Why not just eat a banana?

The latest breakthrough since lunchtime, if you’ll pardon the cliché, is revealed in the result of a study carried out at Penn State College in the US, styled Population Assessment of Tobacco and Health (PATH). Did they think of the acronym first and then juggle the words to find a match? (Report in Penn State News, 17 June 2017.)

It was another questionnaire type of study. Out of 32,320 people who responded to a survey, only 3,586 were found to fit the study criteria. The subjects were cigarette smokers and e-cigarette users. Or cigarette users and e-cigarette smokers.

Where did the PATH lead to? Let’s hear it from lead author Guodong Liu, assistant professor of Public Health Sciences at Penn State: ‘The findings indicated that e-cigarette users were relatively less dependent than cigarette users.’ Amazing! Putting it another way, he said: ‘No doubt about it, e-cigarettes are addictive, but not at the same level as traditional cigarettes.’ Well, fancy that.

How did they determine that vapers were less addicted than smokers? Like this:

Compared with cigarette smokers, e-cigarette users waited longer to start using their product after waking up. Vapers were less likely to consider themselves addicted, to have strong cravings or to feel like they really needed their product. They were also less likely to say they found it difficult to refrain from using their product in restricted places.

Very interesting, but so what? The reality for both smokers and vapers is that they ‘use’ their ‘product’ many times a day, every day, for years on end and find it difficult to stop. Ergo, both types of nicotine user are addicted. It matters not one jot or tittle whether someone is more, or less, addicted and the very notion of degrees of addiction, being based on the above-mentioned arbitrary criteria or in any other way that might be thought up, is groundless as well as pointless; either someone is addicted or they are not.

But wait – there’s more! ‘Planned follow-up studies will help determine if e-cigarettes could lead to traditional cigarettes dependence in the future,’ says Professor Liu. The experimenters apparently see a need for these follow-up studies because, we’re informed, ‘experts have raised concerns that e-cigarette use could cause nicotine dependence and lead to cigarette use, reversing hard-won public health gains.’

What is it with these so-called experts, and who are they anyway? Of course e-cigarette use causes nicotine dependence. Even Professor Liu recognises that. One might as well ask whether cigarette use causes and sustains nicotine dependence. (Dependence sounds nicer than addiction, doesn’t it.) Why else would anyone in their right mind want to suck chemical-laden fumes into their lungs all the time?

Eventually we come to the reason for the huge effort that went into the study:

The PATH study findings are expected to inform future tightening or loosening of regulations around vaping products. In May 2016, the US Food and Drug Administration began regulating e-cigarettes, ruling that they could not be marketed or sold to minors under 18 years old.

That brings me to another point. Why is it that the regulations, with whatever degree of tightening or loosening is thought appropriate, are intended to shield only minors from the marketing or selling (what’s the difference?) of e-cigarettes? What about older people? Don’t they count?

Everyone needs to be shielded from the marketing or selling of an addictive drug delivery system (the cigarette) that kills 7 million people every year worldwide (WHO figure).

But whether or not using e-cigarettes leads to people taking up smoking who otherwise wouldn’t, we still have the same problem: the continuing marketing and selling of ordinary cancer sticks.

If conventional cigarettes were no longer available – through being banned – the problem of whether e-cigarette use leads to smoking would be purely academic. And if e-cigarettes are indeed so much safer than conventional cigarettes – putting aside the question of why anyone in their right mind would want to use nicotine at all – then that would be a real gain for public health.

That is, as long as nothing bad will happen to you from sucking e-cigarette vapour into your lungs a hundred or more times a day, every day, for years on end.

Text © Gabriel Symonds