Do you smoke? Don’t quite fancy chipping out for a vape, but oh so aware of the Instagram potential of those Snoop Dogg style smoke clouds? Fret no longer, as in a couple of months you might be able to get one free on the NHS.
Last week, the BBC reported that the UK’s Royal College of Physicians said that smokers should be offered e-cigarettes by GPs to help them stub out the fags for good. Back in January, the first brand of e-cigarettes was medicinally licensed for use in the UK, so it seems that it’ll be only a matter of time before GPs are dispensing them.
However, at a projected £20 cost for the initial kit, followed by roughly £10 per week for the nicotine cartridges, this would amount to an enormous cost for UK taxpayers. So, with so much money at stake and, more importantly, peoples’ health, are we certain e-cigarettes can help people quit smoking?
First of all, e-cigarettes turn smoking into a novelty. The way e-cigs are marketed and advertised turns a harmful and addictive product into the next ‘must-have’ gadget, and inevitably attracts impressionable young people.
What’s more, unlike cigarettes, smoking a vape has no finite length. Since you can smoke it virtually anywhere, it would be very easy to just continue inadvertently puffing away, ending up smoking considerably more than you would have done if you were just going for a single fag.
Using an e-cig completely lacks any of the elements of ritual or social interaction that you get with normal smoking, arguably one of its only positive aspects. Since you can do it anywhere and it doesn’t have a definite length, people don’t go for ‘vape’ breaks in the same way. Having never consistently smoked myself, I’m not going to assume the moral high ground and make the ignorant and overused claim that ‘willpower’ is all you need to stop. However, the whole basis of using an e-cig to stop smoking relies on people periodically turning down the dosage to wean themselves off nicotine. Surely if they have enough willpower to do it this way then they could do the same with normal cigarettes instead of having the NHS pay for a fancy gadget? This process of cutting down by lowering dosage is not as obvious and tangible as simply reducing the number of cigarettes you smoke per day, which offers more motivating, physical evidence of the progress you’ve made.
I would argue that attempts to stop smoking using an e-cigarette are misguided and a poor public investment. Above all, they confuse the process of quitting, which unfortunately does require some application of willpower, with simply deciding to pick up a vape instead of a Marlboro red.
Image credit: vaping360.com. License: CC BY 2.0.
