Kate Kelland and Ben Hirschler London
Puffing on slim metal tubes loaded with pale yellow liquid, two London businessmen say they have between their lips a cure for what the UN calls “one of the biggest public health threats the world has ever faced”.
Electronic cigarettes are the future, they argue. Cheaper, cleaner and cooler than smoking, “vaping” – using a vapouriser to inhale nicotine infused with flavours from pina colada to bubblegum – spells the end of tobacco.
“After I first tried this, I left half a cigarette in the ashtray and never went back,” says Zoltan Kore, who co-runs the newly opened London e-cigarette shop Smoke No Smoke. “I’m not a smoker now, I’m a vaper,” business partner Gabor Kovacs says. “The awful morning coughing fits have gone, and the waking up in the night struggling to breathe has gone, too.”
Such stories – and hopes of persuading the rest of the world’s billion smokers to stub out their tar and toxin-loaded cigarettes, cutting a catalogue of chronic disease risks – are tantalising for public health experts. And since “vaping” uses the same oral route as smoking to satisfy a smoker’s nicotine craving, some say it can help smokers quit much more effectively than nicotine gum or patches.
All the top tobacco companies are now placing bets on e-smokes, which some analysts predict may outsell conventional cigarettes in 10 years, raising the counter-intuitive prospect that Big Tobacco could actually help people quit smoking.
Celebrities like Bruno Mars and Courtney Love are endorsing them, but e-cigarettes are far from universally accepted as a public health tool. Regulators are agonising over whether to restrict them as “gateway” products to nicotine addiction or embrace them as treatments for would-be quitters. With no long-term scientific evidence that e-cigarettes are safe, critics like the British Medical Association warn of the dangers of unregulated use.
Supporters of e-cigarettes scoff at suggestions they are a slippery slope for previously addiction-free young people to get hooked on nicotine.
Adrian Everett, the head of British e-cigarette firm E-Lites, said: “Comparing electronic cigarettes to tobacco is like comparing playing football to juggling live hand grenades.” – Reuters