e-cigarettes debate

[Weechancer]

The Scottish Parliament Health & Sport committee is holding a public consultation on e-cigs so i have started a change.org.uk petition to open up this debate.

MNHQ has edited this post as petition links and such must be posted in our Petitions board, however for those who are interested it is easy to find from the information above

I'm pretty sure science has already researched nicotine. Is it just because ecigs deliver the hit in a way that looks like smoking? Why not get all hysterical about nicotine gum? That seems more risky than vapour. You could choke on gum. I mean, it's just nicotine op. It's really, really nothing to get this worked up over. Truly.

Underplaying the importance of the powerful and highly addictive drug nicotine, which in cigarettes and in e-cigs is not helpful to this serious debate
Nicotine in potatoes, tomatoes and peppers. is in tiny amounts and is never going to be smoked or vaped so the effect gets as quickly as possible into the human brain.

As a drugs education worker I have spent countless hours helping people to understand that absorbing drugs through your stomach is a slow process compared with inhaling or injecting drugs. It is not always safe, and also more difficult to know what affect it will have. This is why the Myth that eating cannabis is safer than smoking or vaping it, is not a safe thing to do. Why? Because the slow progress through the stomach leaves the user thinking they have not have taken enough of the cannabis, or that it must be very weak stuff. So they take more and then much later when the effects of the drug kicks in they suddenly realise that they have badly overdosed. DS they have no way to remove it from their bloodstream and have to live with the consequences. Smoking or vaping is much more controllable as you know very quickly if it is working.

Keep you comments coming, it all ads to the debate.

It's not powerful at all. Why is nicotine bad, apart from being a stimulant? Why do you use such weird and dramatic language about it!? Powerful drug? Not really compared to meth or other drugs actually destroying lives.

Why are you bringing in nonsense about cannabis myths??? On one hand you are trying to promote vaping cannabis, but you dont want to promote vaping nicotine?

Fuck! I find OPs understanding of evidence to be terrifying, though I do admire her deflection technique!

weechancer you may mean well but, on this, you are wrong. In fact, as others have already pointed out, you are in real danger of being part of the continued problem.

Please, take off your blinkers, read the wider research, stop replacing it with your opinions, your observation and your experience with young people. I have just as much experience, have worked with the NHS and won 2 prestigious awards in health care, have met a prime minister and been thanked for my work. But I still accept that I need to read the work of other professionals in order to understand many issues.

You are not showing that same appreciation or open mind. More shame on you, if your aim is to help.

I think your background is making it hard to see the big picture op. Working with troubled young people is bound to provide you with a wealth of anecdote and experience which makes it tricky for you to be objective.

thanks to Plenty for explaining about the new regs for vaping.

so what will happen to vaping then, I'm a bit confused. It does seem a shame if vaping has helped people stop smoking, to cut off that route - it looks like it was a much bigger help than patches or gum?

PS for people who vape with zero nicotine, what is it that actually enters the blood or whatever? (I'm asthmatic so these are curiosity questions). I'm just conscious of the issue because a few friends who vape (gave up smoking) might actually go back to smoking if vaping couldn't meet whatever government regulations?

Thanks for all these very helpful notes. Clearly your knowledge base is greater than mine, but I am sure that this sort of opening up of the debate can be nothing but helpful. Having worked in drugs education for nearly five decades I have seen al sort of new drugs come on the market. It then takes some time to assess the good and not so good thing about them. It has been relatively easy to provide drugs education to school pupils because they re a captive audience. Educating adults, and particularly parents is extremely difficult, because they never think there is going to be a problem with their kids until it happens. Parental ignorance, in my experience, undermines lots of good drugs education by them passing on old wives tales and myths grin their personal experience of drugs. Inevitably parents today have little experience of what is happening in the world of young people and drugs.

My interest is in ensuring that as many of the accurate facts and information on new substances is communicated out to our communities. The media often summarise important information and sensationalise it in ways that are not helpful.

I am sure that our vies of this are not all that far apart. Let's hope that responsible adults can do more to undermine the horrendous commercial exploitation of children and young people in particular by those who seek to profit from all drugs. Alcohol our biggest problem, tobacco now well under control, illicit drugs going through a new development of so called legal highs about which hardly anyone knows much.

The good guy's just need to do nothing for the bad guy's in this world to succeed.

You simply don't know what you are talking about OP.

The debate has been had. Did you participate in the Scottish consultation when you had the chance? I did and I don't even live there. Nobody will be interested in your 'petition' because it's full of unsubstantiated BS that is totally at odds with the consensus emerging within public health - among scientists and other experts who, unlike you, have actually looked at the evidence.

The thing I C&P was PHE's statement in its entirety. It is hosted on the UK Govt website. It was also signed by Action on Smoking and Health, Association of Directors of Public Health, British Lung Foundation, Cancer Research UK, Faculty of Public Health, Fresh North East, Public Health Action (PHA), Royal College of Physicians, Royal Society for Public Health, Tobacco Free Futures, UK Centre for Tobacco and Alcohol Studies and UK Health Forum. They all disagree with you Why don't you take it up with them?

Nobody here agrees with you because you are posting utter rubbish. It is clear from your posts that you haven't done the slightest bit of reading around this topic. If you had, you would know that the expert best estimate is that vaping is ~95% safer than smoking, that over a million people in the UK have used vaping to completely quit smoking (and those are just the ones who are still vaping - we don't have figures for those who have also stopped vaping) and that nobody ... nobody is making the ludicrous claim that 'E-cigs have a different type of Nicotine, so are safer than tobacco'. Why would they when we have known since at least 1976 that 'People smoke for the nicotine but die from the tar' (MJ Russell, BMJ)?

I usually quite enjoy a debate on ecigs but this is tedious. You are so ill-informed while trying to make out you are such an expert. You are not providing any evidence to back up any of your ridiculous claims and appear incapable of reading anything you are linked to or engaging properly with it.

So I'll leave it here. I look forward to your 'petitions' scaremongering about NRT and coffee. I'm sure they will be very entertaining.

(BTW, I see you still only have 30 signatures. Have you thought of plugging it on twitter? If I was feeling in a particularly cuntish mood I might even retweet it for you. I'm sure it would attract lots of opinions )

lorelei9, we might be left with something like this, ineffective and probably made by the tobacco companies as they're the only ones likely to have enough money to jump through the TPD hoops (careful what you wish for Weechancer). It won't be a huge problem for current vapers as long as they are well-informed ahead of time and don't mind bending the law to import. The real losers are current smokers who may never learn about effective kit or where to get it.

There is a legal challenge to the TPD from Totally Wicked. They have won the right to a hearing in the European Court of Justice. A date has now been set for this - October 1st. If they win, ecigs could be taken out of the TPD and we could get custom regulation that is far more suitable and proportionate. Although it's a legal challenge, not a petition, they are collecting signatures of support and will hand these in to the Dept. of Health on 29th September. They have so far collected over 50,000 signatures but are still asking for more.

Well, this is all well and good, but the cats out of the bag now. People will simply buy from overseas via the Internet if the UK stupidly try to regulate them. They are far too popular now.

Seems to me that there are two very separate groups that may use e-cigarettes/vape.

People using them to stop smoking, for whom it is a harm reduction strategy. Evidence is that e-cigarettes are a great deal less harmful than cigarettes so that's positive. It would be useful to have some good quality studies to assess how effective e-cigarettes are in giving up smoking and if there are any concerning side issues. Also is vaping to give up smoking a short term solution or does it lead to long term dependency on vaping instead?

Evidence from the States seems to show that there is a big rise in the use of e-cigarettes/vaping among young people. This group is likely not giving up smoking but starting vaping from 'scratch' as it were. Would they smoke cigarettes if they couldn't vape? Is this about picking up a new habit and therefore new potential harm or is it also harm reduction. I think that this would also be useful to study.

It certainly seems unwise to ignore possible health risks to a new habit that may possibly involve long term use. Those risks might come from the delivery mode or from the nicotine or from other products that can be easily vaped. Being informed is surely helpful?

I've nothing else to add, it's been said. I'll be vaping my homebrew berry juice on my KFL+ if anyone wants me

Plenty, I hope you don't mind me asking but you seem to know a lot and I like to be informed - what's the difference between the e-cig pic you have posted and what is currently for sale?

Something else occurred to me - my friend's mum, who is 60something, did switch to vaping and then heard scare stories about vaping so now tries to have 2 cigarettes a day (at the end of the day when she really wants them). It is a big cut down for her anyway but it is a shame, if vaping is safe, that she was so put off, because I know my friend feels her mum is at high risk of going back to her old 20 a day habit.

Being informed is surely helpful?
Yes it is, which is why PHE have published this report, which looks at all the evidence to date. At 113 pages it's a long document but it's not a difficult read and it has a good, hyperlinked contents page if you want to know about specific issues.

There's also a 6 page summary here and a rather good blog post here. For specific questions it's worthwhile looking at the full document. It's all in there - efficacy, long-term use as a harm reduction strategy, youth uptake, what can be said about 'gateway' effects (and what can't), the problems with the US data ...

People are using stuff that looks like this now. These are what are called 'third generation devices'.

The cig-alike I posted earlier is an example of a 'first generation device'. These have small, low-powered batteries and are used with sealed, prefilled 'cartomisers'. They are not very effective, they work out very expensive, need recharging several times a day and only come in two or three different flavours.

Second generation ecigs have refillable tanks and bigger batteries. You can put whatever eliquid you want in there, including your own, home-mixed liquid. The batteries are more powerful and last longer. You can put in a lower resistance coil (heating element) to increase the power and produce more vapour.

Third generation ecigs have variable power settings so you have much more control over how much vapour is produced. They also have batteries that only need recharging every few days. You can build your own coils for the tanks making the whole experience totally customisable and cutting running costs to a couple of pounds a week.

We're actually onto fourth gen now - vapourisers that have built in temperature control - a very useful safety feature developed by the vaping industry.

That is a great shame about your friend's mum. Stories like this really highlight the dangers of spreading misinformation. Might she reconsider vaping in light of the recent report and statement?

Plenty, thanks for the explanation

i now remember them handing those out at stations and so on- the first one.

i will flag up that report to my friend, thanks. whehter or not her mum will read it though....appreciate the explanations, thank you.

Perhaps Mumsnet supporters should explore the possible reasons that people are quitting smoking' and taking to vaping, that has nothing at all to do with the claim that e-cig's aid people to stop smoking.

It is well known amongst those that work in the addictions field, that the single most important trigger, to people eventually deciding to address their addiction, is HOW STRONLY THEY ARE MOTIVATED to change their smoking behaviour.

Part of the government's strategy to reduce smoking has been to make the cost of it prohibitive. That is why for about 15 years now the tax on tobacco products has risen on average 6% every year. Each time it rises 1-2% more smokers try to quit. That has been a fairly successful strategy, but there does reach a point eventually, where the really heavily addicted smokers will do anything, to keep smoking, so they turn to the black market for their supplies. This has led to a massive increase in sales of black market cigarettes and the loss of billions of pounds to the treasury. Unfortunately, one unexpected consequence of buying black market fags has been that supplies from the likes of China often contain contaminants like lead of cyanide that are killers.

The introduction of e-cigs has in my view given those who were considering quitting smoking, one of the strongest motivations to quit. THAT THEY SAVED LOADS OF CASH. But can still keep using their drug of choice, in this case nicotine, in the belief that it must be healthier. But is it?

What do people think of that theory?

When thinking about this it is perhaps worth also noting another interesting thing that has happened. Many fewer children are now starting to smoke tobacco, it is now down to around 12-15% of 15 year olds. It is not clear why that has happened, but is is claimed that this is because kids have accepted that smoking is bad for you. Having worked in drugs education of young people for five decades, I think it is more likely that kids are not smoking because, they, like the rest of us, only have a certain amount of pocket money to spend, and today kids choose to spend their cash on topping up their phones, music, or or having the latest must have gadget, to impress their pals.

What do people think of that theory?

I think it's a well established theory that has been discussed for some years now and it's correct (well done!) It doesn't matter whether someone quits because they have made a thorough assessment of the health implications, because of the expense, because they are fed up of being ostracised and picked on, because they are fed up of the smell and yellow teeth or any other reason. The benefits are the same. (Image from here) I'm sure you realise this is a powerful argument against excessive taxation of ecigs, as has been argued for in some quarters. The last thing we should be aiming for is a level playing field between relatively harmless vaping and deadly lit tobacco.

You'll probably be surprised to learn that ecigs have achieved not bad success rates even among smokers who did not intend to quit. This is a remarkable result and has not been found with any other quit method to my knowledge. It's especially surprising because the ecigs used for the study were the old style first generation cig-alikes with a low nicotine strength.

The introduction of e-cigs has in my view given those who were considering quitting smoking, one of the strongest motivations to quit. THAT THEY SAVED LOADS OF CASH. But can still keep using their drug of choice, in this case nicotine, in the belief that it must be healthier. But is it?

Yes, it is What's not to like?

BTW, while you're here, something has been bothering me. What was this in response to?

Weechancer Sun 20-Sep-15 14:11:29
bit cheeky, sexist and pointless I think.

well what a croc of shit. I got to the second page before I gave up reading. as an ex smoker, I tried the patches. they gave me nightmares and skin irritation. the lozenges were disgusting. I got the ecig, dropping the nicotine strength over 3 months gradually to zero. smoke free for two years now. no smoking, no vaping no nothing. people who are trying to get them banned want to take a good hard look at themselves and ask wtf are they actually trying to achieve?

I used to spend 300 per month on cigs at a 20 a day habbit, sometimes 25 a day. ecig liquid cost me 3 for 10pound which lasted longer than a month. patches for just 7days were 16 pounds, lozenges similar price.
the government dont want people to quit. they need the tax they make from it. if they wanted people to quit, patches and the like would be far cheaper or free.

TBF, you can get NRT on prescription (£8.20 / week) and in a lot of stop smoking services you can get it free. It's still shit though.

Hopping from equating e-cigs to cigarettes, to drugs and now to legal highs is only undermining your point, weechancer. The scattergun approach rarely works.

And now you complain that e-cigs aren't 100% effective in quitting and, shock horror, some smokers have no intention of quitting! Well, no! Some don't. But they are measurably healthier for having stopped smoking. If you won't take all other extant evidence maybe you will take 1 person's experience? My DH switched about 2 years ago. Less than 6 months after he switched he had his climbing medical... a full medical, undertaken in a hospital, relates to his insurances. He flew through the step test scoring significantly higher than he had in the previous test. Why? The only lifestyle change he had made was changing to e-cigs. Ta da!

But it would be easier if you just read all the evidence that has been posted for your perusal and acknowledged that you started from a position of error. Then you can begin to help all your clients make better choices regarding nicotine.