The beef against electronic cigarettes is based on false evidence December 05 2014

Jacques Le Houezec,The Daily Star, December 5, 2014

We have long known that people smoke for the nicotine, but die from the smoke. Indeed, the vast majority of cigarette-related diseases and deaths arise from the inhalation of tar particles and toxic gases, including carbon monoxide. Though nicotine replacement therapy has helped smokers quit, the cigarette habit remains pervasive in many countries.

The use of nicotine in noncombustible forms such as smokeless tobacco or personal nicotine vaporizers, would enable millions of current smokers to reduce considerably the harm that their nicotine consumption is doing to their health. In Sweden, the widespread use of snus – a smokeless tobacco product with a lower concentration of carcinogenic nitrosamines – has contributed to a dramatic decline in the incidence of lung cancer, to the world’s lowest levels.

The benefits of phasing out tobacco consumption could not be more compelling. That is why personal nicotine vaporizers should be actively promoted as an alternative to tobacco products, aided by endorsements from health authorities, tax advantages and support from the anti-smoking movement.

But so far, none of this has occurred, largely because nicotine is viewed as a highly addictive and toxic substance, with even smokers hesitating to try nicotine replacement therapy or the personal nicotine vaporizer for this reason. In fact, nicotine has been the primary target of anti-tobacco campaigns for more than three decades.

But nicotine is only partly responsible for tobacco dependence. Other substances from tobacco smoke – such as monoamine oxidase inhibitors, which have antidepressant effects – reinforce tobacco dependence, but are absent from vaporized nicotine. That may be why personal nicotine vaporizer user surveys suggest that nicotine is less addictive in its vaporized form.

In reality, nicotine is a relatively safe drug at dosages that a smoker or “vaper” inhales, with similar effects to caffeine. Moreover, smokers and personal nicotine vaporizer users control very precisely, on a puff-by-puff basis, the dose of nicotine they consume, virtually eliminating the risk of overdose.

In fact, a lethal dose of nicotine is a lot higher than the 30-60 milligrams that many scientific papers claim. After reviewing case reports of nicotine intoxications and suicide attempts, the pharmacologist Bernd Mayer found that the lethal dose of nicotine in humans must be somewhere between 500-1,000 mg of absorbed – not just ingested – nicotine. Given that one of the first symptoms of intoxication is vomiting, and that 70 percent of the remaining nicotine in the digestive tract is metabolized by the liver before it reaches other organs, absorbing that much nicotine is not easy.

With minimal health risks compared to tobacco smoking, personal nicotine vaporizers face only one real barrier to use: the willingness of smokers to switch. But, even on this front, the devices have had considerable success, with personal nicotine vaporizer use increasing exponentially in the last few years.

Though in an ideal world, people would simply be able to quit using nicotine altogether, experience suggests that many smokers cannot – or do not want to – give it up, and will continue to smoke if there is no safe and acceptable alternative. If smokers are willing to accept personal nicotine vaporizers as a viable option, high-risk tobacco use could become a thing of the past.

Meanwhile, health authorities and governments have adopted a fear-based approach, scrambling to regulate – or even ban – personal nicotine vaporizers. The European Union’s Tobacco Products Directive and the United Kingdom’s Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency plan to introduce strict regulations of personal nicotine vaporizer sales and use, based on drug legislation, even though the devices are neither tobacco nor medical products. Even the World Health Organization has released a report expressing serious concern about the marketing and use of electronic nicotine-delivery systems.

Such opposition is not based on scientific evidence. Indeed, an increasing number of scientific publications show that personal nicotine vaporizer use is much safer than smoking tobacco.

In January, a group of scientists (including me) sent a letter to the European Commission imploring it to implement evidence-based, proportionate regulation that allows users of personal nicotine vaporizers to identify the product and dosage that suits them. “If wisely regulated, electronic cigarettes have the potential to make cigarettes obsolete and save millions of lives worldwide,” we wrote. Excessive regulation, by contrast, “will contribute to maintaining the existing levels of smoking-related disease, death and health care costs.”

Michael Russell once declared, “It is the nicotine that people cannot easily do without, not tobacco.” He was right. And it is tobacco smoke, not nicotine, that kills. That makes personal nicotine vaporizers the ideal solution. It is time for health authorities to get on board.

Jacques Le Houezec is a consultant in public health and tobacco dependence and honorary lecturer at the United Kingdom Center for Tobacco Control Studies at the University of Nottingham. THE DAILY STAR publishes this

commentary in collaboration with Project Syndicate © (www.project-syndicate.org)