A recent notice in the student bulletin has banned all e-cigarettes from college - “in the light of advice from the World Health Organisation and other medical professionals concerning the long
term harm caused to the user.”
When this notice was read out during registration recently, there was uproar in my form. Despite there being only one smoker present, most people found the ban ridiculous (mostly as actual cigarettes haven’t been banned) and I was inclined to agree. Everything that we’ve seen in the media has given us the impression that e-cigarettes are the harmless alternative to smoking.
In fact, this isn’t quite true. While the e-cigarette is largely considered to be an effective means for smokers to kick the habit (by maintaining/weaning themselves off current nicotine levels while eliminating all of the nasty tar/carbon monoxide/rat poison stuff) it isn’t actually harmless. Just less harmless than smoking. The worrying thing is that the e-cigarette is increasing in popularity drastically among teenagers - including those who didn’t smoke to begin with.
Some e-cigarettes have been found to give off formaldehyde, a known carcinogen. Silicate particles, a cause of lung disease, are also present in some e-cigarette vapour. The nicotine itself can lead to circulation problems and heart disease.
This misconception of the e-cigarette as completely harmless is pervasive, and has started to re-glamorise (or at least de-sensitise young people to) the cigarettes which have been so declining in popularity among teenagers, mostly due to better education and more powerful campaigning. The Health Department is likely to at least ban the sale of the e-cigarettes to under-18s in the light of WHO’s report.
One of the other risks is passive smoking - the e-cigarettes that give off formaldehyde do so at a higher level than ordinary cigarettes, thus increasing the risk to passive smokers of consequences such as lung cancer.
All in all, e-cigarettes aren’t so terrible - but they aren’t completely safe either.
However, it still seems odd that the college would ban them while tolerating ordinary smoking, when, in fact, e-cigarettes still may be the answer to weaning current young smokers off of cigarettes.
We just need to be careful to remember that the electronic substitute still comes with risks, even to those not directly smoking them - and to bear in mind that as a relatively new innovation, we don’t know everything about them. It isn’t clear what other drawbacks they may currently have, or the long term effects of perhaps more intense use of nicotine. Only time will tell.
