E cigarettes catch attention

By Teresa Weakley -

Whether you’ve seen someone holding what looks like a cigarette, or something that looks like illegal drug paraphernalia, new devices may have caught your attention. They’re electronic cigarettes, or vaporizers.

Anthony Bottaro was smoking a pack and a half a day of traditional cigarettes when he first tried e cigarettes, although that’s not what he calls them.

Bottaro said, “I had quit smoking for a year and a half and I’m just avid with the vaporizers and making juice.”

Bottaro said, “I don’t like the connotation of e cigarettes because there’s no smoke, there’s no carcinogens. You’re not lighting anything, it’s a mechanical device.”

Bottaro hasn’t smoked a single cigarette since the moment he started using his vaporizer. He believes in the product so much he opened his own shop in Cheektowaga earlier this year. It may look like smoke, but like Bottaro says, it’s not. It’s vapor.

The casings of these devices cover an integrated circuit, a small computer chip with a lithium ion battery.

Then there’s the juice, a mixture of nicotine and a carrier liquid of glycerol and propylene glycol. When in use, the battery heats up the gadget inside to about 180 degrees and turns the nicotine mixture into vapor.

Professor and Chair at UB Dr. Gary Giovino said, “What we’d like to see is the end of combustibles, the end of especially the manufactured cigarette, as well as cigars and pipes.”

Giovino worked at the CDC for ten years. He is a professor and Chair at UB’s School of Public Health. He says there are 6,000 chemicals in cigarette smoke. The most dangerous substance in e cigarettes is nicotine.

Giovino said, “If you can switch from 6,000 chemicals, 250 of which cause cancer or are toxic in other ways, to a product that has far fewer dangerous chemicals, that could be a good thing.”

Giovino stresses these devices still carry some risk. Nicotine is highly addictive. “The concern is kids. The concern is that we’ve made incredible progress since the late 1990′s in reducing smoking among younger people, you know at middle and high school students. E cigarettes are tending to glamorize this behavior of taking a tube, putting it in your mouth and inhaling nicotine.”

This has advocates pushing for tougher regulations. Government officials are suddenly calling for fast action to regulate e cigarettes.

The first national data on youth use of electronic cigarettes just became available in September.  The CDC survey shows that the number of young people using e- igarettes doubled from 2011 to 2012, a statistic health advocates find alarming.

Giovino, with UB’s School of Public Health, says marketing might be part of the problem.

New advertisements for e-cigarettes feature celebrities in TV commercials and are in fact very similar to the old cigarette ads.

The FDA is supposed to announce new regulations any day now, that would cover marketing these devices, and could potentially limit flavors as well.

Anthony Bottaro hopes the regulations won’t be too strict, he says he’s saved hundreds of dollars each month by switching to his vaporizer.

Copyright WIVB.com

E cigarettes catch attention