The Long View, on Radio 4 last week (still available on the iPlayer), examined the phenomenon of electronic cigarettes in a novel way - comparing it to the snuff phenomenon of centuries before. So - does the comparison bear up?
Smoking, as we all know by now, is a bad thing. It's a stupid thing to do, and only an idiot would take it up after their early teenage years. I should know, I started smoking when I was on the verge of 20. Why do we smoke? Because other people do. Why do other people smoke? They don't really know. Probably because some other people do. And so the circle goes.
Some people continue to smoke out of habit, and hate themselves for doing it. I personally enjoyed the act of smoking quite a lot, and miss it. But no one likes the smell of a smoker, and understanderbly resent the way the smoke transfers to them. And no smoker likes the feeling of ravaged lungs after a night out, and the unwelcome duty of having to torch the throat despite this in order to feel human again. Nicotine is supposedly the most addictive substance on the planet however, and giving up smoking is harder than people make out, and people make out that it's very hard indeed.
So something like e-cigarettes come along and everyone is happy. If you don't already know, smoking an e-cigarette (or 'vaping') is a way of inhaling nicotine without the danger (as far as we know - the British Medical Association is not yet convinced, more of which later). An e-cigarette comprises a cartridge with a nicotine solution, something called a cartomiser and a battery. The cartomiser is activated when the user inhales, and converts the nicotine into a vapour rather than smoke. The theory is that this vapour is free of the carcinogens and toxins that are the cause of all the Long Term Conditions and various forms of cancer normally associated with smoking, but simulating the act of smoking. So people like me, who really miss smoking on nights out and so on, have a safer alternative (a safer alternative which is legal to use indoors and so saves all that tedious standing around in freezing cold beer gardens).
'The Long View' compares this smoking alternative to the smoking alternative of the 17th-19th centuries - snuff. Snuff is a powdered version of tobacco which is snorted. It's not very popular anymore, although still available - I once had a manager who swore by it, and although he blew his nose more than was perhaps usual he certainly didn't smell as bad as the rest of us. It was seen in the past, rather like e-cigarettes are now, a safer alternative.
There are many fair comparisons. People (like the vaping enthusiast on the show Sarah Jakes) personalising their e-cigarettes to look "steampunk" on the programme is compared to personalised snuff boxes made with Sheffield steel. Flavouring snuff with different scents is also mirrored by the different flavoured nicotine solutions available for people to use in e-cigarettes. 'The Marquis of Anglesey' in London was apparrently a great hang-out for these cool new dudes with their snorting habit, led by the boring poet John Dryden. The rise of snuff coincided with the rise in popularity of the newly introduced coffee. Coffee houses in those days were sometimes nicknamed 'penny universities', where people would pay a penny entrance and then drink coffee and swap pamphlets and newspapers all day. Snuff was seen as a novel way of getting nicotine along with this novel new drink. It was all considered stylish and fashionable (and somewhat effete in the eyes of normal people). Snuff was considered more civilised. Sarah Jakes certainly sees e-cigarettes as more civilised, and her and her dedicated fellow vapers get together and vape stylishly once every six weeks or so.
After a while though the comparisons start to feel a bit more forced - luckily the programme doesn't try to force the point too much and allows a debate about whether e-cigarettes are a good thing or not. The loudest person in this debate is Rod Liddle, now editor of The Spectator, and coming on like the bastard child of Peter Hitchens and Jeremy Clarkson. He is a champion of good old fashioned cancer sticks. The 'problem' with e-cigarettes, he claims is that they are "immediately redolent of being a scaredy-cat." This comes back to why people smoke (e-cigarettes or otherwise); are they making a point or putting up with a self-inflicted addiction? Liddle definitely people smoke to make some dick-swinging point about how they don't care about dying. But he admits to using e-cigarettes when in "some fascist dystopian establishments" that won't let him smoke (presumably he includes schools and hospitals amongst these bastions of totalitarianism).
Liddle's bizzarre argument is that using e-cigarettes is "conniving with the health industry"; Sarah Jakes agrees that she is conforming because she wants to be healthier. Personally I don't hold a strong enough opinion on e-cigarettes other than 'prefer them to cigarettes and nicotine gum', but am more sympathetic to Jakes because she thinks it makes more sense to not die. But then Liddle is very obviously trying to stir up trouble for the sake of it and comes across more like a contrary five year old than a rebel (or indeed, an adult).
Where he does start to make some good points (albeit still in an obnoxious way) is when he argues with Vivienne Nathanson of the BMA. Although she makes good points that the industry isn't standardised,and that they re-nforce the psychological aspect of smoking, she is assuming that everyone that uses e-cigarettes is using them to give up - a means to an end - which as the previous interviews have shown simply isn't the whole story. Some people like Sarah Jakes are using them because they are enthusiasts, and people like Liddle are using them when they can't smoke their normal fags. Some, like me, fall between the camps and have replaced one addiction with a less harmful on-and-off habit. But none of these ways of using them are relevant to the BMA's claims that e-cigarettes aren't ready to be condoned as official nicotine replacement therapies, because that isn't the only reason (and maybe not even the main reason) why people are using them.
Liddle makes the point that "clearly it is better that people are using them rather than cigarettes", and frankly it is hard to argue with that. Regulation is an understandable thing to ask for, but trying to thwart a trend taking people away from smoking seems incredibly counter-productive. Fair enough, it might be too early to tell if GPs should be recommending them, but that's a whole different discussion. There does need to be more evidence to definitively say that e-cigarettes are better than smoking, but I'm willing to take the chance.
'The Long View' has a novel way of introducing a debate about e-cigarettes, but once the debate has begun its constant yanking back to the issue of snuff seems intrusive. It is a very good documentary, but the links between e-ciggarettes and snuff are too few to fill a full half hour, and it is really the e-cigarette elements of the programme and not the parts about snuff that bring it to life. It's well worth a listen for anyone who's been stupid enough to take up smoking though.
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