E-cigarettes: Healthy tool or gateway device?

(CNN) – If the tiny sample of smokers in a new study in the British journal Lancet are any indication, electronic cigarettes might be slightly more effective than nicotine patches in helping people quit smoking.

Great, right? Except another new study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggests more children and teens are trying them.

The implications of both these studies means electronic cigarettes have been getting a lot of attention lately. Just what e-cigarettes are and what role they should play in helping people quit smoking depends very much on who you speak with about this topic.

Smoking is still the leading cause of avoidable death in the United States. The devices are not one of the FDA-approved methods to help people quit, but many people are using them this way. A growing number of scientists are studying them to see whether they may be a way to end an epidemic.

The topic, though, remains as polarizing a health issue assex education or diet sodas.

An e-what?

The e-cigarette was actually developed by a pharmacist in China.

The pharmacist, Hon Lik, was a three-pack-a-day smoker. That was nothing unusual — more than 300 million people in China are regular smokers. But when Lik’s father, who was also a heavy smoker, died of lung cancer, Lik decided he had to come up with an alternative that wouldn’t kill him.

Most scientists believe nicotine itself, while highly addictive, is not what causes cancer for smokers or for the people around them who breathe their second-hand smoke. Instead, it’s the toxic chemicals that are created when tobacco and filler products burn that are dangerous.

If there was a way to get nicotine addicts their fix without the burn, you just might avoid the health problems. Nicotine then becomes as harmless as any other addictive substance, such as caffeine, some experts say.

So Lik developed an e-cigarette — a device that uses a small battery to atomize a pure liquid solution of nicotine. Nothing is burned. There is no ash. There is no smoke. There is nicotine, and then there is flavoring added for taste.

Essentially the person using these inhales a kind of vapor that looks like fog from a fog machine. A recent review of all the scientific research done on e-cigarettes by Drexel University professor Igor Burstyn concludes “current data do not indicate that exposures to vapors from contaminants in electronic cigarettes warrant a concern.”

In plain language, Burstyn concludes: “It’s about as harmless as you can get.”

“I wouldn’t worry at all if someone was smoking one of these by my kids,” Burstyn said. “From a pure health perspective, these are not as bad as a cigarette.”

E-cigarettes came to the U.S. market around 2009. The CDC now estimates about one in five American smokers have tried an e-cigarette — that’s about 6% of all adults.

There are e-cigarette stores, but now you can also buy them online or in convenience stores. Some look like regular cigarettes; some look like pens or thumb drives.

First you buy a starter kit, which costs between $40 and $130. In the kit is the e-cigarette, a charger and a few cartridges. The cartridges typically last as long as a 20-pack of cigarettes and sell for around $10. You can also buy a bottle of e-liquid to refile the cartridge yourself.

The anti-e-cigarette camp

Critics point out e-cigarettes come in kid-friendly flavors such asgummy bear, atomic fireball candy and cookies and cream. It makes them worry that e-cigarettes will become a gateway to encourage kids to develop a lifelong nicotine addiction — or worse, try the real thing.

Only about 20 states specifically forbid the sale of e-cigarettes to children.

Tobacco use has been on the decline with kids; it’s about half what it was in the mid-1990s. But the latest CDC study shows a growing number of middle and high school students have tried e-cigarettes.

One in 10 high school students surveyed said they had tried e-cigarettes last year. That’s double the number from 2011. One high school in Connecticut banned them after the principal said administrators dealt with at least one incident involving e-cigarettes every day.

CDC director Tom Frieden characterized this trend as ”deeply troubling.”

But as far as risky behavior goes, it’s still a tiny fraction of students. The survey showed about 3% of these kids said they had used one in the last 30 days. By contrast, 39% of students said they drank some amount of alcohol in the past 30 days, 22% binge drank and 24% rode with a driver who had been drinking.

The real problem is that 88% of adult smokers who smoke daily said they started when they were kids, according to the CDC. Kids who start down the path to using e-cigarettes may stick with them for life.

“So much is unknown about them and what the long-term complications could be with their use,” said the American Lung Association’s Erika Sward. “Bottom line, we don’t know what the consequences of using them are, and we are very troubled that kids would find them attractive.”

E-cigarettes are unregulated in the United States; no laws make manufacturers tell you what you are actually inhaling. The unknown is one of the many qualities of e-cigarettes that the American Lung Association doesn’t like.

It’s “a complete unregulated Wild West,” Sward said. She wants the FDA to move quickly with regulatory oversight, which she says would make manufacturers disclose what the actual ingredients are in each of the 250 or so brands available.

In 2009, a FDA test on a small number of e-cigarette samples found “detectable levels of known carcinogens and toxic chemicals to which users could potentially be exposed.” They found diethylene glycol in one cartridge at a 1% level; this is an ingredient used in antifreeze and can be toxic to humans in large quantities. Diethylene glycol is also found in some dental products and in some pharmaceuticals.

After that study, the FDA banned the sale of e-cigarettes. They warned e-cigarette smokers that they were inhaling “toxic” and “harmful” chemicals. However, in 2010, a court ruled that “the FDA had cited no evidence to show that electronic cigarettes harmed anyone,” and stores could go on selling them.

The early e-adopters

On the other side of the debate are the passionate supporters of e-cigarettes. Many who use them say it is the first thing that has helped them stop using cigarettes — something more than 90% of smokers fail to do with any of the existing FDA-approved methods. There are blogs and message boards dedicated to them. And there are countless impassioned testimonials from the people who use them.

Florida resident Craig Lashley says they’ve changed his life.

“I got tired of being like that little kid in ‘Peanuts’ who had the cloud of smoke following him all the time,” Lashley said. “I didn’t like the way I smelled when I smoked, and I didn’t like what smoking said about me, especially to kids.”

He discovered the e-cigarette about a year ago and hasn’t smoked a regular cigarette since.

He says he smells better, feels better and spends a lot less — about $10 a week on e-cigarettes. He used to spend about $45 a week on regular cigarettes.

“I like the feel of blowing smoke,” Lashley said. “It seems to me like (e-cigarettes are) a healthier alternative.”

A growing number of respected physicians and scientists agree, and they say these products could end a major health problem.

“Electronic cigarettes and other nicotine-containing devices offer massive potential to improve public health, by providing smokers with a much safer alternative to tobacco,” the Royal College of Physicians says. “They need to be widely available and affordable to smokers.”

The latest study, published in the British journal the Lancet, examined whether people who used them as an alternative to smoking would abstain from using regular cigarettes.

The New Zealand authors studied the behavior of 657 people who were trying to quit. One group got nicotine patches, another got nicotine e-cigarettes and others got placebo e-cigarettes without the nicotine.

Over a period of six months, only a tiny fraction of the people in the study actually quit smoking.

People using the nicotine e-cigarettes quit at a slightly better rate compared with those using the patch, though. Some 7.3% using the e-cigarettes abstained from smoking traditional cigarettes compared with the 5.8% who stopped with the patch. About 4.1% stopped with just the placebo e-cigarettes.

It was such a small number of people who quit that the authors concluded “more research is urgently needed to clearly establish their overall benefits and harms at both individual and population levels.”

Dr. Michael Siegel, a physician who has spent the past couple decades working on tobacco control initiatives, has been surprised by the negative reaction to e-cigarettes from so many people in the public health sector. Siegel says the studies he’s done have shown e-cigarettes are a help.

“True we don’t know the long-term health effect of e-cigarettes, but there’s a very good likelihood that smokers are going to get lung cancer if they don’t quit smoking,” he said. “If they can switch to these and quit smoking traditional cigarettes, why condemn them?”

Siegel theorizes the e-cigarettes might look too much like smoking.

“It’s ironic the very thing that makes them so effective … drives the anti-smoking groups crazy. But what makes them so effective is it mimics the physical behaviors smokers have, which is something the patch can’t do.”

Siegel does believe there is an urgent need for more regulations.

Ray Story, founder of the Tobacco Vapor Electronic Cigarette Association, agrees. He says his association has also pushed for age verification legislation.

“When you have these companies trying to promote these as something they are not, and you have stores that sell them in the candy aisle, you are going to have a problem,” Story said. “If they are officially categorized as a tobacco product, you get an automatic age verification put in place.

“Nicotine is addictive, and we want the federal government to create guidelines and a structure that will confine these to being sold as adult products.”

Lashley says no matter what the debate, he will continue to spread the e-cigarette gospel to his fellow adults.

So far, his co-workers have been receptive to the idea. He used to be the only one with an e-cigarette on smoke breaks. Now he says he’s got more than a dozen colleagues doing the same.

One colleague, though, complained about it.

“He said ‘I’m sick of all these people smoking electronic cigarettes,” Lashley said. “When I asked him why he said. ‘Simple, now I can’t bum any off of them.’ “

E-cigarettes: Healthy tool or gateway device?

CVS move won’t slow e-cigarette sales

As retailer gives up cigarettes, e-cigarette industry grows

By Jonnelle Marte, MarketWatch 

The news Wednesday that CVS Caremark CVS +0.17%   would stop selling tobacco products drew praise from the White House and anti-smoking groups. But while the ban is the latest anti-smoking initiative introduced by a major retailer, it may not do much to slow the fast-growing e-cigarette industry.

E-cigarettes, battery-powered devices that convert nicotine-containing liquid into vapor, aren’t sold at CVS. But they are widely available and have become easier to buy over the years, even as traditional cigarettes have gotten more expensive and retailers have cut back on selling them. The electronic products are being carried by more brick-and-mortar stores and are sometimes displayed more prominently than old-fashioned cigarettes, says Bryan Haynes, partner at law firm Troutman Sanders and counsel for the Electronic Cigarette Industry Group, a trade association representing e-cig makers. “It used to be only a select few locations would carry e-cigarettes, and they would generally be more specialized shops,” says Haynes. “Now it would be more surprising if you didn’t find e-cigs anywhere that traditional cigarettes are sold.”

They are also gaining in popularity, at a time when sales of traditional cigarettes are declining. About one in five adult smokers in the U.S. tried electronic cigarettes in 2011, up from 10% in 2010, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And Bonnie Herzog, a senior analyst with Wells Fargo, says that the roughly $2 billion e-cig industry is on track to quintuple to $10 billion in sales by 2017. Although e-cigs currently represent only a fraction of the overall tobacco industry — estimated at $100 billion — Herzog says they could become more popular than traditional smokes over the next decade.

The move from CVS comes weeks after a report from the U.S. Surgeon General showing that smoking is deadlier than initially expected and linked to diseases such as diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis and colorectal cancer, on top of previously well-known conditions such as lung disease, heart attack and stroke. But since there isn’t as much evidence linking the much younger e-cigarette industry to health risks, e-cigarettes have less of a stigma, says Haynes.

Some smokers are having an easier time smoking e-cigarettes than traditional cigarettes, as the latter are increasingly being banned in parks, restaurants and the workplace, says Haynes. The devices can be more discreet than regular cigarettes.

Indeed, while employers have ramped up their anti-smoking efforts in recent years, banning smoking at the workplace and charging workers who smoke higher insurance rates, many companies say they are waiting for more research regarding the health risks of using e-cigarettes. “We’re waiting for more evidence, more clarity to be able to set meaningful policy,” says LuAnn Heinen, a vice president at the National Business Group on Health, a non-profit in Washington, D.C., that encourages employers to ban traditional cigarettes at work and to offer smoking-cessation programs for workers looking to quit.

To be sure, anti-smoking groups say the lack of research regarding e-cigarettes is more reason for consumers to avoid the products. “Nobody knows what’s in them,” says Paul G. Billings, senior vice president of advocacy and education for the association, adding that some studies have found e-cigarettes contain carcinogens. There is also a concern that e-cigarettes may be introducing teens — and other nonsmokers — to nicotine, with the share of high-school students who say they’ve used them doubling to 10% from 2011 to 2012, according to the CDC. And some groups are treating e-cigs and other tobacco products similarly. Johnson & Johnson JNJ +0.33%  , for example, bans workers from using e-cigarettes along with all tobacco products on their campuses, says Fikry Isaac, head of global health for Johnson & Johnson.

CVS move won’t slow e-cigarette sales

Over-Regulation of Electronic Cigarettes Potentially Harmful

Besides nicotine, e-cigarettes do not contain the tar, chemicals and other substances found in tobacco smoke, substances that cause many of the health risks associated with smoking. (Photo : Reuters)

As e-cigarettes cut into tobacco’s market share, experts are worried that new regulations are putting corporate interests in front of public health.

In an article appearing in the Therapeutic Advances in Chronic Disease, communication, legal and public health experts Daniela Saitta, Giancarlo Antonio Ferro and Riccardo Polosa from the University of Catania, Italy, argue that fear over the growing popularity of the electronic cigarette could lead to policy implementations that have unintended consequences.

“The rationale of tobacco harm reduction is to make nicotine products that are satisfying as a smoking substitute available to smokers at least as easily as cigarettes, and at competitive prices, hence providing all smokers with an easily obtainable lower-risk alternative to smoking,” the authors wrote. “Certain regulatory decisions may have diverse unintended consequences on public health and may face many different challenges.”

Besides nicotine, e-cigarettes do not contain the tar, chemicals and other substances found in tobacco smoke which cause many of the health risks associated with smoking. Despite these health benefits, the authors said that members of the health community, pharmaceutical regulators and governments fear that e-cigarettes will encourage higher nicotine consumption and may encourage new smokers, rather than leading to people quitting, especially in young non-smokers.

The authors showed recent drafts of legislation by the European Union define “arbitrary” limits to nicotine content in e-cigarettes and result in higher costs and limited assess for consumers.

“It is counter-productive and hypocritical to over-regulate a product designed to reduce or eliminate the diseases and early deaths caused by smoking,” the authors wrote.

Polosa and his co-authors set down guidelines for e-cigarette legislation that includes detailed package labeling, evidence of good manufacturing practices, child-proof caps and documentation of the contents of the e-cigarettes available for regulators.

Unfortunately, the authors said data driven policies may be “politically impossible to implement because the growing popularity of e-cigarettes is a threat to the interests of the tobacco industry, the pharmaceutical industry and to their associated stakeholders due to the substantial decrease in cigarette consumption and NRT sales.”

“If these obstacles can be overcome, much misery and suffering can be reduced and millions of lives can be saved,” the authors stated. “E-cigarettes are not a gateway to smoking but a gateway from smoking, and heavy regulation by restricting access to e-cigarettes would just encourage continuing use of much unhealthier tobacco smoking.”

By J. Travis Smith

 

 

Over-Regulation of Electronic Cigarettes Potentially Harmful

LeCig Electronic Cigarettes to Open New Location in Broken Bow, Oklahoma

Leading independent provider of e cigarettes expands its company owned electronic cigarette stores to Broken Bow, Oklahoma. New location joins existing Hot Springs, Glenwood and De Queen locations in Arkansas as the South East’s premiere vaping destinations.

ECigarette provider LeCig today announced the planned opening of its latest electronic cigarette store in Broken Bow, Oklahoma. The Broken Bow store is scheduled to open February 7, 2014.

Located in the South Park Plaza Shopping center next door to the busiest Wal Mart in the area (Google Map), the Broken Bow LeCig store carries LeCig’s full line of electronic cigarettes, starter kits, e juice, batteries and accessories.

“We’re really happy with the reception we’ve had here in Broken Bow and are excited about expanding in to neighboring Oklahoma. Our customers appreciate the selection of vaping solutions and our wide range of e juice flavors,” said Mike Elias, CEO of LeCig.

LeCig Broken Bow will be open Monday through Friday 9AM – 6 PM and Saturdays 10AM – 4PM and Sundays 1 PM – 5 PM.

The LeCig Broken Bow store is the fourth retail location opened by Arkansas based LeCig complementing its DeQueen, Glenwood and Hot Springs Arkasas locations.

LeCig offers electronic cigarette products and tobacco alternatives to both the novice and experienced e-cigarette enthusiast along with a 30 day money back guarantee. The benefits of LeCig’s e cigarettes include:

- No tobacco — which means no tar, carbon monoxide, or ash.

- Savings for the average smoker of over $1,000 per year

- No more second hand smoke or having to go outside

- E Cig users can get the same amount of nicotine as a regular cigarette, and reduce that amount if they are trying to cut down

- A cartridge costs less than $2 and is about the same as an entire pack of cigarettes.

- No more “You Smell Like a Dirty Ashtray”

- Le Cig has a variety of different e liquid and cartridge flavors

- FREE SHIPPING in the United States

The electronic cigarette industry is expected to grow to over $10 Billion by 2017 as tens of millions of tobacco smokers make the switch to electronic cigarettes.

“Our customers find that our e cigarettes provide them a smokeless alternative to tobacco when they are out and about, as well as help them reduce the cost of smoking over the long term”, commented Dee Sanders, LeCig Operations Manager.

LeCig offers e cigarette starter kits, disposable electronic cigarettes, e cig batteries and chargers and e liquids and refills in a variety of flavors, both as e liquid refills and as electronic cigarette cartomizers. Check out LeCig’s e cig blog at http://lecigs.com for electronic cigarette news, how to, videos and more.

LeCig products are available on the web and at retailers across the country and is rapidly expanding its retail base nationwide.

Learn more about LeCig by visiting http://www.lecig.com or by calling 870-525-1440.

LeCig Electronic Cigarettes to Open New Location in Broken Bow, Oklahoma

E-Cigarettes Spark Dilemma for Employers

Joshua Catherman uses electronic cigarettes at work—discreetly.The 32-year-old meat cutter at a Tampa, Fla., supermarket is reluctant to ask his employer for permission to “vape” indoors.

When he is sharing the tiny break room with co-workers, he asks if they mind if he uses an electronic cigarette, which converts a nicotine or nicotine-free liquid into vapor. If the answer is no, he pulls out his device and takes a long drag of flavored liquid mist.

“I blow out a Bavarian cream vape, and it smells like Christmas at grandma’s house,” he says.

The one time a co-worker walked into the break room and objected to his e-cigarette, Mr. Catherman quickly put it away. “I don’t want to lose my job,” he says.

To puff or not to puff? Vaping at work is, so far, a hazy issue for most workers and their employers. While companies want to support workers’ efforts to quit smoking, they are unsure about inviting staff to flick on the battery-powered e-cigarettes in the office.

Exxon Mobil Corp. allows vaping in smoking areas, while CVS Caremark Corp. bars workers from using regular or e-cigarettes at its corporate campuses. E-cigarettes aren’t allowed for customers or workers at Starbucks Corp. and Wal-Mart Stores Inc., but vapers—both patrons and workers—are welcome at McDonald’s Corp. restaurants. United Parcel Service Inc., which charges nonunion tobacco users $150 extra in monthly insurance premiums, opted to make e-cigarette users pay the higher price, too.

Twenty-four states and the District of Columbia ban smoking in the workplace, but only three—New Jersey, Utah and North Dakota—have added e-cigarettes to those laws.

And while more than 100 cities forbid vaping in areas where regular cigarettes are already banned—including Chicago, where city aldermen voted on Wednesday to restrict e-cigarette use—most haven’t addressed the issue, leaving employers to make their own decisions.

Employers’ choices are complicated by the fact that public-health experts can’t agree on whether e-cigarettes are a valuable tool for helping smokers kick the habit or simply a milder—but still potentially harmful—alternative to regular cigarettes.

Most vaping liquids contain nicotine, the addictive agent in cigarettes. Scientists largely agree that e-cigarettes emit far fewer toxins than traditional cigarettes, but critics, including public-health officials and health advocacy groups, contend that secondhand vapor is a pollutant and more research is needed to understand its health effects.

Some workers simply find vaping unsettling. Last month Idaho’s Bannock County, population 88,000, banned e-cigarettes from all county buildings, including the courthouse, county jail and fairground facilities, after courthouse employees complained about indoor vapers.

“They felt like it was disruptive, more because of how it looked than anything,” says Howard Manwaring, a county commissioner. Many versions of e-cigarettes closely resemble regular cigarettes, right down to their glowing tips.

The county hasn’t extended the ban to private workplaces or restaurants because commissioners don’t have enough information yet about the health effects of vaping, Mr. Manwaring says, adding, “We will leave it open to revisit in the future.”

Cigarette smoking in offices seems like a relic, but it was only in 1994 that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration proposed a broad smoking ban that would have applied to more than a million workplaces. The agency’s regulators received death threats in response and the proposal was eventually abandoned, partly because employers had begun adopting their own bans.

By 2007, 91% of U.S. employees were subject to smoking-restriction policies, according to a report from Pfizer Inc.

Business owner and nonsmoker Carol Keiling elected to allow e-cigarettes during lunch hours after an employee approached her two years ago about vaping in the office. Ms. Keiling, president of Safety Harbour Insurance Inc., in St. James City, Fla., now lets workers vape freely unless a customer is present. Three employees—all former tobacco smokers—use e-cigarettes.

“It didn’t seem to pose a danger to anyone, so I gradually loosened the rules,” she says.

She quickly noticed that the “cacophony of coughing” that filled the office every morning disappeared soon after the smokers switched to e-cigarettes. Productivity rose, too, she says. Of the one employee who stuck with tobacco cigarettes, she says, “I feel like I lost over an hour a day of paid time to his smoking.” Ms. Keiling tried to regulate his smoke breaks, but laid him off in May, partly because of low productivity.

The Food and Drug Administration is considering restrictions on the sale and marketing of e-cigarettes, and may release its recommendations in the next few weeks.

That proposal could “eliminate some of the uncertainty as to whether e-cigarettes should be grouped as tobacco products that are harmful,” says Jay Hux, an attorney at employment law firm Fisher & Phillips LLP. “That’s a narrative employers should be aware of.”

The FDA’s actions are being closely watched, since any proposal from the agency will add to the growing debate over the devices, which are seen by some in the industry as the future of the $100-billion-a-year U.S. tobacco market. E-cigarette companies have drawn big-name investors, including tobacco giants such as Altria Group Inc. and Reynolds American Inc.

For now, many vapers say they will puff in stealth.

Shelley Bain, 55, quit her 30-year pack-a-day habit in October after switching to e-cigarettes. At the federal agency where she works in Bethesda, Md., she occasionally slips into the bathroom for a quick hit on her e-cigarette.

When she does so, Ms. Bain says she inhales, then counts to 15 so almost no vapor escapes when she exhales.

Mostly, though, she takes her device outside and huddles with the smokers.

Though she doesn’t know if her agency has an official policy on e-cigarettes, she says, “I don’t want to get into the whole mess of trying to argue about it with people inside.”

By

LAUREN WEBER and

MIKE ESTERL

Write to Lauren Weber at lauren.weber@wsj.com and Mike Esterl atmike.esterl@wsj.com

E-Cigarettes Spark Dilemma for Employers

E-cigarettes could become 'medicines' available on NHS

Manufacturers apply for licences from regulatory body as tobacco substitutes scrutinised by EU and advertising watchdog

E-cigarettes could be available on the NHS by the end of the year with at least two companies – one a subsidiary of British American Tobacco – having already embarked on the process of obtaining licences from the medicines regulator.

The UK company Nicolites said its application was “well-advanced” while BAT’s Nicoventures has also started the process, although decisions on whether their products are prescribed on the NHS will be made by local commissioning groups.

The status of “medicines” will give the companies commercial advantage and allow the e-cigarette makers to market their product internationally, including in sponsorship deals, a move that will be banned for competitors not in the same bracket.

The news came to light as ministers in England prepare to ban the sale of e-cigarettes to under 18s – Wales and Scotland are likely to follow suit.

The Advertising Standards Agency is also about to launch a consultation on new rules to cover e-cigarettes, used by 1.3 million people in Britain last year. It will start later this month, with the framework likely to be in place by autumn, nearly two years after the first TV adverts for such products.

The applications to the Medicines and Healthcare Regulatory Authorityare a victory for the regulator’s determination to persuade manufacturers and importers to apply voluntarily for a licence and meet specific rules including on the amount of nicotine provided. They are continuing the process even though the European parliament defeated UK attempts to make medicinal licensing compulsory for e-cigarettes last autumn,.

Existing anti-smoking therapies such as gums, patches, an inhaler, and a mouthspray already have medicine licences and have been endorsed by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, which advises on good practice and value for money. Nearly 1.4m prescriptions for them were issued in England in 2012, but licensed e-cigarettes would not need a separate Nice assessment.

Nikhil Nathwani, managing director of Nicolites, said the company was “well advanced in the product’s licencing” and hoped to achieve marketing authorisation some time this year. It was working closely with the government, the regulator and Nice. “This will be continued even after marketing authorisation has been achieved”, he said. Nicoventures has also made a licence application for a nicotine inhalation device to the MHRA.

A spokesman for BAT, which already has a standard e-cigarette brand, Vype, on sale in Britain, said the company would like to see “a regulatory approach that puts consumer safety and product quality first, while allowing the appropriate level of innovation, marketing and distribution freedoms to allow this important new product category to grow.”

A spokesperson for Njoy, a big US cigarette company, which has also endorsed MHRA regulation, could not say whether an application was in progress, when contacted.

The readiness of big e-cigarette players to go down the voluntary route for the expensive process of medicines approval is in sharp contrast to the position of the UK trade body for e-cigarettes, Ecita, which has railed against the over-regulation it claims will be introduced EU-wide.

E-cigarettes classed only as consumer products from 2016 will have to carry health warnings that nicotine is highly addictive. The draft EU directive, which has still to complete its legislative process in the coming months also contains new curbs on tobacco – including health warnings covering nearly two thirds of cigarette packs

By James Meikle -theguardian.com

 

E-cigarettes could become 'medicines' available on NHS

Opinion: E-cigs can help with quitting tobacco

 BY NATHAN FRIEDLAND, SPECIAL TO THE GAZETTE JANUARY 30, 2014

 A person smokes an electronic cigarette in Paris.

MONTREAL — With all the controversy surrounding electronic cigarettes, one thing is certain: the effects of smoking a real tobacco cigarette are devastating to the human body. Walk down the corridors of any hospital and this devastation is a visible reality.

Diagnoses of cancer, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and heart attack have overloaded hospitals across the entire world. According to Health Canada, “Smoking tobacco remains the leading cause of preventable death and has negative health impacts on people of all ages: unborn babies, infants, children, adolescents, adults, and seniors. Lung cancer is the leading cause of death due to cancer in Canada.”

Personally, I have seen this devastation first-hand — both as a nurse and as a husband. And I know that quitting tobacco is difficult. It has now been a month since my wife switched from tobacco to electronic cigarettes and the effects have been — no pun intended — breathtaking. I am no longer afraid that our next trip together will be to a hospital emergency room for oxygen therapy and an electrocardiogram because of chest pain and an incessant cough. These symptoms of hers have completely disappeared.

I am no longer afraid to go to work at night because I know an electronic cigarette will not burn our house down if she falls asleep while smoking one. What’s more, my wife looks younger, feels better, breathes better at night while sleeping, and that awful smell of smoke in her hair is gone.

At times, even when she used to smoke outside, cigarette smoke would float toward our daughter, causing many fights of epic proportions, nearly leading to divorce.

In my case, it is starting to look like electronic cigarettes have saved my wife, saved my marriage and made our family’s future brighter for all. I’m sure I am not the only one. I understand the arguments against e-cigs: they might be thought of as “cool” by teenagers, which could encourage them to take up tobacco cigarettes. And nicotine is certainly not great for the human body, either. On the other hand, these negatives seem trivial to me when compared with how electronic cigarettes appear to help people quit tobacco cigarettes.

Nathan Friedland is a nurse at the Montreal Children’s Hospital. He lives in Roxboro.

© Copyright (c) The Montreal Gazette

Opinion: E-cigs can help with quitting tobacco