F E AT U R E
THE STORY SO FAR:
CLEARING UP CONFUSION ABOUT NICOTINE
What do we know for sure about nicotine consumption?
Should vaping companies encourage vapers to phase
out nicotine content?
By Leo Forfar
The arrival of vapour products on the global stage has been a
seismic event. Businesspeople, smokers, ex-smokers, politicians
and physicians are still feeling the effects fourteen years on. It was
the entrance of an unknown into a known: a new, young and relatively
untested activity forcing its way into the domain of an established, old
and demonstrably harmful one.
Unsurprisingly, as vaping leached the consumer base of tobacco,
bringing down preventable deaths and pushing up life expectancy in
every nation it expanded to, people began to associate it with smoking,
throwing it under the umbrella tobacco unfurled centuries ago. As of
2017, with vaping on the rise and smoking getting its just desserts for
a prolific body count, the one factor uniting them (apart from poorly
thought-out policy) is nicotine.
Nicotine remains one of the more controversial elements in the debates
surrounding health and safety in vaping. Its inclusion in vapour products
poses something of a paradoxical issue. Most vapers are former
smokers, who through necessity or preference, stopped exposing
themselves to tobacco but hit a block quitting nicotine cold turkey.
However, it’s never good to be addicted to anything and few vapers
would deny this.
So, with the suffocating presence of tobacco shoved firmly out of the
room (these are mods and e-liquids we’re talking about after all) let’s
talk sense about nicotine.
John Britton is the Professor of Epidemiology at the University of
Nottingham’s School of Medicine and Director of the UK Centre for
Tobacco and Alcohol Studies. He was able to shed some light on what
the scientific community knows so far.
“The strongest myth about nicotine is that it causes cancer, and is
responsible for most of the harm caused by smoking,” he said.
“THE STRONGEST MYTH ABOUT
NICOTINE IS THAT IT CAUSES CANCER,
AND IS RESPONSIBLE FOR MOST OF
THE HARM CAUSED BY SMOKING,”
John Britton
Professor Britton also reminded us that, though not a carcinogen nor
overtly debilitating ingredient, nicotine isn’t harmless. And though
vaping isn’t perfect, it remains the best option for former smokers by far.
“Nicotine raises heart rate and blood pressure, and causes short term
constriction of arteries (thus impairing blood flow) but these effects are very
similar to those of caffeine. Long term use of nicotine is therefore probably
better avoided, but of itself doesn’t represent much of a health hazard.
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Tobbaco fields - Cuba
“Any long-term harm from vaping is likely to arise from other
constituents of vapour, not the nicotine. Vaping is unlikely to
be free from long term health hazard so the best advice to
any vaper is to stop vaping. However, if that means that they
go back to smoking, that would be counterproductive from a
health perspective.”