In Defence of the Electronic Cigarette and Other Alternatives to Smoking
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A simple Idea
Like many of the best ideas around, that of the electronic cigarette was a simple one.
Take everything bad that you don't need out of a cigarette. Put the one ingredient that causes addiction in a harmless solution. Put that solution in a device resembling a cigarette, so that smokers can retain the comfort and feel of a cigarette. Heat the solution up, and get a vapour resembling tobacco smoke - but without the smell, the carcinogens or the tar.
Paul Bergen, of the Tobacco Harm Reduction Project, says that:
What is left is a tube of some sort you put in your mouth (no danger unless you poke it in your eye or swallow it), nicotine (which is no more dangerous than caffeine unless you are a fetus), a flavoring component, and propylene glycol (which though toxic if you drink a lot of it is quite harmless if you inhale it).
Under Attack
However, it was not long before the electronic cigarette came under attack.
Critics worried about its long term effects, arguing that the long term effects of inhaling pure nicotine and propylene glycerol, the stage smoke creating solution needed to create the illusion of smoke, has not been tested thoroughly enough.
Others worried that the electronic cigarette could encourage smokers who would have given up to encourage smoking.
In the words of one public health campaigner, Serena Chen, regional tobacco policy director of the American Lung Association in California:
"If you had a serial killer who liked to stab people, would you give him a rubber knife?"
A Health Risk?
The electronic cigarette has been tested under laboratory conditions.
According to Dr Murray Laugeson, of Health New Zealand, who tested the Ryan Cigarette, the electronic cigarette is:
"... safe relative to cigarettes, and also safe in absolute terms on all measurements we have applied."
He also added that propylene glycol, the main ingredient of the electronic cigarette and a substance which has been tested in children's wards, had an excellent safety record.
Electronic cigarettes have been smoked long enough and by enough people that we know there are no serious short term side effects.
However, we have yet to see the results of long term trials on people. While we are pretty certain it is a lot healthier than smoking, it is true that we cannot be absolutely certain of the health risks involved.
Better the Devil We Know!
What we do know is how bad smoking is.
Smoking contains over 60 carcinogens and 3000 chemicals.
It causes numerous diseases, including lung cancer, oral cancer, throat cancer, heart disease, infertility, impotence, emphysema, arteriosclerosis, peripheral vascular disease, strokes, periodontal disease, brittle bones, eye cataract, stomach ulcers, erectile dysfunction, cot deaths, miscarriage, diabetes and other diseases.
It will kill around half of long term smokers - and with around 1,200,000,000 smokers in the world today, that's a lot of deaths.
Essentially public health campaigners are arguing we should ban an electronic cigarette which has had all the worst parts of smoking stripped out while retaining a product which has a one in two chance of killing its users.
A Scary Precedent
The current situation has a precedence in smokeless tobacco.
The European Union has banned Snuss, the safest form of smokeless tobacco and an alternative to smoking which research has been shown to be at least 90% safer than smoking cigarettes.
The one country in the Europe where smokers are allowed to use Snuss, Sweden, now has one of the lowest oral and lung cancer rates in the world.
Ash UK called the European partial ban (more dangerous forms are available) on smokeless tobacco:
"...a contradictory, illogical law on tobacco which leaves cigarettes legal while snus, which is over 100 times less harmful, is banned."
Lethal Moralising
Part of the problem may be public health campaigners who seem to regard giving up smoking as a moral and spiritual goal that has merit over and above health benefits.
So much so that they are prepared to ban healthier alternatives to smoking. The message is simple: Give up smoking or die.
Inconveniently, tobacco is highly addictive - meaning that many either can't or won't give up smoking.
It also means that, with no alternative allowed by health campaigners or governments, smokers will die ... in their hundreds of millions.