Imane Kurdi In Charles de Gaulle airport last week, I noticed a woman smoking as she sat by the gate waiting for her flight. Intrigued, I approached closer. It looked like a cigarette, same shape, same color, same gestures, but where was the smoke? When I got really close, I noticed that it was quite different from a real cigarette, a metal gadget made to look and feel like a cigarette, but that does not produce smoke: an electronic cigarette. And then at a conference, another woman, right inside the auditorium, lit up, but this time it was a thicker, longer tube, curved at one end, and she puffed on it like you would a “shisha”, throughout the talk! Smoking in a public space, I had not encountered that in years, a real blast from the past. Except that it's not quite smoking. The French have coined a new term; they call it “vapoter” or vaporizing, since what you are doing is not smoking but inhaling a warm vapor. It has become a huge business in France. More than 500,000 people use electronic cigarettes generating a business worth millions of euros a year. Small shops have sprouted like mushrooms, in the same way that mobile phone shops and shops selling accessories for mobile phones did in the last few years. You see them everywhere with their large array of colorful vials and bright posters. The choice is baffling, not only in terms of the electronic gadget itself, from one that looks just like a cigarette to others that are closer to a pipe, but in terms of the flavors of the liquid you inhale. Electronic cigarettes were developed in China in 2004. The principle is rather simple; a stainless steel gadget with a chamber for storing a liquid and a rechargeable battery. The liquid is heated releasing a fine mist which the user puffs on as he or she would a cigarette, but instead of smoke, you inhale mist. What is in this mist depends on the little bottle you have bought. The liquid now comes in hundreds of flavors, from apple to mint to caramel, you can choose liquid with or without nicotine, and in various concentrations of nicotine. The salesman in the shop I went to assured me it was all harmless, that it was made of 100 percent natural products. A small aside here about “natural products”. My late mother used to get very upset by the way people bandy about the assertion: it's harmless because it's natural, because it's herbal, it can do you no harm, as if the earth did not grow plants that are harmful or toxic and only man-made chemicals can harm your health! Clearly a fallacy, since nature abounds with poisonous plants, berries and herbs, and yet how often do you hear it! So are electronic cigarettes harmless as the salesman assured me? The short answer is we just don't know. They are certainly less harmful than classic cigarettes. There is no tar and no carbon monoxide, nor all the toxic chemicals that we know exist in cigarettes. There is also no passive smoking: someone puffing on an electronic-cigarette next to you does not harm your health since they don't release smoke for you to inhale. The problem is that there have been almost no clinical studies or toxicity analyses, in other words we do not know that electronic cigarettes are harmless, nor is there any evidence that they cause any harm. Are they effective in helping smokers quit? This is their main selling point. So far there is some evidence, much of it anecdotal, that they are highly effective with heavy smokers. Chain smokers who find it near-impossible to quit smoking find that switching to electronic cigarettes deals with both the nicotine addiction and the physical habit of puffing on a cigarette, plus they keep the pleasure element. What is more the fact that they are not banned in public spaces, means that you can have the pleasure of “vapoter” wherever you are without annoying or bothering anyone else. You can see the attraction. Marisol Touraine, the French Minister for Health, is concerned at the rising popularity of electronic cigarettes. She joins a movement that worries about the trivialization of something that could be harmful to health. The World Health Organization is widely quoted as urging the ban of electronic cigarettes, but this is not quite the case. What it urged to be banned, and this was back in 2008, is the claim that electronic cigarettes have therapeutic benefits, since there is no scientific proof to back the claim. It has also called for more research on both the health effects of e-cigarettes and their efficacy as a smoking cessation aid. Some countries have taken a very cautious approach and banned e-cigarettes altogether. Others like France have adopted a regime based on recommendations but no regulation. Touraine would like this to change; she has suggested that e-cigarettes should be banned in public spaces and prohibited to those under 18 just like classic cigarettes. It is that old debate between the pragmatic and the idealistic. If the choice is between not smoking at all and smoking e-cigarettes, clearly it is better not to smoke at all. But if it is a choice between smoking tobacco and puffing nicotine-free e-cigarettes, the equation is not nearly so straightforward. — Imane Kurdi is a Saudi writer on European affairs. She can be reached at [email protected]
