of 10% would cause 4% of smokers in developed countries to quit, and 8% of smokers in developing countries to give up. A worldwide price rise of 10% in 1995 would have lead to 40 million smokers giving up, and would
have prevented at least ten million tobacco related diseases.

In addition the real cost of smoking to the economy is far greater than 2.7 billion, with time lost due to illness, impaired physicial and mental faculties and of course losing 120,000 of the population a year to smoking, many of whom would still be in their prime if it wasn’t smoking.

Despite this, and with a Prime Minister who, with his money grabbing raids on pensions funds has shown that he does not always understand the wider picture, we can’t help wondering if a government desperate for money from any source will eventually ban the electronic cigarette – one method of smoking which currently escapes the punitive taxes placed on tobacco.

If you don’t feel you should be subsidising the NHS, try our E-cigarettes – they could save you a substantial amount over the long term.

I was intrigued when an Australian friend told me about a drug which he had bought in Australia, subsidised by the government, to help him to stop smoking. The drug, he said, worked by affecting the part of the brain that made the smoker addicted.

The drug was Champix, a precription quit-smoking drug manufactured by Pfizer. Champix has show reasonable success in helping smokers to give up smoking, with about 25% remaining off the dreaded weed after a year of taking the drug.

Unfortunately, as Karen Mc Ghee, a smoker on champix who was found hanging from the bannister by her nine year old daughter, can testify, the drug can have unpleasant side effects.

In a rare number of cases the drug can cause depression and even lead to suicide. Of about 20,000 users in the UK around 50 have suffered from depression.

That’s not a huge number, and in all likelihood the drug will save more than it kills. Of course, that is of little consolation to the people it does kill.

That includes Karen Mc Ghee, whose heart stopped in the ambulance on the way to the hospital – five times.

The doctors believed that she had brain damage, and after five days they turned her life support system off. Miracalously, just minutes after they turned of the system, and with her family waiting for her to die, she started breathing again.

Others have not been so lucky. They include Wayne Marshall, a 36-year-old father-of-two from Doncaster, TV editor Omer Jama, 39, both of whom killed themselves after taking the drug.

I think we’ll stick to selling e-cigarettes for now!

Doctors in Australia and America may soon be offering vaccines exclusively for smokers.

Unfortunately this is not a vaccine which will help people to stop smoking, or even avoid taking up smoking. Instead it is hoped the vaccination will help smokers from getting certain diseases that often affect smokers.

The vaccine is pneumococcal vaccine, which would protect smokers from illnesses such as meningitis and pneumonia.

Smokers suffer a stastically higher chance of getting these diseases than non-smokers as the protective mechanism in their respiratory system is damaged by smoking.

Some non-smokers have been against spending money on vaccines and other treatment for smokers. This is foolish. Not only is it the right of people to choose to live their life as they want, so long as they don’t hurt other people, it is also their right to enjoy the protection of the government. And from a practical point of view, prevention is always cheaper than the cure.

Never-the-less, giving up smoking is still the best option

You can read the full story on the Canberra Times website.

No smoker I have met has denied the relationship between smoking and alcohol – Rolf Harris has even written a song about the two of them: Nicotine and Alcohol.

Some smokers have had to stop alcohol while they were giving up smoking, or at least kick the habit of going to the pub. Indeed, one of the benefits of the smoking ban is that it makes it so much easier for smokers to give up, as well as making it harder for social smokers to make the jump to becoming addicts.

The opposite may also be true.

Both alcoholics and those helping them to stop drinking have argued that nicotine can be a crutch for stopping smoking. There can be little doubt that when drinking alcohol turns to alcoholicism, nicotine addiction is the lesser evil.

However, new research suggests that it may now be better to give up both alcohol and smoking at the same time.

A study in Madison, Australia looked at the brain function of recovering Alcoholics, who included both smokers and non-smokers. They found that alcoholics failed to recover certain brain functions as well as non-alcoholics.

This recovery of brain function included decision making skills and thinking speed, making it more difficult for the subjects to remain sober in the future. Other functions improved, but not as well as for the non-smokers.

So it looks that alcoholics may now have to kick two habits at once. As if they didn’t have enough to be dealing with in the first place!

A copy of our letter to the Princess of Wales:

HRH Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall
Clarence House
London

Your Royal Highness

We would like to offer you the enclosed gift, an electronic cigarette, which is designed to assist in giving up smoking and can also be used without fear of passive smoking, as it not only uses NO tobacco, it emits neither smoke nor smell. Nicotine is delivered in the required strength from the cartridge (filter) and an atomiser emits a smoke like vapour when exhaled – when inhaled a light glows at the tip of the e-cigarette.

The filters (cartridges) come in four strengths, ranging from high to zero, and it is legal to use this in planes, trains and indoors – either as an alternative to smoking, or to continue taking nicotine as required.

This is a very recently approved product and is already proving successful for those who wish to cut down or stop smoking, whilst still having the feel of a cigarette in their hand. We hope you will accept this gift and that it might be useful to you on occasions where smoking a real cigarette is no longer wither legal or allowed by those around you!

Yours sincerely

Jean Rasbridge
Gower Mobility Limited
Coed-y-Dwr Farm, Oldwalls, Llanrhidian, Gower, SA3 1HA.