E-cigarette ? A medical revolution

On World No Tobacco Day 2014, WHO and partners are calling on countries to further increase taxes on tobacco, which kills nearly 6 million people each year. Why not recommend the electronic cigarette? What do we really know about its harmfulness? Interview with Luc Dussart *, smoking consultant and member of Formindep.

French health minister Marisol Touraine is currently pleading for the ban of electronic cigarettes in “certain public places”. A caution shared in particular by the Canadian authorities who have not legalized its sale. What should we think ?

The more visible the electronic cigarette, the more smoking will decline. It would be wise for our policy makers to listen to what citizens are saying rather than influential groups, even very wealthy or very organized ones. In the rule of law, it is forbidden to prohibit without valid and proportionate reason. Except in special cases (current teachers, for example, confined space justifying special regulations), vaping must remain a freedom. This is the surest way to reduce the prevalence of smoking: dividing it by two in France seems a goal then achievable before a chandelier.

Could this be a measure to protect non-smokers or a way to stigmatize vapers?

The ban on smoking in public places should be motivated by the protection of non-smokers. However, the e-cigarette is not a danger for those around you. It does not release combustion products such as carbon monoxide, nor “side current”, the smoke that escapes from the cigarette when the smoker does not draw on it. All the vapor produced is inhaled. In the expired cloud which disappears in about ten seconds, what is measurable is water vapor, a little of a bactericidal alcohol – propylene glycol – nicotine and a few other trace components. . The air on a shopping street can be much more dangerous for our children’s lungs!

Can we say 100% that the electronic cigarette is less dangerous than the classic cigarette? Do we not risk attracting new consumers before then backing down?

Tobacco kills, they say, 66,000 people per year in France and 700,000 in Europe. I am surprised that there are so many studies attempting to show the risks of vaping and so few showing the benefits that users derive from it: here too, there is a disproportion, detailed in my blog UnAirNeuf.org.

In this regard, I refer you to the recent international survey of more than 19,000 users motivated to respond spontaneously, conducted by Dr Konstantinos Farsalinos, funded for the most part by users, which guarantees its independence and objectivity. . Just one number to encourage you to read the original publication: 81.0% of participants say they have completely quit smoking and smokers who remain active have on average reduced their smoking by 20 to 4 cigarettes per day.

Moreover, all serious investigations refute the gateway hypothesis, imagining that young non-smokers might be inclined to initiate smoking after a vaping experience.

But is the electronic cigarette really a solid way to stop traditional cigarettes?

The electronic cigarette is a proven way to overcome addiction to smoking: no need to study a few hundred guinea pigs more or less paid to verify what millions of smokers say spontaneously and without commercial interest. It is a medical revolution on the same scale as the discovery of antibiotics. It is strongly opposed because it displaces the interests of powerful economic forces:

• First, the states collecting taxes on tobacco sales by the tens of billions each year; tobacco policy is steered in France by Bercy, and not by the Ministry of Health;
• The drug manufacturers, then, who – it is terrible to say – prefer good sick smokers earning them in the long term € 150,000 per head in treatments rather than former smokers who quit smoking before having been affected in their condition. health. Globally, this represents between 100 and 200 billion dollars of annual turnover, compared to the 3 billion sales of substitutes and other pseudo-treatments without proven effectiveness;
• Finally, tobacco manufacturers, because their sales are reduced, a simple mechanical effect of the reduction in the number of smokers and the drop in tobacco consumption by vapers who continue to smoke (around 15% of regular vapers).

So why not think of it as a medicine (with all that that entails)?

Attempts to equate vaping with medical treatment have been overturned eight times in law, in Europe and North America. The electronic cigarette is effective because there are thousands of variations and thousands of liquids with different taste characteristics: to each his own pleasure. No approved drug is indicated to provide pleasure … The unforeseen emergence of this global phenomenon is not so much the device itself, already marketed in the 1980s in the USA and quickly outlawed by the pharmaceutical lobbies, but the power of users, of their social networks, of their knowledge that cannot be manipulated since it is transparent and self-regulated on the internet. It is to be hoped that this mass democratic movement will prevail over the “medical dictatorship”, by borrowing this formula from Bernard Kouchner.