The Lake News Online
  • Guest column: E-cigarettes: savior or menace to society?

  • It's winter, and the poor smokers are stuck out in the cold again.
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    They shiver on windy street-corners, taking long drags, the better to get the nicotine in their systems quickly and get back inside. They huddle in doorways - though lots of businesses don't allow that anymore.
    It's one of the many punishments we pile on smokers. We scold them constantly and make them pay outrageously high taxes. They've been exiled from the places where smoking used to bring the greatest pleasure: cafes, bars and restaurants. At UMass Amherst, students have to go off campus to legally light up, and that can be a long walk. Even parks and beaches are now smoke-free.
    It's not that we're sadistic. But their habit imposes huge public health costs. Their secondhand smoke is a danger and an irritation to everyone else in the office. They are a bad example for our kids. And they smell like ashtrays.
    Our punishments are for the smokers' own good, we say, because it makes them want to quit.
    Now along come e-cigarettes to rattle that rationale.
    E-cigarettes serve up nicotine extract in a vaporized form. They deliver the same nicotine fix that comes from cigarettes, along with other things smokers enjoy — deep inhaling, the feeling you're taking a refreshing break, having something to do with your hands.
    But there is no tobacco, no burning — and no smoke. A light vapor may be visible coming from users' mouths, but it is odorless and, while there hasn't been sufficient research to declare it harmless, its chemical composition bears no resemblance to secondhand smoke.
    Yes, nicotine is highly addictive, but it's the other things in cigarette smoke - tar, carbon monoxide and hundreds of toxic compounds - that kill you, not the nicotine. E-cigarette advocates call it "vaping," not smoking, because it really is different.
    So here's the question: If they have a way to ingest their nicotine without subjecting anyone else to secondhand smoke, should we invite the nicotine addicts back inside? Should we let people "vape" in bars and restaurants?
    Or, to put it another way: Are all the misery-inducing anti-cigarette measures put into place in the last 30 years really about about health, or are they some moral judgment society applies to nicotine addiction?
    Should e-cigarettes be seen as a savior for smokers who must feed their addiction but don't want to destroy their health, or as a menace?
    Some of the anti-tobacco warriors have decided they're a menace. Forty states attorney generals have sent a letter asking the Food and Drug Administration to classify e-cigarettes as "tobacco products" — even though they contain no tobacco. City councils and local boards of health are considering banning them wherever smoking is prohibited. Tobacco Free Mass is asking the state legislature to do the same.
    Page 2 of 2 - "It's dangerous to think of e-cigarettes as less dangerous than regular cigarettes," Tami Gouveia, executive director of Tobacco Free Mass told a MetroWest (Mass.) Daily News reporter.
    It's also indisputably true that e-cigarettes are less dangerous than tobacco cigarettes. Public health advocates should care about scientific truth. Only zealots find the truth to be dangerous.
    The zealots wrap their opposition in concern for the children, of course. Teenagers will get hooked on e-cigarettes, they warn, then go on to the real thing.
    Why they would assume kids would switch to a nicotine delivery system that costs eight times as much as the e-cigarette cartridges is hard to say, but we really don't know what will happen when e-cig use becomes widespread.
    That price advantage may be temporary, of course. State governments are addicted to tobacco tax money, collecting $17.6 billion of it in 2011. Politicians don't want to lose that revenue, even if it means people are healthier, so several states are moving toward imposing new taxes on e-cigarettes.
    Reasonable voices, including local boards of health and the Mass. Medical Society, are focusing on keeping e-cigarettes out of the hands of minors. That makes sense. Adolescents are particularly susceptible to nicotine addiction, so it should be as hard for them to get e-cigs as real cigs.
    But what about the 75-year-old guy in a nursing home, who has been smoking for 60 years and now suffers from heart problems and emphysema?
    He's starving for nicotine, but it's against the law to smoke in a health care facility and against his doctor's orders to even touch a cigarette. Why can't they let the poor man vape?
    E-cigarettes can be a gateway for teenagers to smoking, or a gateway out of smoking for nicotine-addicted adults. How many people would fall into which category may be impossible to say, but we shouldn't slam the door on the potential good e-cigarettes can do.
    Give the nicotine-addicts a break. If they can get what they need without exposing the rest of us to toxic smoke, why not invite them in out of the cold?
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