Nasty Juice Yummier Than Fruit

There is no doubt that e-cigarettes are big business.

The flyer I received recently about the forthcoming Vapexpo conference in Paris lists around two hundred brands of e-cigarette liquid from sixteen countries.

Promoted on the misleading meme that e-cigarettes help smokers quit, if anyone has any doubts that vaping is drug addiction by other means, they only need to look at the two-minute promotional video for a variety of e-cigarette liquid produced in Malaysia, with the apt name of  Nasty Juice.

It opens with disconcertingly close-up and slow-motion views of a young man biting into an apple, a strawberry and a mango, in that order, while his eyes roll back in ecstasy. Then the tempo changes as he appears to be in some distress with his hands on his head and the voice-over asks, ‘What if, what if we can make it yummier?’ The answer seems to descend from heaven as, with a look of bliss on his face, he reaches up to grasp – a can of Nasty Juice! This, the voice-over intones, has ‘more flavour, more sweetness and more juiciness, just for you’. And finally the punch-line: ‘Quitting smoking cigarettes is possible than ever (sic)’.

If you wish to enjoy eating apples, strawberries or mangos, you merely need to visit your local fruit shop and buy them, provided they are in season. I often do this myself. But you would have to be out of your mind to buy synthetic chemical essences of these flavours and inhale them into your lungs. Yet this is what e-cigarette users do, and not just occasionally, which would be bad enough, but many times every day for years on end. Nasty juice indeed.

Is vaping safe? The obvious answer is no. The function of our lungs is to absorb oxygen and to exhale carbon dioxide produced by the body’s metabolism. Therefore, normally only clean air should be inhaled. E-cigarette vapour typically contains nicotine, water, propylene glycol, glycerin, flavourings and traces of heavy metals and other nasty chemicals.

How can one prove that vaping is, or is not, safe? You can’t. There is no reliable way of speeding up the process of long-term exposure to e-cigarette vapour to produce in a few weeks or months what the effects of daily vaping would be in humans after, say, twenty years. This doesn’t prevent scientists from trying, though.

There was a report in the doughty Mail Online (12 September 2017) of a study carried out by intrepid researcher Dr Pawan Sharma from the University of Technology, Sydney. The headline breathlessly informed us: ‘Vaping in pregnancy increases a child’s risk of asthma even if the e-cigarettes are nicotine free.’ In mice, that is.

Isn’t it enough on common sense grounds that vaping is likely to be bad for your health and even more so for pregnant women and their babies? But suppose Dr Sharma’s study had found no harmful effects of vaping in mice, would that mean it’s safe for pregnant women to vape away as much as they like? Obviously not – mice are not the same as humans and it’s an absurd and groundless assumption to regard animals as valid ‘models’ for human illnesses.

Dr Sharma admitted as much because, when I wrote and asked him to please tell me what is the scientific basis for believing that the results are applicable to humans, he was honest enough to reply: ‘These results can’t be extrapolated to humans right away.’

Then why did he do the experiments? Nonetheless, does he think the results might be extrapolatable (able to predict what happens in humans) in the future, and if so, when, and why? Of course I heard nothing further from this seeker after the truth.

Researchers working for Big Tobacco, on the other hand, are striving to prove the opposite: that tobacco products such as heated (not burnt) tobacco ‘sticks’ (for example, iQOS and ‘glo’) are potentially less harmful than smoking in humans (https://www.nicotinemonkey.com/philip-morris-tortures-animals/). At least Philip Morris, the subject of this post, is cautious enough in its lawyerly fashion only to refer to this new-fangled way of poisoning yourself with tobacco as a potentially reduced risk product.

You can prove anything you want with animal experiments. But they should be seen for what they are: crude, cruel and useless for understanding human diseases.

Vaping should also be seen for what it is: a way of continuing nicotine addiction that it is hoped will be safer than smoking.

Text © Gabriel Symonds