Everybody smoked cigarettes when I was a kid growing up in southeastern Pennsylvania in the 1960s. Oh, sure, adults told us smoking was bad for our health, but it certainly didn’t seem wrong, considering our bodies suffered no immediate ill effects at that age and our mothers, fathers, siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins and family friends were all lighting up — at home, work, school, church and athletic events.
TV and movie stars, many who did not smoke, added to the irresistible allure, some making their reputations on how well they handled a smoldering cigarette butt on-screen. One local physician, Dr. Loehle, would perform physical exams with a lit unfiltered Pall Mall dangling from his lips. How could smoking be wrong?
Remarkably, Loehle lived well into his 80s, making him one of those rare examples of people who smoked and lived a long life. Unfortunately we either ignored or failed to notice the many other folks disappearing from our insular social landscape due to cancer, or a heart attack, or stroke. It took a long time — and millions of premature deaths — for Americans to finally come to grips with the fact that, as a society, all of this was terribly wrong. The uncomfortable truth was we had been duped and lied to; the tobacco industry was knowingly selling cancer, emphysema and a dozen other terrible diseases to anyone — adults and children — able to pay for a pack of attractive looking, highly addictive filtered sticks of paper-wrapped tobacco.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), tobacco use causes nearly 6 million deaths per year worldwide, with current trends showing that in 14 years tobacco will be the cause of more than 8 million deaths annually. In the United States, cigarette smoking is responsible for more than 480,000 deaths per year, including nearly 42,000 deaths resulting from secondhand smoke exposure.
Perhaps more frightening, the CDC found that if smoking continues at its current rate among US youth, “5.6 million of today’s Americans younger than 18 years of age are expected to die prematurely from a smoking-related illness.”
When it comes to diseases smokers will be forced to live with, the CDC found that “smoking … harms nearly every organ of the body,” with more than 16 million Americans living with a disease caused by smoking. Furthermore, “for every person who dies because of smoking, at least 30 people live with a serious smoking-related illness,” among them cancer, heart disease, stroke, lung diseases, diabetes and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), which includes emphysema and chronic bronchitis.
By 2007, people were finally wising up to what smoking was all about, but along came a new kind of nicotine delivery system, one without the messy ashes created by burning cigarettes, Electronic Nicotine Delivery Systems, or ENDS — marketed by their backers as a way to beat tobacco and condemned by detractors as a gateway drug to further use of tobacco.
Although they are not tobacco, ENDS, like tobacco, contain nicotine. Nicotine is not a carcinogen, but it is highly addictive and a potentially deadly toxic substance. Another ingredient contained in ENDS is generally benign propylene glycol, a synthetic liquid substance that absorbs water and is recognized as a safe food additive. Propylene glycol is also used as a base for de-icing solutions and to create artificial smoke in theater productions. Also included is vegetable glycerin, an odorless and colorless carbohydrate derived from plant oils that is sometimes used as a skin softener. These are the ingredients that ENDS manufacturers — much like tobacco barons of 50 years ago touting menthols as “healthy cigarettes” — don’t mind telling us about.
But along with these chemicals, traces of other more sinister substances have been found in “e-smoke,” according to a study conducted by scientists at UC San Francisco. They include acetaldehyde, benzene, cadmium, formaldehyde, isoprene, lead, nickel and toluene — all listed among dangerous substances contained in Proposition 65, the Safe Drinking Water and Toxic Enforcement Act of 1986.
On Monday, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) imposed new regulations that require greater scrutiny of ENDS and e-cigs. The FDA will have to approve all e-cigarette products that have been available since February 2007, according to a report in USA Today. “Manufacturers will be able to keep selling their products for up to two years while they submit a new production application, plus an additional year while the FDA reviews it,” the newspaper reported
About the only restrictions on these devices now are merchants must ask for ID from anyone who appears to be under 27, and only vending machines in adult-only facilities can sell e-cigs. Also covered are premium, hand-rolled cigars, as well as hookah and pipe tobacco. Most importantly, they cannot be sold to minors, something already prohibited in most states, and merchants are barred from giving them away, according to USA Today. And that’s good, because with tobacco use on the decline, it is estimated that 3 million middle and high school students now “vape,” as the practice is called. The CDC estimates “e-cigarette use among high school students rose from 1.5 percent in 2011 to 16 percent in 2015.”
This is not only a cause for alarm but reason enough to support even tougher restrictions on the use and sale of ENDS that the FDA might come up with. Remember, cigarettes were once touted as something that was good for our health. Let’s not make that same mistake when it comes to regulating ENDS.
Resource : http://www.pasadenaweekly.com/cms/story/detail/?id=16256
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