Over 600 Flavours!

The UK Ecig Store likes to make a splash: they boast of ‘Over 600 e-cigarette flavours’!

So much for e-cigarette regulation in Britain. If this sort of advertising is not to entice young people to ‘vape’ and get hooked on it I don’t know what is.

Now let’s go to the small print at the bottom of the opening page of their website

Electronic cigarettes are not suitable for use by…persons who should avoid using tobacco or nicotine products for medical reasons

If we remove the redundant words we have: ‘Electronic cigarettes are not suitable for persons who should avoid using them for medical reasons.’ But everyone should avoid them for medical reasons! E-cigarette vapour contains potentially harmful substances and the risks of long-term use are unknown. Therefore the UK Ecig Store should not be selling these products. Nor should anyone else.

Obviously, if someone has a heart or lung condition it would be particularly inadvisable for them to smoke, but these are just the people who, if they felt they could not cope without nicotine in some form, might be advised to use e-cigarettes instead of smoking. Not by me I hasten to add – I would offer to cure them of nicotine addiction in any form.

So the good old UK Ecig store is really contradicting itself or shooting itself in the foot by saying, in effect, that no one, because of medical reasons, should use e-cigarettes and the sooner they shut up shop the better.

Nonetheless, some doctors actively promote e-cigarettes as a new way to stop smoking!

There is something odd about this. E-cigarettes are not being promoted as a stop-smoking aid in the same way as other methods – nicotine gum or patches, prescription drugs, a course of acupuncture or some other gimmick. With these methods, or ‘tools’ as they are sometimes called (why should you need a tool to stop smoking?), obviously the idea is that you use the gum or patches or take the drug or whatever it is for a limited time and then with reasonable luck you will have stopped smoking and will never want to do it again. Incidentally, how many people succeed with this kind of approach? At best it’s around the not brilliant figure of 20%.

Underlying the reason for the poor results of these methods is the assumption that you need a way, method, technique, system or tool to stop doing something. Why not just stop? And if just stopping seems difficult or even out of the question, then one should ask why should it appear to be difficult, or very difficult, to stop?

It’s not as if you are on a bicycle with defective brakes going downhill: you want to stop but even pulling hard on the brakes doesn’t impede the bicycle’s progress very much. In such a case one could talk of trying to stop to avoid a crash at the bottom of the road.

So there must be some reasons for the alleged difficulty in stopping smoking. Three possibilities come to mind. Either the smoker, in spite of what she might say, doesn’t really want to stop and only says she does to appease the naggers or the doubts in her own mind.

Or there may be a genuine difficulty in refraining from picking up the next cigarette, putting one end in your mouth, setting fire to the other end and sucking the fumes thereof into your lungs.

A further possible reason that may be suggested for difficulty in quitting is that the smoker perceives some benefit or enjoyment from smoking that is so alluring he doesn’t want to give it up, but this is just another way of saying he doesn’t want to quit. Even so, a little thought and discussion will show that the idea of the pleasurable or helpful cigarette is illusory.

E-cigarettes are not promoted as a means of stopping smoking similarly to other cessation aids, but as a replacement for smoking that is often used long term. Therefore there is something underhand about promoting e-cigarettes as a smoking cessation aid. All that e-cigarettes achieve is to allow a smoker to continue her nicotine addiction in a supposedly safer way.

Nonetheless, promoted they are (except in a few countries that have banned them). You can see why this is: e-cigarettes are being endorsed and encouraged as alternatives to smoking because this is a multi-billion dollar industry. That is why every man and his dog in the nicotine business are plugging e-cigarettes for all they are worth. Customers are being lured with a promise of wonderful flavours – like cherry, apple or banana.

But if you really want to experience the joys of these flavours all you have to do is to eat a cherry, apple or banana!

Text © Gabriel Symonds