Cessation Experts Warns Against Bans
One of the UK’s leading smoking cessation experts has cautioned the government against responding to the calls to ban disposable vapes and played down fears of teen vaping
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by Dave Cross
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Ms Rutter spoke to local journalists in the North-East, telling them that any perceived vaping risks should be balanced out against the benefits accrued from the role they play in improving public health by helping smokers to quit their tobacco addiction.
Ailsa said that banning vapes could have “unintended consequences”.
Recently, arguments for a ban have been gaining traction with Merseyside and Cheshire local politicians. The thing is, she believes, vapes are a useful crutch used by heavy smokers and people experiencing mental health problems who are otherwise reliant on cigarettes.
She is reported as telling local councillors: “There needs to be more thought given to this. There's already a black market, we are worried that this could drive a further black market in it. The vast majority of young people are not vaping regularly. There has been a 50% growth in experimentation over the last two years, giving it a go once or twice.
“There is minimal evidence that this is a generation of young people that are heavily addicted... There is quite a lot of evidence that quite a lot of the young people who are vaping would have been smoking and many of them were smoking.”
The smoking cessation expert pointed to research which has shown the risks of diseases associated with smoking are appreciably lower if smokers switch to vaping.
Fresh and Balance has a website dedicated to sharing facts about vaping. It states:
- Nicotine vaping is one of the most effective tools for quitting smoking
- Nicotine vaping is substantially less harmful than smoking
- E-cigarettes are generally much cheaper than cigarettes
- Smokers should considering switching to vaping
- Vaping “will almost certainly reduce your risks of cancer, COPD and a range of smoking-caused diseases”
- Many thousands of people in the UK have stopped smoking with the help of an e-cigarette
Fresh points smokers to the best source of information about vaping - specialist vape shops and local stop smoking services.
The advice continues:
- In the UK, e-cigarettes are tightly regulated for safety and quality
- Vapes carry a small fraction of the risk of cigarettes
- E-cigarettes do not produce tar or carbon monoxide
- Nicotine is the addictive substance in cigarettes but is not the substance which causes most of the health risks from smoking
- Almost all of the harm from smoking comes from the thousands of other chemicals in tobacco smoke, many of which are toxic
- There’s no evidence so far that vaping causes harm to other people around you
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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