Tag: writing

How loutish, greedy homo sapiens turned a public health miracle into a social and environmental disaster

It started with such promise, supported by an unimpeachable authority: Public Health England. In 2015 the NGO commissioned a series of investigations into the relatively new phenomenon of vaping. The conclusions, which it kept updated with further studies and never resiled from until its dissolution in the reforms of 2022 are unequivocal. To summarise:

• Vaping is probably the most effective, lasting and easiest path to quitting smoking yet devised
• Vaping is 95% safer than smoking
• Vaping neither stains, infects or in any discernible way damages the lungs, (by inference including that of bystanders).
• Vaping is not a gateway to smoking among young people. The decline in the uptake of smoking among young people in developed countries continues.

Are we sure about that? Let us turn to a more disapproving but equally prestigious body, the John Hopkins Centre for Heart Disease:

There are many unknowns about vaping, including what chemicals make up the vapor and how they affect physical health over the long term. “People need to understand that e-cigarettes are potentially dangerous to your health,” says Michael Blaha MD.

After more than a decade of widespread vaping, that’s what they’ve got: ‘unknowns’; ‘long term’; ‘potentially dangerous.’ From the language we can tell that they feel that it must be bad, why, it’s almost obvious. It’s just that, dammit all, they can’t find any evidence, and it’s not for want of trying.

Now to what is happening on the ground. The virtuous public regards vaping as another form of smoking, and equally bad. Most people firmly believe it to be harmful. Laws have been passed in some jurisdictions limiting and controlling vaping. This should be a civil liberties issue — banning an activity many find helpful and pleasurable, with no evidence of harm? Where is the outrage?

Silence.

Why? Because it looks like smoking. It’s … cheating!

“You can’t do that here!”

“No smoking!!!” Ah, the shrill self-righteousness. The self-satisfied revelling in judgement without fear of third-party disapproval.

Vaping has become a trope in screen entertainment. Heroes never vape. The bad guys, and especially the bad guy’s dim muscle boys, frequently do. Slaggy molls vape.

The papers are full of material treating vaping as a known evil. Of course they are; that is how the echo chamber of modern media works. If the public conceives a prejudice, any prejudice, feed it to them with all you’ve got. Truth? Who cares? We have advertising to sell.

How did this happen? Let’s roll back to the beginning. For me, it started fourteen years ago. I was living in England and sitting in a surgeon’s office being briefed for a knee replacement, the damage from an old skiing accident having by then almost crippled me.

“Do you smoke?”

Answer: yes. In fact, after decades of abstinence I had returned to smoking a few years earlier in the cauldron of a marriage gone bad. Partly for the stress and partly, I confess, because it infuriated my wife. Mea culpa.

The surgeon: “If you stop six weeks before your operation, you will have 50% less carbon monoxide in your blood. If you quit three months before the op you will have none. This is very good news for the anaesthetist, whose job it is to keep you alive while I saw your leg off.” (A doctor once told me orthopaedic surgeons were glorified mechanics; he might have had a point.)

This was not really what I wanted to hear. I still rather enjoyed a fag and was, of course, properly hooked. But there was this new vaping thing. Not available in any shop I could find, but all over the Internet. A few days later I received my kit. A thing called a ‘vape pen’ that constantly leaked a fluid that the label warned should never be allowed to touch the skin, and a range of flavoured liquids. The so-called tobacco flavours were uniformly foul, the sweet ones less so but I did not want to smoke a lolly, but that espresso flavour hit the spot. Coffee and a fag rolled into one — what’s not to like?

I ditched the smokes and started vaping. Effortless. Literally effortless. Vaping was every bit as satisfying as smoking, in fact if I got the coil resistance and wattage right I could generate vast, gratifying clouds of steam that looked like smoke but wasn’t.

I quickly learned that those around me most emphatically did not enjoy being enveloped in the visible products of my exhalations so I toned it right down. Vaping was to be a private pleasure. Fine.

Alas, the instincts of the young to loutishness soon dropped a spanner in the works. Online forums sprang up swapping tips on how to wind your own coils and supercharge your kit to produce a fog of vapour sufficient to conceal the advance of an infantry battalion. Within the year stores began to pop up on the high street, gleaming palaces of fluids and kit ranged up like expensive perfumes. Posters and instore videos advertised conventions where yoof in giant pants competed to blow the most smoke rings from one puff.

The idiots seemed to think vaping was cool. Wrong! A Gauloise hanging from the corner of Albert Camus’ mouth, perhaps, but those clunky devices the size of a small handgun, those vast nimbuses of water vapour? Never.

The rest is history. Obnoxious zoobs marched around with their portable fog machines literally getting up the noses of the citizenry and the long decline began, a decline which turned into a cliff thanks to one Zang Shengwei, of Shenzen parish, godfather of the Elf Bar and similar candy-coloured devices which are now the curse of our landscape. In 2022 it is estimated that 40 tonnes of lithium were tossed away in tiny batteries inside those bits of bright plastic trash in the UK alone. In the middle of an eco-disaster, they let it happen. Business is business.

How did the powers that be not instantly ban those things? If there is one harm that can absolutely be sheeted home to vaping, it is the effect of high doses of nicotine on developing brains. The lamentable Mr Zang knowingly, deliberately designed those things to look like toys and to deliver the kick of a horse. And he was allowed to. Became a billionaire, in fact.

And so we go down the familiar track. Australia has passed a raft of laws, some sensible. With luck, medicalising vaping will channel it successfully down the quit smoking route for which it has been a godsend. But then they have blown it by letting loose a barrage of misinformation and outright lies.

The ‘About vaping and e-cigarettes’ page at health.gov.au lists several toxic substances that e-cigarettes ‘can contain’, such as acetone and formaldehyde. Sure, they can contain them but any fluid you are likely to buy most certainly will not. Acetone is highly flammable, a substance only a lunatic would expose to a glowing e-cigarette coil. Inhaling its vapours would make you throw up. The page repeats the ‘gateway to smoking’ lie, which the authors must know to be untrue. And so on.

What any over-the-counter fluid does contain are two substances widely used in food, drinks and, significantly, in vaporisers designed to deliver drugs: propylene glycol and vegetable glycerin, both rated GRAS (Generally Recognised As Safe) world-wide. And nicotine. Nobody objects to nicotine in gum, pills and patches and nor should they in vaporisers. Time for a little-known but true fact: exhaled vape steam contains little or no nicotine because the drug is very rapidly absorbed into the bloodstream across the alveolar membrane of the lungs. You breathe a lot in but breathe very little out. So here is the truth about forcing others to breathe in your ‘chemicals’: the vapour is almost entirely steam, and the trace chemicals it may contain are the very same that your bystanders have probably, voluntarily but unknowingly, ingested by one means or another in the preceding twenty-four hours. All they had to do was eat a supermarket muffin or anything else listing E1520 and/or E422 in the small print on the ingredients label.

None of this, of course, will make the slightest difference to my life as a vapist. No matter how discreet I may try to be, I will continue to be cursed and condemned. In the end the war on smoking is in one respect like any other war: the first casualty is truth.

In Defence of Nicotine

Tobacco is a dirty weed. I like it.
It satisfies no normal need. I like it.
It makes you thin, it makes you lean,
It takes the hair right off your bean.
It’s the worst stuff I’ve ever seen.
I like it.

Tobacco, by Graeme Lee Hemminger

Vaping is rather satisfying. It recalls the pleasure of the pipe. It delivers one of those plant-based drugs that almost appear to have been devised by God to benefit us humans, the alkaloid family. Caffeine, morphine, nicotine, codeine, quinine, atropine and thousands more.

Nicotine, with a couple of caveats, is a Good Thing. It’s a pity it’s addictive, like many other alkaloids, but hey, we’re addicted to oxygen, water, food, motion. The idea of a life without addiction is a nonsense. A lot of people, and as a vapist I know, are deeply addicted to passing judgement on others. God knows I’ve given enough of them their fix.

But taken to excess, nicotine is bad for your blood pressure. I vape using a machine with a removable rechargeable battery containing liquid with a very low level of nicotine – 6 mg/ml, so much weaker than a cigarette that when I took a puff on one a while back I turned green and nearly vomited. My blood pressure was 119/68 this morning thanks to my practice of Nordic walking thousands of kilometres per year. If you don’t know how outstanding 119/68 is, ask a nurse. It plummeted when I quit drinking. I am 77 years old, in bouncing good health, and I have been vaping for more than a decade. Bad for you? Bah!

In fact, nicotine is rather good for your brain. So good, in fact, that they give it to some dementia patients. There is a reason the photographic annals of the world are awash with pictures of great writers and artists smoking while they work. This is no trivial thing – Walter Raleigh brought tobacco to England in 1587, just in time for Shakespeare and the great English literary renaissance. It is my belief that tobacco was one of the driving forces that turned England from a country with few literary figures of note to one whence flooded a literary canon revered to this day. A canon, one must say, overflowing with praise for the weed. Google ‘literary praise for tobacco’ and you will be swamped. Were they all wrong, all fools? I decidedly think not. A pity they did not fully appreciate the dangers of inhaling smoke, but we are the beneficiaries.

My father was a writer and I grew up next to his study, forbidden territory, where he sat pounding his typewriter and filling the atmosphere with a grey fug from his endless cigarettes. They killed him in the end, but he died content at 84, hardly a life tragically curtailed by the fags. But I am under no illusions: he got lucky. Now I spend my days at a laptop, puffing happily on my vape, my brain firing on all cylinders on much smaller doses of the blessed drug than he ingested, but still doing its benign work.

Vaping, by removing the harm of smoke but retaining the benefice of inhaled nicotine, is to my mind an outright blessing. Long may it reign.

You may commence firing. I may flinch but will not run.