Having given up up the dreaded weed – the nicotine variety, I should explain – over 22 years ago, I wonder if e-cigarettes had been around, I might have been tempted to use them, instead of the cold turkey I put myself through. I’m glad they weren’t and I’m glad cold turkey worked because, I suspect, I would have been stuck in a halfway house for years, until one day I returned to the real thing when a suitable excuse, like a life crisis, came along. Thankfully, with my addiction long behind me, I’ll never know and I don’t really care.
The 300 plus carcinogens in each cigarette convinced me to quit, as well as the fact that everyone on my mum’s side of the family died as a direct result of smoking. Also, it made me smell and it was the most expensive and painful method of suicide known to man. Apart from that, I can’t knock it.
Whilst when I smoked the only ways of giving up fags were either by willpower or death, there is another choice now: vaping.
Although there is no science as to whether e-cigarettes are bad for you – you need evidence to establish that one and right now there isn’t any – the view of the experts, that is to say doctors, is that it’s far better to vape than to smoke, at least for ‘established’ smokers. For young people, and particularly children, I am not so sure.
I was in Keynsham today, a small town just next door to Bristol. As I walked down the High Street, not long after the schools had kicked out, I quickly became aware that vaping was very big in the town and most of the vapers (is this a word?) were children and in some instances very young children. Incredibly, I saw two children, no younger than 12, I reckoned, who were being accompanied by their mother and they were vaping. Not mum, though: she was puffing away merrily on the real thing. This vaping malarkey in children is of course not confined to Keynsham. I was in Thornbury, north of Bristol, yesterday and it seemed more children were vaping than not. I asked one of my own sons about it. Vaping is the in thing, or whatever youngsters call it these days. It’s hip to vape.
Whilst vaping is an alternative to cigarettes for adults, the worry is that it will develop a nicotine addiction in children and lead them to smoke the real thing. After all, e-cigarettes are merely a replacement for proper cigarettes. If e-cigs are getting children addicted, perhaps society is missing the point?
I do not blame anyone for vaping. I know just how hard it is to give up cigarettes permanently and if there is an easier way, then why not take it? However, if our laws are, effectively, encouraging children to get addicted, then perhaps stricter regulation is needed. I was not exactly shocked to see young children with e-cigs, although I was surprised that some of their mothers seemed to be actively encouraging it.
The cigarette companies who were once terrified at the advent of a product that might reduce the sales of their toxic product would today have been rubbing their hands together at the prospect of the next generation of smokers learning their craft on e-cigs.
