Category Archives for "E-Cigarettes"

E-Cigarettes

E-cigarettes are being encouraged in Britain as a means of quitting smoking.

This is misleading and irresponsible. E-cigarettes are merely an alternative way of continuing nicotine addiction that is hoped will be safer than smoking.

It’s often argued that with e-cigarettes, since you don’t inhale many of the poisons found in tobacco smoke, it’s healthier to vape than to smoke. This is defeatist: it disempowers and even infantilises smokers. You don’t need an alternative to smoking!

Sucking nicotine-laden fumes into your lungs many times a day for years on end is obviously risky. Only when people have been doing it for twenty or thirty years will we know whether it’s safe – but in the meantime why take the risk?

It’s also claimed vaping is pleasurable and sociable. If you look into this it’s clear the pleasure is illusory; and the sociability of vaping merely means you don’t feel quite so foolish inhaling poison if other people are doing it with you.

Quitting smoking and all forms of nicotine completely can be easy – with the Symonds Method.

E-Cigarettes May Be Hazardous To Your Health

Is this the beginning of the end for ENDS? The acronym – much medical writing is peppered with annoying non-standard abbreviations of this sort – means Electronic Nicotine Delivery Systems. These drug-delivery devices (for that is what they are) were in the spotlight at a conference in India of the FCTC (there we go again) […]

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To Vape, or Not to Vape: That is the Question!

I recently signed up for the Vaping Post, an online publication that ‘brings information on vaping’. They add, ‘We consider that the electronic cigarette (vaporizer) is a method of risk reduction for adult smokers who can’t or don’t want to quit smoking.’ Having set out their raison d’être they rightly caution that: Vaping exposes the […]

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Why NRT Makes it Harder to Stop Smoking

NRT, let me remind you, means so-called nicotine replacement therapy. Why ‘so-called’? Because nicotine is not a replacement for anything, nor is nicotine being replaced with something, so the name is wrong. It really means cigarette replacement but could equally well and more accurately be called nicotine maintenance therapy (NMT). The idea is that, since […]

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Millions and Millions of Vapers

In support of the suggestion that e-cigarettes (‘vaping’) should be available on the NHS, there is a clip shown on the BBC Radio 5 Alive program (19 August 2015) featuring Professor Kevin Fenton from Public Health England. He points out that “more than 2.5 million smokers have already purchased their own e-cigarettes…some are using them […]

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