Smoking used to have a certain cool image. When Sherlock Holmes had a difficult problem to solve he would smoke shag tobacco in his pipe and think it through. He also used cocaine and morphine to escape from ‘the dull routine of existence’ as he put it.

The creator of Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, died in 1930, long before the dangers of smoking were recognised.

I used to smoke a pipe myself, a Peterson pipe, because I thought it looked impressive. And in the 1970s for a time I worked for Dr Peter Abbott. He discovered in the Sudan in 1956 the cause of a terrible disorder called Madura foot, a fungus infection. He used to smoke a pipe and grew his own tobacco in his garden, though he recognised he was addicted to it.

I remember a patient, a professional photographer, who used in his own publicity a photo of himself with his arms folded over his Hasselblad camera on a tripod. He was a smoker and said smoking was part of his image. Nonetheless, he agreed it wouldn’t look very appealing if his promotional material showed him with a cigarette in his mouth.

Times have moved on and the only image that smoking now has is an undesirable one. The prevalence of smoking is going down in most developed countries but the number of e-cigarette users is increasing; there are nearly three million in the UK.

And not just in the UK. The other day in my local neighbourhood in Setagaya-ku in Tokyo I noticed a young man walking along the road holding in one hand a metallic tube-like object. At irregular though frequent intervals he would discretely put one end of it into his mouth – and suck. This would be followed by the expulsion of a brief puff of mist into the air. Then I realised he was a ‘vaper’ (vapeur if you’re French) and what he was doing was inhaling into his lungs nicotine-laden aerosol generated by his e-cigarette.

Most people who vape do it as an alternative to poisoning themselves with tobacco smoke – which they previously did as a way of getting their doses of nicotine. Vaping is said to be much safer than smoking. But do you really want to vape long term, or even for the rest of your life? Who knows what will happen if you do this hundreds of times a day, every day, for twenty or more years?

Why do people start vaping? In most cases it’s a continuation of the reason they started smoking cigarettes, which they did typically as teenagers because their friends or parents smoked. They then found they couldn’t stop, or thought they couldn’t. Now e-cigs have come along. Wonderful! They can continue to ‘enjoy’ the ‘benefits’ of nicotine without (most of) the risks of inhaling smoke from smouldering chopped up tobacco leaves.

What smokers didn’t realise when they started smoking was that they were buying into an image designed to appeal to young people who were fooled into believing it would make them appear grown up, sophisticated, sexually attractive, and confident. Big Tobacco has spent billions in advertising its false promises and has made vastly more billions from the unfortunate people who have been lured into believing them and as a result have continued, in spite of knowing the dangers, to buy pack after pack after pack because they became hooked on the nicotine in the cigarettes.

And now, if you’ve taken to vaping as an alternative to cigarettes or just for the supposed fun of it, you can continue your addiction without (most of) the dangers of smoking. But you’re still addicted! And what’s so wonderful about vaping anyway? Do you see a vision of heaven or experience an orgasmic sensation every time you take a suck?

What vaping does for you is – nothing. Nothing at all, except give temporary relief of the need to take another dose of nicotine. And now, just as with cigarettes, many vapers find they can’t stop, so they say they don’t want to stop. The very suggestion has them up in arms. Hence organisations such as New Nicotine Alliance in the UK (where, incredibly, it’s a Registered Charity) and similar ones in Australia and Sweden have sprung up to defend the right of their members to enjoy being addicted to e-cigarettes.

But what if the alleged enjoyment provided by nicotine were an illusion?

If you’re a smoker, you can demonstrate to yourself not only that the enjoyment of smoking is an illusion, but also how you can easily escape from nicotine addiction.

Text © Gabriel Symonds