ON the basis of the latest report on e-cigarettes by the Government's Science and Technology Committee – a report which has been widely criticised for bias favouring the vaping lobby, and ignoring counter expert evidence advising caution in regard to yet-possible detrimental health effects of e-cigarettes – Norman Lamb, the committee chairman, has been quoted as saying that "public places should stop viewing conventional and e-cigarettes as one and the same. There is no public health rationale for doing so" ("MPS want vaping rules relaxed to help smokers quit", The Herald, August 17).
I beg to differ – and apparently, so do many public health practitioners.
The estimate that e-cigarettes could be around 95 per cent safer for smokers than conventional cigs may be scientifically well supported; but this is not a complete "clean bill of health"; so now to relax hard-fought-for laws designed to protect people from passive smoking (and vaping?) in public places would be a backward step since the evaluation of e-cigarette safety is still ongoing.
Also let us remember that the rationale for the use of e-cigarettes is supposed to be that they are a support to wean people from an addiction to smoking conventional nicotine-laden cigarettes, and by this logic, they should eventually be able to wean themselves from the less pharmacologically addictive e-cigarettes.
Unfortunately, this complete route to extinguishing a smoking addiction does not appear to have happened for many people, who appear to now be addicted to e-cigarettes; and I think that there is a very obvious but under-emphasised reason for this; e-cigarettes not only continue the "ritual" associated with smoking, but further, accentuate it, as anyone who watches an e-smoker billowing e-cig vapour everywhere can see.
Drug (nicotine) addiction is not all about the drug; it includes the ritual associated with taking the drug – a factor which seems to have been conveniently forgotten by the harm reduction lobby in its rush to normalise what seems to be fast-becoming e-cigarette addiction, with its ever-present danger of relapse to smoking conventional cigarettes.
Philip Adams,
7 Whirlie Road, Crosslee, Renfrewshire.
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