Do not smoke, just vape

Given the harmful effects of tobacco consumption, we must strike at its roots. While the Government could consider banning tobacco use, it would be more useful to enact a regulation to manufacture safer harm-reduction products like vaping devices, writes Deepak Mukharji

Smoking has serious health consequences. Not only does it cause cancer but more immediately it severely impacts cardio-vascular health. Some 40 years ago, a British psychiatrist said,

“People smoke for nicotine but die from tar.” Perhaps he oversimplified it because tar is just one of the by-products of smoking.

The trouble with smoking tobacco lies in its chemistry. Cigarette smoke has nitrosamines, hydrogen cyanide, benzene, arsenic and many other harmful chemicals that are sure killers.

Adult human beings are ever-increasingly driven to make choices through their process of education and social conditioning. The whole concept of democracy is predicated on adult choice and the outcome can be potentially even more harmful to one’s health. This despite information being available and marketed.

Many adult smokers want to quit but they lack the will. The World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates that by 2025, the world will still have one billion smokers even though the number of people giving up on tobacco is increasing every year. Progressive Governments are recognising the issue as a problem and are making attempts to address it. Thankfully, there are harm-reduction products available in the market.

Nicotine is a naturally occurring substance found not just in tobacco but also in other vegetables like potatoes, tomatoes, brocolli and eggplant. The WHO maintains that nicotine can be consumed through nicotine-delivery substitutes developed by large pharmaceutical companies such as gums, patches and sprays that are easily available.

However, in addition to these products, private initiative saw the development of vaping devices (incorrectly but commonly referred to as e-cigarettes). They have nothing to do with cigarettes. The fundamental difference lies in the smoke.

Cigarettes deliver smoke by actually burning the tobacco at over 750°C. Vaping devices do not generate smoke. By using an electric charge to heat liquid pharmaceutical grade nicotine to between 100-150°C, these devices create a vapour. This pharma-grade nicotine with polypropylene glycol (a food processing additive) and glycerine makes it usable in vaping devices. Today, worldwide, the vaping device industry is worth over seven billion dollar per annum with manufacturing predominantly in China. 

In support of banning tobacco, Konstantinos Farsalinos from the Onassis Cardiac Surgery Centre and University of Patras (Greece) believes that consumers should be offered a third option to “quit or die.”

According to him, “Study after study shows that eight out of 10 smokers are unable to quit on their own, or after using pharmaceutical products such as patches or pills. And if they don’t quit, those studies also show that 50 per cent of them will die from tobacco-related diseases.”

The UK is probably ahead of the pack of countries who are seriously looking at harm-reduction products for smokers, who do not have the will to quit because they derive a subjective pleasure from the simulated action.

Vaping devices mimic action. As a baseline, in 2006, the UK initially banned vaping devices but continued to study them in depth. Not only was the ban subsequently lifted, but in its 2015 and 2018 reports, Public Health England (PHE) concluded that vaping is 95 per cent safer than smoking tobacco, which is terrible. Today, the Stoptober programme in the UK is considering the sale of these vaping devices in pharmacies because they consider them efficient harm- reduction products. Countries like Japan and Australia are taking a similar pragmatic approach.

The Indian tobacco scenario is complex. While cigarettes represent the most common face of tobacco, the reality is that over 100 million cigarette smokers represent a mere four per cent of the overall Indian tobacco market.

Given the terrible harmful effects of tobacco consumption, India must strike at all tobacco use. But while there is an urgent need for the Indian Government to ban tobacco, it must simultaneously enact regulation to manufacture 95 per cent safer harm reduction products like vaping devices and make these products in India instead of letting customers access them illegally through smuggled products. 

(The writer is a freelancer)