To want the advertising of e-cigs banned

[Singsongsungagain]

I'll set my stall out from the off here. I have no time for smoking. I find it smelly, disgusting and of no benefit to anyone other than the fat cat tobacco company directors. I was delighted with the smoking ban and all of the limits that have been imposed on advertising and packaging etc, feeling that the world will be a healthier place for my children with the least amount of smoking possible. I'm all for a complete ban- although I appreciate the complexities of that.
But now it seems we have this new wave of e-cig promotion and personally I've been disappointed to see the TV adverts- which include the word "cigarettes". Surely this is a backward step in the promotion of a healthy nation?
I've just been reading an article from The Independent in which various well educated scientists, doctors etc have stated that there is now evidence that e-cigs damage cells. They are NOT a healthy alternative to smoking, and yet they are being promoted on our TVs in the same way that conventional cigarettes once were.

AIBU to think that e-cigs should be subject to the same regulations as conventional cigarettes?

I've just been reading an article from The Independent in which various well educated scientists, doctors etc have stated that there is now evidence that e-cigs damage cells. They are NOT a healthy alternative to smoking, and yet they are being promoted on our TVs in the same way that conventional cigarettes once were

Public Health England just released a report, quite controversial, that stated they are about 95% safer by their estimates, according to the well-educated scientists that put it together. One article in the Independent isn't really a very good sweep of the scientific evidence.

So, they are likely to be 'healthier', not healthy per se.

Cell studies are really not very good ways of seeing if things are going to cause cancer in 40 years time. If you read the paper, it says that in the conventional cigarette test on the cells, they couldn't make it past 24 hours as they were all dead. The e-cig liquids kept on being put over the cells for weeks and weeks before significant damage was shown.

The reporting of this paper in media outlets, and the conclusions, were outrageously unscientific. Ben Goldacre could have a field day.

As for teens smoking- what we have to ask is not whether some teens use e-cigs (they will, the same ones who would have experimented with regular cigarettes) but whether overall there is less smoking as a result of e-cigs- all the evidence is that smoking rates have never been lower in teens and a paper came out recently that showed teen smoking rates are higher in states in America which have banned e-cigs, blowing the 'gateway' hypothesis out of the water.

Of course it is better to quit and stop altogether, but not inhaling carbon monoxide and tar on a daily basis IS a public health achievement IMO.

There is no evidence to date that non smokers are taking up vaping

yet personally i have seen previously non smoking school children vaping there heads off maybe they would have become smokers eventually but in the last few months it has all exploded i live on a road with a high school and the children coming out from year 7 onwards all have a ciggie or an e-cig stuck in there mouth has gone up massively

They are a gateway and they do normalise smoking

You know something, if tobacco companies switch from tobacco to ecigs then surely that is a good thing?

has anyone else noticed smokers who didn't used to smoke a lot and have gone to vaping vape constantly? its like they have suddenly taken up chain smoking

I don't think enough is really known about e cigs. And it worries me that they are held up as being completely harmless. A lot of my friends use them and I have found that if I am in a car with them while they use it or if Im just standing near them for too long I will get a migraine and my breathing is affected, if Im unlucky enough to get a full face full of it then I will be choking and coughing for several minutes.

Something in them is doing that to me, it feels like having air freshener sprayed directly in your face. But when I first asked if they could not vape while in my car they just laughed as they thought there could be no problems at all with it. After seeing me coughing my guts out and telling them they could walk back they put it away. They also all admitted that they now vape more often than they smoked, they can sit for hours vaping almost constantly when they wouldve just had a cigarette and then got on with life.

Maybe Im just very sensitive. But I think their over-promotion as such a healthy, innocent thing is short sighted. Its likely to be a lot better than smoking, but I don't think that breathing perfume over and over all day can be all that healthy either.

All evidence to date says they are not a gateway to smoking. The gateway theory is outdated and not supported by public health these days.

So kids see adults vaping?

They also see adults drinking alcohol, binge eating, yo-you dieting and doing all manner of things that are unhealthy.

It doesn't automatically mean they'll follow suit.

Vaping delivers nicotine much more slowly than smoking, to get the same nicotine you have to vape little and often.

*yo-yo, not 'yo-you'

Yo-you sounds like some sort of teenage greeting.

Nicotine is toxic whatever the delivery system.

If cigs and gum are toxic, then ecigs are toxic.

new research suggests that their harmfulness is comparable

Stop saying this, no it doesn't!!!!! Not even the misreported study you are talking about claimed this.

How can it be 'comparable'? One isolates the nicotine and puts it in glycol and has it inhaled (along with flavours if you want), one is full of 100's of other chemicals plus inhaling carbon monoxide which we know causes lung cancer, heart disease. There is no biological mechanism for them to be 'comparable'.

Now that doesn't mean e-cigs are 'safe'- there may be health risks to inhaling the liquid over the long term, but they simply can't, it's impossible for them to be the same level of risk as inhaling 40 a day regular cigarettes which we know causes premature death in 2/3rds of users!

I'm not sure why some people want to turn this into a discussion about "banning everything unhealthy"

Because you want to ban one thing that may or may not be unhealthy, it sets a line for what else could be banned under the same umbrella of issues. you see an issue with vaping, fair enough. I see issues with cars - they are far more dangerous in my eyes than vaping, they let out chemicals in the air and affect our environment, they guzzle up natural resources and so forth. However, I bet you could list me many a reason why cars (and other transportations) shouldn't be banned, mostly because they are convenient for your lifestyle. It's quite easy to pick and chose what you find harmful and want to be banned, but you can't complain when others point this fact out.

Why people want ecigs to be restricted is beyond me. Even the NHS now advocates their use as a quit aid.
As for the WHO many UK scientists and tobacco control experts have written to them complaining about their view on ecigs. Opinion swayed by extremists in the US.

They don't see them doing those things in the playground though!

If cigs and gum are toxic, then ecigs are toxic

Long-term nicotine gum use has a pretty good safety profile, that's why it's available in pharmacies and in supermarkets without prescription!

MrsGently- do you think the ban on advertising smoking should be lifted then?

There are lots of pro-vapers on here so I expect this will kick off.

Smokers moving to vaping is a good thing in health terms. Smokers using vaping inside but smoking outside due to the smoking ban annoys me due to it normalising smoking again.

Young people starting vaping and then moving up to smoking is a concern. There may not be evidence yet but I will be amazed if it didn't come out in the near future.

Chewing tobacco and gum both increase the risk of oral cancer.

In the playground, smoking experimentation has always occurred, with nearly 1 in 3 people going on to smoke regularly in the UK until the last few years.

More teens are smoking cannabis joints than using e-cigs. That's what the research shows. That's what most teens smoke (sorry to break this to all those out there who think their children don't count in the incredibly high trying rates of cannabis use in UK and Europe).

There is no evidence that e-cigs are leading large numbers of teens into smoking regular cigarettes at all, in fact the evidence is the exact opposite: rates are plummeting, and use of e-cigs in non-smokers is so low they can hardly measure it (i.e. all the children you see using e-cigs will most likely be smoking, and not just regular cigarettes either).

They don't see them doing those things in the playground though!

Was that referring to my post? Because kids see cars everywhere, get sat in front of Top Gear and told how brilliant they are. Not told that they are a big part in causing global warming and basically destroying the planet we live on. That's a bit more serious that a bit of flavoured water being smoked, wouldn't you say?

They don't see them doing those things in the playground though!

this is a real problem in dds school they put a child in isolation because he was using it in lessons

another school was told by a parent that their child needed to have regular breaks to use their e-cig as he was trying to quit smoking she was most put out when told no we can't take a break to smoke neither can your child

Totally and utterly YABU. E-cigarettes are not known to be harmful at all and worst estimates reckon they are 95% less harmful than cigarettes.

Smoking rates are plummeting due in no small part to e-cigarettes. If e-cigarettes are harmless, which they are, why on earth would you want advertising of them banned, other than sheer ideological vindictiveness?

Do you want to limit the positive effects of these products and have more people die of cancer in the future? Very strange.

Due to ideological vindictiveness e-cigs were recently banned from hospital grounds in Scotland but pleasingly this is now being overturned.

scienceblog.cancerresearchuk.org/2009/04/24/can-nicotine-gum-cause-mouth-cancer/

There is no epidemiological evidence that chewing nicotine gum causes mouth cancer, and even if it did, it is still a heck of a lot safer than smoking regular cigarettes which we know cause head, neck, lung, prostate and all other kinds of cancer at much higher rates.

We know snus use in Sweden (a kind of oral tobacco in a pouch you put in your mouth) is associated with a very significant decrease in heart disease, strokes, lung cancer compared with countries who use regular cigarettes, but with a slight mouth cancer risk (not higher though than for regular cigarettes). Overall, the risk of using these products is really much less than inhaling tobacco smoke into your lungs.

The ideal is to quit completely, if this is not possible, the best thing has to be to reduce the harm of consuming nicotine, and these products definitely do that, although the vast majority of people I've known only use nicotine gum or patches for a short amount of time as they are very unthrilling.