Electronic cigarettes: There's no smoke without fire when it comes to possible health risks

OPINION BY PAUL ROUTLEDGE
Sep 11, 2014
Mirror UK

Mirror columnist Paul Routledge will take some convincing that ‘vaping’ is a healthy and less antisocial alternative to smoking
My first cigarette as a teenager was also my last. It made me sick, and what was the point of that?
Much the same was true of my first pint, though I thought that was worth persevering with. It’s still work in progress.
Now you can buy e-cigarettes, which mimic the action of fags and deliver a nicotine hit just like the real thing. A kind of mini-Oriental hookah, with smoke, but no tar and fewer of the other lethal chemicals.
Users call themselves “vapers” and the habit – or addiction, if you prefer – is spreading fast. Hollywood has even cast e-cigs as “amoral props” in 99 Homes, a film about a corrupt estate agent.
It’s boom time for the manufacturers. Ten new vaporisers and more than 200 “flavours” from banana cheesecake to bacon are appearing online every month, and you can buy them on any high street.
Medical experts are divided on the issue. Some claim that e-fags are a dangerous “gateway” drug to tobacco, or even worse substances, and could lead to the abolition of the ban on smoking in public places.
Others argue that they’re less harmful than tobacco, which is certainly true, and don’t inflict “passive smoking” on other people, which is less proven.
The Royal Society for Public Health wants e-fags to be renamed “nicotine sticks” to make them less attractive and discourage young people from taking up the habit.
The World Health Organisation goes even further, arguing for a ban on using them indoors, and claiming they do pose a danger to others from toxic exhaled aerosols. Passive vaping?
The WHO seeks curbs on advertising, a ban on selling e-fags to children and the virtual abolition of vending machines.
E-cigs “and other electronic smoking devices” are banned on the buses round our way. But not on trains or in pubs
and restaurants.
I saw a man puffing away in the Olde White Bear, while Trev and June had to go outside for a roll-up drag. But the Roscoe pub in ­Liverpool (an excellent alehouse, by the way) bans vaping in its bars.
A notice on the wall invites customers “kindly” to smoke them outside.
“There are so many different vapours today, some of which are not to everyone’s taste,” the landlord says.
E-cigs are not covered by the legal prohibition of ordinary fags, of course, because they were hardly known at the time the law came into effect in 2006.
Bus company bosses can proscribe what they like – food, booze and chewing gum being the usual targets – and I suspect more and more public service providers and hospitality outlets will start to ban e-cigs.
To my mind, grown men and women sucking on these nicotine dummies are a pitiful sight. And the tobacco companies are cashing in on the e-fag craze, big time. As more and more people give up Woodbines (do they still exist – they were the favourite smoke of the 1950s?), ­cigarette manufacturers have to find fresh ways to sustain their dirty profits.
So new generations have to be addicted to nicotine, which makes me uneasy. We know too little about the addictive nature and potential harm to others of “vaping” to give it a clean bill of health.
Sir Walter Raleigh brought the new wonder drug tobacco from America. If he did it today, he’d be clapped in irons. Quite right, too. The makers of e-cigs might be the next in the dock.
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