How do you feel about vaping?

Personally, I have never enjoyed it and ever since Colin Farrell likened an E-Cig to a ‘robot’s penis’ in the second season of True Detective, my association with them was over.

Now, “a decade after electronic cigarettes were introduced in the United States,” the New York Times has reported that “use has flattened, sales have slowed and, this fall, NJoy, once one of the country’s biggest e-cigarette manufacturers, filed for bankruptcy.”

And that’s a pretty big deal. NYT continues:

It is quite a reversal for an invention once billed as the biggest chance to end smoking as we know it and take aim at the country’s largest cause of preventable death. Use of the devices is slumping because they are not as good as cigarettes at giving a hit of nicotine. Dealing another strike against them, the country’s top public health authorities have sent an unwavering message: Vaping is dangerous.

The warning is meant to stop people who have never smoked — particularly children — from starting to vape. But a growing number of scientists and policy makers say the relentless portrayal of e-cigarettes as a public health menace, however well intentioned, is a profound disservice to the 40 million American smokers who could benefit from the devices.

Smoking kills more than 480,000 Americans a year.

American public health experts have long been suspicious of e-cigarettes – after all, there is no proof that what you are smoking is better than tobacco.

But there has been no short-term data to show that any element of the E-Cig has a harmful effect – and the UK recognises this.

But mounting evidence suggests vaping is far less dangerous than smoking, a fact that is rarely pointed out to the American public.

Britain, a country with about the same share of smokers, has come to the opposite conclusion from the United States. This year, a prestigious doctors’ organisation told the public that e-cigarettes were 95 percent less harmful than cigarettes. British health officials are encouraging smokers to switch.

British policy makers say that they were also skeptical of the devices at first, but that they have become more convinced of their benefit as data has accumulated. Rates of successful quitting are up. The smoking rate is down.

Surveys by Action on Smoking and Health, a British antismoking group, have found that half of Britain’s 2.8 million e-cigarette users no longer smoke real cigarettes.

Among people who are trying to quit smoking, e-cigarette users are 60 percent more likely to succeed than those who use over-the-counter nicotine therapies like gum and patches, a British study found.

So, while E-Cigs might resemble a piece of phallic metal, there’s no potential harm in replacing your pack of cigarettes with one of them – at least not yet.

You can read the full piece from NYT HERE and check how, once again, policy makers are overriding health benefits in the States.

[source:nytimes]