An Irrational Fear of Vape
Are electronic cigarettes dangerous? It’s probably best not to look at the Cheat Sheet website for a sensible answer.
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by Dave Cross
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“We want you to save time and live more,” they write, “so we closely follow, research, and write about topics to bring you the most up-to-date guides, reviews, lists, and advice.” While such a site is of no real interest to current vapers, it could well be something that a smoker looking to switch might stumble upon. What a shame they haven’t managed to closely follow any sensible research or produce good advice.
“They may look innocent, multicolored, and fun, but don’t be fooled,” says Lauren Weiler. “Just because you can smoke them indoors doesn’t make them any safer than traditional cigarettes.” Sorry, you say, no safer than regular tobacco cigarettes?
Public Health England contend that vaping is at least 95% safer than smoking, the Royal College of Physicians says that it carries less than 5% of the risk of tobacco and The Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology state: “current data suggests that the levels of toxins and contaminants within inhaled vapour do not pose significant health risks.”
Weiler’s nonsense extends to how eliquids are made: “To create the e-cigarette liquid itself, nicotine is extracted from tobacco and then mixed with a base, such as propylene glycol, which is an alcohol found in antifreeze and used in the plastics and perfume industries. Flavourings, colourings, and chemicals are then added to this mixture to form the smoking liquid.” She missed out ‘snips and snails and puppy dog tails’.
Aluminium is a key component of some explosives, fertiliser can serve a similar purpose and water is strongly implicated in incidents of drowning – but only an absolute fool would caution against their other uses.
In fact, so bizarre are some of the claims Weiler trots out that a reader could be mistaken for thinking the article was penned by Stanton Glantz’s Centre for Tobacco Control Research. The very same centre that she quotes when warning about “nanoparticles”, links to “asthma, stroke, heart disease, and diabetes” and that “it’s also tough to tell exactly what’s in the e-cigarette liquid.”
But we thought you’d already explained juice is made from Strontium 90 and arsenic, Lauren?
All article’s like hers do is feed into the growing quantity of misinformation on the internet convincing larger numbers of smokers that it’s too risky to switch their habit for vaping.
“It is perfectly sensible to have a healthy skepticism about new products and technologies, particularly their long-term effects,” say Adam Houston and David Sweanor in the National Post. “Where real risks exist, it is important to identify them. But it makes little sense to focus on theoretical, minuscule or entirely bogus harms without acknowledging the serious, well-known harms caused by existing products, which these new innovations could mitigate.”
Houston and Sweanor call for something to be done about the “alarmist quasi-science” carried by the likes of Cheat Sheet, to “ensure that consumer knowledge and regulatory priorities better reflect the scientific evidence.”
Photo Credit:
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Eyes - Wikipedia creative commons
Warning poster - http://scarfolk.blogspot.com
Dave Cross
Journalist at POTVDave is a freelance writer; with articles on music, motorbikes, football, pop-science, vaping and tobacco harm reduction in Sounds, Melody Maker, UBG, AWoL, Bike, When Saturday Comes, Vape News Magazine, and syndicated across the Johnston Press group. He was published in an anthology of “Greatest Football Writing”, but still believes this was a mistake. Dave contributes sketches to comedy shows and used to co-host a radio sketch show. He’s worked with numerous start-ups to develop content for their websites.
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