By Richard Leiby
I had lunch, a cup of coffee and a smoke the other day at the offices of the American Legacy Foundation in Washington.
I puffed away for a good 15 minutes, savouring the irony. Here I was, surrounded by zealous anti-smokers - Legacy is among the US's most influential and well-funded tobacco-fighting organisations - yet I had been invited over to partake of all the nicotine I could handle.
There was a catch, of course: what I puffed on wasn't a Marlboro or any other combustible cancer stick. The "smoke" was more accurately fog - small, vaporous clouds.
I was trying out a controversial new nicotine-delivery device that resembles a cigarette but is really a plastic tube with a glowing LED at its tip.
"If you just suck on it, it should work," scientist Dr David Abrams said, handing me an Njoy brand e-cigarette. (That's "e" for electronic; nothing to do with the internet, except that the devices are sold there in abundance.)
Inside the tube is a lithium battery that warms and aerosolises a nicotine solution; Njoy says it works like a vapouriser.
After a few puffs, I found myself wreathed in a fine mist of nostalgia. An e-cig supplies none of the flavour or warmth of a real smoke, yet I was transported back to the days when smoking didn't equal social opprobrium. I got a buzz.
As the foundation's resident expert on addiction and smoker behaviour, Abrams and other researchers are intrigued by the devices but also deeply concerned.
Could they become another weapon in the anti-smoking arsenal? Or could they hook more young people on nicotine and serve as a gateway to tobacco use?
The products are unregulated, untested in the US and not approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which has sanctioned other nicotine-supplying substitutes such as patches and gum.
Last month, US Senator Frank Lautenberg, author of the law that banned smoking on planes years ago, urged the FDA to take "enforcement action against manufacturers of 'electronic cigarettes' and take these products off the market until they are proven safe".
The FDA is getting on the case: although the devices are available online and in scattered retail outlets, the agency says it has halted some imports and is evaluating whether sales require FDA approval.
E-cigs supply nicotine via the lungs, albeit without the tar, carbon monoxide and other nasties in tobacco smoke, and thus provide the almost instantaneous "hit" that smokers crave.
They offered that "exquisite regulation of brain chemistry that makes smoking so powerful and rewarding", said Abrams, a health psychologist who has studied addiction for 30 years.
"People don't realise that we know of no other way to finely tune the brain than puffing on a cigarette," he told me.
Abrams, who smoked as a teenager and has tried e-cigs in the name of science, is no knee-jerk foe of nicotine. But he certainly doesn't endorse e-cigs, especially since studies on their safety and efficacy have only just begun.
Scientists also worry that e-cigarettes may demotivate smokers from quitting, by allowing them to stave off nic fits by "smoking" in offices, restaurants and other places where they can't normally light up. Thus the e-cigs become what Abrams calls a "bridge product".
In a joint statement, the American Cancer Society, Cancer Action Network, the American Heart Association, the American Lung Association and the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids blasted e-cigarettes for being "marketed towards young people, who can purchase them in fruit flavours and online without having to verify their ages".
Njoy claims that one of its cartridges (which contain water, flavouring, propylene glycol and nicotine) will last the equivalent of a half-pack of real butts. There's a danger of sucking down too much at one sitting: nicotine affects heart rate and blood pressure.
At least one controlled study is under way, at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) in Richmond, to find out the impact of e-cigs on nicotine levels in the blood.
"I'm not necessarily saying these products are dangerous," said psychology professor Thomas Eissenberg of VCU's Institute for Drug and Alcohol Studies. "I just think we ought to know what people get when they use them before we sell them."
His study of 40 smokers is trying to determine how e-cigarettes deliver nicotine and whether they suppress withdrawal symptoms.
I found "vaping" too, well, plastic to be enjoyable. After I left the foundation, a tantalising wisp of tobacco smoke wended its way through the gentle rain. The old genie beckoned. Just then there developed a burning in my mouth and an accumulation of phlegm in my throat - the after-effects, I realised, of liquid nicotine and just a whiff of second-hand smoke. I walked on, resisting the addictive draw of nostalgia. - The Washington Post