Imagine if there was an alternative to smoking cigarettes. Imagine this alternative could help millions of people quit smoking and came with only a fraction of the harmful chemicals that cigarettes do. E-cigarettes are the most innovative smoking-cessation product invented yet. So, public health officials and anti-tobacco activists are all in favor of this life-saving innovation, right? Actually, they’re almost all totally against it. Because they make no substantial distinction between e-cigarettes and real cigarettes even though they are completely different products. Northeastern University researcher Jessica Oakes points that most e-cigarettes have a replaceable cartridge which contains a mixture of fairly common food additives, nicotine, water and some sort of flavoring. When the cartridge is heated that mixture is vaporized for the user to inhale.
There are no long term studies to prove if e-cigarette cause cancer but that doesn’t mean it is safe or that it doesn’t cause cancer. If we go back to inhaling chemicals into our lungs, I don’t see any way that this won’t cause long term harm. Many people that use e-cigarettes use them much more than cigarettes because they are perceived to be safer that increases the amount of chemical inhaled.
To begin with, e-cigarettes are not cigarettes they contain no tobacco. Instead, a liquid derived from tobacco leaves are vapourised, and users of e-cigarettes inhale that vapour which is not smoke. This is significant because the real harm from tobacco comes from the combustion process which releases hundreds of toxic compounds known as tar. Since e-cigarettes have no tobacco, they release no tar. This makes them at least 95% less harmful than tobacco cigarettes but e-cigarettes do contain nicotine, an addictive drug. However, there is little evidence that nicotine alone is bad for you, making it similar to say, caffeine a drug used every day by millions of people. When it comes to addictive substances like caffeine or nicotine, they are not completely safe because a study says that nicotine and caffeine can damage your brain cells and they directly can affect your heart as well. Ignorance does not imply safety.
Anchal Kapoor