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've just ordered a new vape from myvapery and some samples.

Thanks op I would never have known about them had it not been for your thread

Were you shouting at ME OP?

I think he was just shouting. It seems that's what he's good at.

Ah that always makes us ladies sit up and listen doesn't it

There's some coming out of Eurobarometer on vaping in Europe. They actually bothered asking people how often they vape and didn't just lump daily vapers in with people who tried a puff at a party once (unlike the Californian studies). They also asked the revolutionary question - do you use nicotine in your ecig? Among other things they found a 35% quit rate among regular vapers and in France, NO nicotine use among the tiny number of never-smoking vapers (except for the 'tried it once' group).

There are now less than three days left to add your support for TW legal challenge. There's also a thunderclap you can support if you are on FB, Twitter or Tumblr (or all three). Weechancer you should add your support too - if the TPD is implemented as it is, the tobacco companies will end up with a far greater proportion of the market than the current 2%.

Now that the bully-girls have left the playground, of this discussion stream, and hopefully are safely tucked up in bed, the rest of us can, after the holiday weekend, return to the serious business of exploring whether e-cigs are a good or a bad thing for our public health.

I am neither for them nor against them, but as a very experienced drugs-worker-drugs and drugs education worker, I do not believe that we as yet, have the evidence, that convinces me, that this new way of consuming the drug nicotine, is safe, or a wise thing to be doing.

Many years ago at the start of the reports of the levels of child abuse in our nation, I was moved to write this wee poem.

When we learn to listen to our children,
we will come to realise,
that they are like mirrors,
reflecting back to us,
what we, have done to them.

Max Cruickshank

I think they are a good thing, nicotine by itself is addictive, but not actually harmful. I'm not sure why you are so against them when they help so many people to stop smoking?

Where do you live that had just had a holiday weekend?

bully girls!do you mean fully grown adults who disagree with you and have posted plenty of information for you that you have persistently refused to acknowledge?

Wow! Poetry too!

I'm beginning to think you're on a wind-up OP. Tbh it's the only rational explanation.

I do you mean fully grow adult s who have tried repeatedly to inform you? That you have responded to by shouting them down?

I'm 46, a professional woman and I am highly regarded at work. I choose to vape because it's cheaper and better for me.

Who the fuck I are you to tell me what to do? I've read the research. I've made an informed decision

You, I think, misjudged your audience

Bully girls! I love this thread

Max. You say you are in favour of harm reduction. How can we reduce the harm of nicotine use?

My goodness, name-calling and poetry, Max really has completely run out of arguments, hasn't he? It's like he's sitting there waiting for someone, anyone, to even slightly agree with him and ignoring anything anyone else says. Or jumping up and down and shouting about the mafia and drugs. How is this a debate?

Reply to DollyTwat
I am new to the culture of Mumsnet discussion, so I am at a bit of a loss to understand why you say I am shouting people down, unless putting my last contribution to this discussion in capitals, in case anyone missed it.

You being a 46 year old, professional, highly competent woman, does not guarantee your immunity from the scourge of addictions. However I totally agree that you have every right to use any drug you like, having done your research and made your decision. In my efforts to open up this public debate on vaping I am trying to find out more about the topic, about which I am most certainly not an expert, and to alert people to dodgy sources of research.

In the many posts in this discussion, by others from the Mumsnet community I have seen some really, silly, snide, rediculous and troubling comments.

In my decades working in the field of addictions I have seen so many new trends started with loads of dubious, so called research driving the public’s interest in trying whatever is new. e.g. “nicotine by itself is addictive, but not actually harmful”. has been stated several times. I find that statement to be irrational, because literally millions of our fellow citizens have been entrapped in their addiction to tobacco products, which has as its main ingredient nicotine. The fact that up to 4,000 other chemicals are added across the range of cigarettes, complicates the situation, and most certainly delivers some of the nastiest ingredients which causes our ill-health. It is the nicotine that is the driving force to keep smokers on board. Any attempts by the tobacco industry to sell non-nicotine cigarettes has been doomed to failure.

Certainly by switching to e-cigarettes you and 6 million others in Europe, may have reduced your health risks, but unless you eventually end up tobacco and nicotine free, which may or may not be your aim, then you are sigining up to continue with an addiction. If you are happy with that, then that is alright with me. But if you have children, would you be happy for them to vaping with nicotine products.

Another contributer to the discussion joked about “glassing people with a martini glass” this was there attempt to riducule what I had said about the caffeine in the alcoholic beveridge, Buckfast, produced by the monks of Buckfast Abbey, in Cornwall. These monks make millions of pounds from this trade which has been the scourge of the poorest communities of Scotland. 75% of the production of Buckfast is sold in Scotland. The police recorded some 7,000, mainly voilent crimes associated with Buckfast. My local corner shop had it on sale yeaterday at a special offer of £5.95 for a 70 cl bottle of this 15% alcohol drink. All appeals to the Buckfsts monks to put the drink in plastic bottles instead of glass have failed. Our prisons are loaded with young alcoholics, fed amost from birth with the Myth that Buckfast is “A Tonic Wine” so must be good for your health.. In the last few years Buckfast has remarketed itself from a Tonic Wine with three mysterious ingredients listed on the bootle, that the public thought was the tonic element, these was only preservatives. It is now being sold as A Tonic Wine, Aperitif, wth a very high caffiene content.

The mixture of alcohol a Depressant drug and Caffiene a Stimulant drug, is what, without any doubt causes the agression and violent behaviour of Buckfast drinkers. The stimulant drugs commonly in use in the UK run from fairly mild ones like, caffiene, to the amphetamines, then on to cocaine, crack cocaine and crystal meths. When people find that one stimulant does not do enough for them, they quickly move on up the scale, to the high end Crack cocaine.

In Scotland alone we have had around 80 deaths a year from mixing alcohol and cocaine together. That happens because as the drinker adds cocaine into the mix, they no longer feel drunk so binge even more than normal. Eventually this lethal cocktail causes heart failure and other problems because the chemical mix creates a third drug, cocaethylene, in their system which kills them. Most of these deaths have been not of drug addics but of ordinary people like businessment, students, self employed business owners, intelligent, professional men and women.

I hope you will not judge these comments as shouting at people?

It depends on what level of reducing the harm you are aiming from. To be totally safe you need to stop using it completely. if you want to be 95% safe then according to the organisation Public Health England you can carry on Vaping. If you are an adult then clearly the choice is yours.

If you keep vaping because you want to avoid the nasties in tobacco smoking then you need to accept that there are no legal controls in place to guarantee the safety or quality of e-cig products. You have to believe what is on the bottles. My local supplier told me he gets his supplies on the net, from the USA and China, and then mixes them up in the back shop. This young man was about 20 years of age, has no training in this, holds no qualifications, to handle ro dispense drugs. The tobacco, alcohol and illicit drug trade in the last few years has been flooded with dodgy products from China which have been found contain cyanide, lead and other stuff that I would not put in my body. I hope that answers your question?

Scotland's it's September holiday weekend today.

Read on you may learn a thing or to and start adding some useful ideas to the debate.

I have not ignored all the stuff that people have offered as advice, I am studying it and checking out the sources of that information before responding.

If you want to alert people to the dangers of buckfast wine, then I for one would agree with you.

However it adds nothing to the question of vaping.

(Writing in capitals is commonly understood as shouting on the internet.)

I find that statement to be irrational, because literally millions of our fellow citizens have been entrapped in their addiction to tobacco products, which has as its main ingredient nicotine. The fact that up to 4,000 other chemicals are added across the range of cigarettes, complicates the situation, and most certainly delivers some of the nastiest ingredients which causes our ill-health. It is the nicotine that is the driving force to keep smokers on board. Any attempts by the tobacco industry to sell non-nicotine cigarettes has been doomed to failure.

Look, smoking fags is undoubtedly a bad idea. Its harmful effects have been well documented, peer-reviewed and publicised. We all know smoking is bad for you. But the key word there, in the context of whether e-cigs are a good idea or not, is smoking. E-cigs don't contain combustibles. Nothing it set on fire. You are not inhaling smoke. You are not setting fire to vegetable matter that has been laced with said 4,000 chemicals, wrapped in paper and produces carbon monoxide, which is one of the main factors in smoking-related disease.

What you are inhaling is a vapour made by heating a mixture of pharmaceutical grade nicotine, propylene glycol and/or vegetable glycerin and flavourings. The flavourings don't even have to be added if you don't want. See attached image - are you getting this het up about inhalers? If not, why not?

So it reproduces the key ritualistic elements of smoking and the hand-to-mouth action that are also very addictive and half the reason conventional NRT like patches doesn't work very well.

But if you have children, would you be happy for them to vaping with nicotine products.

If they were vaping instead of smoking, yup. If I found my teenager smoking, I'd buy them a vape kit. I wouldn't encourage them to vape if they had never smoked, as acquiring an addiction for the sake of it isn't particularly productive, but it wouldn't bother me much if they did take it up. I wouldn't encourage my under-16s to drink coffee either, but I wouldn't smack the cup out of their hands.

I don't think anyone, any vaper, has ever said vaping is something for everyone. It's a great alternative to smoking with most if not all of the bad bits taken out. If you are already smoking, vaping is a far safer way to do it.

If you're conflating nicotine use with other drug use, that's a very different argument and debate. There are so many other factors in hard drug and alcohol (ab)use, such as economics, race, education, class, domestic abuse, stress, peer pressure and so on that it can't really be part of a discussion about e-cigs themselves. Unless you're stipulating a slippery slope or gateway argument for which you better have some damned hard evidence so as to avoid suspicion of scaremongering and bias.

I hope that answers your question?

Kind of. It tells me that you have no real understanding of what harm reduction means or of the principles underlying the approach. Try here. Maybe have a think about how your attitudes towards ecigs measure up to those principles.

We have a very good case model for nicotine harm reduction: Sweden, where the use of snus - a type of pasteurised oral tobacco - has been a popular alternative to smoking since the early 19th century. As a result they have by far the lowest smoking rates in Europe and also by far the lowest rates of tobacco-related disease and lost years of life (pretty graphs). Snus has been banned in the rest of the EU, which is a tremendous shame as it could save a lot of lives.

Excellent post, NiNo.

If I decided to get my caffeine by rolling up tea leaves in paper and setting fire to it I would be at similar risks to smoking

fed amost from birth with the Myth that Buckfast is “A Tonic Wine” so must be good for your health

No, that really isn't why people drink it I do find the whole Buckfast thing fascinating though. If caffeine is such a huge problem then that means that nicotine is even safer than caffeine.

Do you think people should abstain from coffee?

The stimulant drugs commonly in use in the UK run from fairly mild ones like, caffiene, to the amphetamines, then on to cocaine, crack cocaine and crystal meths. When people find that one stimulant does not do enough for them, they quickly move on up the scale, to the high end Crack cocaine.

If you want to have a sensible discussion you need to stop doing this. It makes you look like a frothing idiot.

This 'bully girl' was not sleeping at ten to eleven last night, she was working her ass off!
And have got a basic vapey thing with the flavours Green Tea, Rum, and Cinnamon. I was going to start using it yesterday but with the charging time combined with the worky stuff I ended up buying ten Mayfair instead, boy, does my throat know about it!

Perhaps you missed my point my reference to Buckfast was in the context of people arguing that caffeine is harmless. Buckets is now loaded with caffein as is Redbull and other energy drinks which are causing big brooms in our schools. But you will tel me now that is nothing to do with e-cigs debate - yes it has all drug use is inter-related. If you worked with seriously addicted people as I have, you will find that they have almost all started from smoking tobacco and med on up through the different options to what ever is their latest drug of choice. Heroin, legal highs, cocaine or what ever. and to PlentyOfPubeGardens I would say it is you that need to start having a sensible discussion, avoiding talking about drugs that you either know noting about or don'e want be included the discussion is hardly an adult, open discussion.