I am very glad that when I gave up smoking on 1st January 1994, there was no such thing as an e-cigarette. I never had the choice of remaining addicted to nicotine or going ‘cold turkey’ and quitting the drug altogether. The latter was tough for a few long months in deep mid winter but soon enough I knew I was finally smoke-free. It was right up there with the best decisions I ever made.
Given that pretty well everyone on my mother’s side of the family died as a direct result of smoking related diseases, the odds are that by now I might be in serious trouble of heading that way myself. I know people who flit between e-cigs and the real thing, before going back to the real thing again and then going back to e-cigs. For me, that would have been an unpleasant way of prolonging the agony of addiction.
The medics say that e-cigs are a far better option that cigarettes, or perhaps that they are less bad. Public health England (PHE) says that vaping is 95% safer than smoking which makes me think about that 5%. Why is it not completely safe, then? The Guardian reports the World Health Organisation (WHO) having concluded in 2016 that nicotine is “involved in the biology of malignant diseases”, which means it gives you cancer. They have established the possibility that nicotine has “a damaging effect on foetal and adolescent brains”, a bit like cigarettes, then. And this is only what we know so far.
The report goes on to say that e-cigs also contain “glycols, aldehydes, volatile organic compounds. polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon, nitrosamines, metals and silicate particles”, all of which are potentially harmful. Now, I am rather relying on the advice of scientists who tell me things I don’t really understand, other than the conclusion that vaping is clearly not without its risks. Perhaps, as times goes by there will be far more risks than we know about today. After all, back in the day, doctors advertised the benefits of cigarette smoking.
Finding out that e-cigs are likely to be bad for you, would seem to vindicate my view that vaping should be carried out as far away from me as possible. Some people might get a kick out of breathing in someone’s raspberry vaping, but if there is a danger that this stuff is potentially damaging to my health, then I don’t want to be anywhere near it, thank you very much.
We know how cigarette smoking ends and it doesn’t end well. Of course, everyone knows someone who smoked into their nineties and it never affected them. They never pause to think whether the second hand smoke affected anyone around them. The same carcinogens polluting the smoker’s lungs will end up in the second hand smoker. By the same token, should we be forced to breathe in someone else’s vaping?
Encouraging people to vape merely encourages people to carry on being addicted to one of the most addictive drugs known to mankind. If science is discovering that vaping is bad for you too, why isn’t the government pointing this out?
