Sisecam Flat Glass Products Attracted Wide Attention at INGLASS 2015

Sisecam Flat Glass attracted much attention at INGLASS 2015 Conference held in Hungary, one of the most important European markets, which was participated by the industry's leading architects and engineers.  In the conference held under the main sponsorship of Sisecam Flat Glass, the company drew everyone's attention with its presentations and its products exhibited in the foyer area.

Operating under the body of Sisecam Group, the global player of the glass industry, and being the Turkish flat glass market leader, Sisecam became the sponsor of INGLASS 2015 held in Hungary. The company has the distinction of being one of the two largest producers of Europe. At the conference held within the scope of the event, Sisecam Flat Glass made an impressive presentation, which provided information about its innovative and wide product range, and took the chance to address the global actors of the glass industry directly. 

Esra Aydinoglu, Sisecam Flat Glass Product Management Supervisor (left) made a presentation to the guests providing information about architecture's expectations from the glass industry and Sisecam Flat Glass' wide product range meeting these expectations.

Sisecam Flat Glass became the sponsor of the INGLASS 2015 Conference held at Budapest Sofitel Hotel on 23 November 2015 on the theme of "Glass in Architecture". In the session participated by 100 industry representatives, Esra Aydınoğlu, Sisecam Flat Glass Product Management Supervisor, made a presentation to the guests providing information about architecture's expectations from the glass industry and Sisecam Flat Glass' wide product range meeting these expectations. The renowned architect Gökhan Avcıoğlu also made a presentation in the conference, and provided information about the renovation project they undertook at Esma Sultan Mansion, of the most popular historical attractions of Istanbul, as well as the importance of glass in the design of this historical building and the glass applications in their works.

The innovative products of Sisecam Flat Glass presented in the foyer area of the event venue won the acclaim of the participants, which include renowned architects and engineers who won prizes with their architectural projects in glass category.

While delivering her closing speech, Erika Katalina Pasztor, Event Moderator and Editor of architectforum.eu/epiteszforum.hu, said: "With the presentation of Şişecam Flat Glass, we learned that glass acts like buildings' bodies with its permeability and reflectivity, and we were inspired by their impressive reference projects."

Resource: http://www.glassonweb.com/news/index/28280/

Glass products company tops 1,000 workers at former GM plant

MORAINE, Ohio (AP) – Hiring by a glass products company hit an important milestone, topping 1,000 jobs at the site of a former General Motor Co. plant in southwest Ohio.

The number of people employed at Fuyao Glass America Inc. in Moraine is now more than the number of people General Motors employed when it ended operations at the same factory eight years ago, the Dayton Daily News (http://bit.ly/1RLF0di ) reported.

The windshield-manufacturing plant employs about 1,100 workers, and the company has a goal of employing about 1,600 people, though employment at the plant could reach as a high as 2,000 workers, company vice president David Burrows said.

The plant ships finished automobile glass to Hyundai and is preparing to send glass to Chrysler and General Motors. It has also started aftermarket glass shipments to Safelite. Dealing in aftermarket glass, a project announced last year, resulted in plans to hire 750 more people at the plant.

The company has also started its second plant expansion that will add more than 100,000 square feet onto an earlier 120,000-square-foot expansion, Burrows said.

After General Motors left the 4.5-million-square-foot plant, Moraine officials immediately tried to get other employers into it, said City Manager Dave Hicks. He said the success of Fuyao at the plant is noteworthy and has invigorated the city.

“They have exceeded every goal they have set, every standard they gave us,” Hicks said.

(Copyright 2016 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.)

Resource: http://wkbn.com/2016/01/18/glass-products-company-tops-1000-workers-at-former-gm-plant/

10 Survival and Emergency Uses for Glass Canning Jars

You already know the wonders of canning jars if you are a home canner or a moonshiner. These old-timey, reusable storage jars are very versatile and can provide us with a number of survival savvy attributes and uses. Here are my top 10 survival uses for the classic glass canning jar.

1. Re-pack dry foods
Keep bugs, rodents and dampness out of your dry food stores, pour your rice, grain, beans, etc. in canning jars and screw the cap on tight. Add oxygen absorber packs for best results.

2. Tinder box
Keep some tinder dry and away from nest making rodents, by keeping a jar full of shredded bark, dryer lint or some other top tinder, at your camp, cabin or bug out site.

3. Bank
For valuable coins, jewelry and other bank-worthy items, fill the jar and bury it in a place where you can easily find it again – but no one else will find it.

4. Ammo cache
Consider a few jars of your most used ammunition, buried at a bug out site or in the back yard. Like the bank, make sure you place it somewhere that you can find it again.

5. Home brew
While running your own moonshine is illegal, home brewing wine and beer are not against the law. Store your fine, hand crafted beverages in space saving canning jars.

6. Store wild game and veggies
Fish caught, game hunted and home grown tomatoes can be stored for years if properly canned in canning jars, and stored in a cool dark place.

 

 
Canning jars make a great, waterproof first aid supply container.

8. Build a wild pharmacy
Medicinal plants can be dried and stored for several seasons in canning jars. Incidentally, our word “drug” comes from the Dutch word “droog”, meaning dried medicinal plant.

9. Lantern
Put a small candle down in the jar to make a wind-proof lantern for home or camp.

10. Break the jar
Glass knives and arrowheads can be chipped from the pieces of a broken jar. Wear gloves and goggles while breaking the glass. Chip the pieces to shape with a nail imbedded in a stick.

Leave us a comment to tell us what you can accomplish with a canning jar and your imagination.

Resource: http://www.outdoorlife.com/blogs/survivalist/10-survival-and-emergency-uses-glass-canning-jars

Sherlock’s New Special Is a Full Season of TV in One 90-Minute Episode

Lots of showrunners have a particular style: Aaron Sorkin and Amy Sherman-Palladino have distinctive pattering dialogue, Bryan Fuller has visual surrealism, Shonda Rhimes has damaged characters. And Steven Moffat has plot. Plots on a Moffat show twist and turn; timelines flip and reverse and fold back in on themselves. Lines of dialogue reverberate backwards and forwards and repeat throughout the delicate, Rube Goldberg–like engine of story that pulses underneath. This style has developed over the years, and the sensibility has taken over Doctor Who, but Sherlock is really where it is most at home.

At its best, Moffat style can be delicious to watch. It’s like watching endless interconnected lines of dominoes topple gently, one after the other, only to end up back where they started, collapsing into a perfectly round and endlessly intricate mosaic pattern. You watch them all go down, neat and unstoppably quick, and you can only step back and see the whole structure after they’ve all fallen.

Sherlock has always had this style baked in, but as the series has grown, it’s collected more and more grist to feed into the plot mill. With each new installment, there’s an ever-increasing body of characters and plots to loop back on, to tell and retell. And “The Abominable Bride,” the show’s latest 90-minute special, is the most excessive, most dramatic, and most over-the-top example of this kind of mayhem to date. It’s a pinnacle of Moffat plotting, but it also represents an odd inversion of the idea of peak TV. Rather than a huge wave of TV that consumes hours and days, Sherlock crams as much TV as possible into a mere 90 minutes.

Of all the Sherlock stories so far, “The Abominable Bride” is the most self-referential, and the most exhaustingly tricky. The beginning premise — Sherlock in Victorian clothes! — kicks off with a retelling of “A Study in Pink,” complete with Holmes and Watson’s first meeting in a morgue. Then we get the built-in story-within-a-story: Watson’s writing about Holmes in The Strand. And only then do we get what appears to be the real mystery, zombie bride Emilia Ricoletti, which is actually a series of murders, and is then actually a take-off on the Conan Doyle “Five Orange Pips,” and is then actually a whole story about suffragettes and how ladies are always overlooked. And then it turns out it’s current-day Holmes high on who knows what trying to figure out how Moriarty could come back from the dead, and then it’s actually a deep-down Reichenbach dream sequence with Holmes struggling against Moriarty as himself.

And that’s not the end of it: There are winking lines of dialogue about Holmes’s sexuality and the idea of a relationship with Watson, a not especially subtle way of trying to write the fanfiction into the fiction itself. There are perpetual references to and obsessions with falling. Anachronisms pepper the dialogue in the Victorian story, hinting at the twist to come. Watson accuses Holmes of quoting lines of dialogue Watson wrote for him in The Strand, which are actually lines from the Conan Doyle stories. Modern-day Moriarty wears Emilia’s bridal gown, and there’s a wound across his mouth echoing Victorian Lestrade’s earlier description of Emilia’s mouth “like a wound.”

This intense weight of stuff, almost all of it self-referential and in-jokey, can come off a couple different ways. Either you fall for it (ha!), buying into the viewer-as-detective position Moffat likes to put you in, or the whole thing looks like one guy crawling blindly up his own ass. Any way you split it, though, “The Abominable Bride” is hugely ambitious, and its overstuffed, overwritten nature is fascinating in the current TV landscape. There is, after all, so much TV right now, and in this respect, Sherlock is an oddity. From every corner, we’re drowning in hours of content — whole seasons that appear instantly on Netflix or Amazon, new series premiering throughout the calendar year, zombie shows returning from the dead, and that’s not even touching web video. Sherlock, in contrast, has released 90 minutes of content in the last two years. It is a drop in the bucket, a tiny speck in the torrent of programming.

And from this perspective, “The Abominable Bride” suddenly starts to look like something else. It’s not just another installment of Sherlock; it is all of Sherlock crammed into a tiny special. It’s trying to be its own fanfiction, and its own reboot, and its own criticism (“Is this silly enough for you yet? Gothic enough? Mad enough?”), and its own response to criticism (the whole suffragette thing), and a character piece and a political statement, and a Sherlock Holmes mystery, all at the same time. If peak TV is more hours of television than any one person can watch, Sherlock is peak TV through the looking glass: more Sherlocks in an hour than any one person can grasp.

The end result is, inevitably, a bit of a disaster. It is just too much, especially when the episode tries to shoehorn in an apology for the patriarchy, along with Sherlock and Moriarty grappling in the middle of a waterfall, giving a discourse on narrative and no one knows quite what else. (The apology for the patriarchy is especially ineffective when the installment itself then reenacts all of the male-centric blathering it purports to disrupt). 

Still, it’s hard not to be at least a little swayed by the bravado of the thing, especially when it’s such a swashbuckling, self-assured kind of bravado. “The Abominable Bride” may have bitten off more than it can chew, but it’s an occasionally glorious mess, fantastically bananas in the midst of its smug cleverness. And even more, it’s fun to see peak TV take on a different form. Instead of carving out its own little niche in the TV landscape, Sherlock seeks to do everything all at once, making it a bit like those crazily busy weekly shows (Empire or Scandal), but without the pressure-release valve of the next episode to take the edge off.

The risk, though, is that “The Abominable Bride” is too much ornamental nonsense for even the most dedicated audience, with lots of plot machinery and not enough actual human feeling. As Moriarty himself puts it, “The Abominable Bride” might be “too deep, Sherlock. Way too deep.” Or, put another way – too much of that Moffat style.

Resource: http://www.vulture.com/2016/01/sherlock-special-peak-tv-through-the-looking-glass.html#

Wrongfully convicted Seattle man who got $500K from state now charged with dealing meth, selling stolen guns

A Seattle man who was paid $500,000 by the state after he was wrongfully convicted and imprisoned for robbery is back in custody, charged with burglary, dealing methamphetamine and selling stolen guns.

Brandon Olebar, 32, was the first person to receive wrongful-conviction compensation from the state after Innocence Project Northwest lawyers convinced King County prosecutors they had convicted the wrong man. Olebar was released from prison in 2013 after serving 10 years behind bars.

After he was awarded the money a year later, Olebar said he hoped he could use it to get an apartment for his wife and new child, buy a car, pay bills and go back to school.

However, according to three criminal complaints — two in King County Superior Court and another in U.S. District Court — within a year Olebar was selling ounce-quantities of methamphetamine, driving a getaway car during a burglary and peddling stolen guns out of a house in Kent.

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In federal court, he’s charged with being a felon in possession of a firearm after he allegedly sold methamphetamine and a 9-mm SIG Sauer handgun to a paid, confidential law-enforcement informant for $1,000 on Dec. 16 after a meeting at his mother’s home in Covington.

A search of the home two days later, conducted by Kent police and agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), turned up other firearms, including handguns, shotguns and assault-style rifles, according to a search-warrant return filed in federal court.

The warrant alleges Olebar sold an SKS rifle — a Chinese-made weapon similar to an AK-47 — to the informant during a previous transaction. The ATF determined that gun had been reported stolen in Snohomish County, according to court documents.

According to the state charges, Olebar was arrested July 31 and charged with burglary and drug violations after he and three others were stopped in a vehicle suspected in a burglary at the office of Kent’s KOA campground. The campground office’s safe was found in the cargo area of a Land Rover with Olebar at the wheel.

A backpack containing Olebar’s wallet also contained a handgun, cash, drugs and a pair of brass knuckles, according to the complaint. They also found a bank-deposit slip showing a recent deposit of more than $404,000. A police report on the incident did not identify the account holder.

Officers also found several ounces of methamphetamine and a small quantity of heroin, according to the charges.

In the second state complaint, two King County sheriff’s deputies noticed a 2012 black two-door Cadillac CTS-V in a Taco Time parking lot in White Center on Aug. 17. According to the charges, they noticed a small pile of trash just below the driver’s window and walked up to the car.

According to the complaint, Olebar was sitting behind the wheel with a glass pipe in his lap. When one of the deputies asked if it was a meth pipe, Olebar reportedly looked down at the pipe and said, “Oh, crap.”

Deputies found more than $3,400 in cash, most in bundles of about $400, and bundles of suspected methamphetamine and heroin,the complaint alleges.

Olebar is being held in federal custody. Convictions in 2001 for drugs and felony evading police have allowed the U.S. Attorney’s Office to charge him with being a felon with a gun, a crime which carries a penalty of up to 10 years in prison.

In 2003, Olebar was sentenced to 16½ years in prison after he was convicted by a King County jury of burglary and assault for allegedly being one of several men who broke into the home of his sister’s boyfriend and beat and pistol-whipped the man unconscious.

The conviction was based solely on eyewitness testimony, according to Innocence Protect Northwest attorneys, who learned of the case in 2012.

Two University of Washington law-school students, working with Innocence Project Northwest (IPNW) attorneys, developed evidence indicating Olebar was not there and had an alibi, and presented it to the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office.

Prosecutor Dan Satterberg had his office review the evidence, and they became convinced Olebar was not involved. The charges were dismissed and Olebar ordered released from prison in 2013.

The following year, Olebar became the first person to be compensated under a new law that allows people who were wrongfully convicted to file a claim for damages against the state. Under the law, a wrongly convicted person can receive $50,000 for each year of imprisonment, including time spent awaiting trial.

IPNW director Anna Tolin at the UW law school said the project was “deeply saddened that exoneree Brandon Olebar is facing new criminal charges,” pointing out they are not related to the incident for which he was exonerated.

“The wrongly convicted face unique struggles to rebuild their lives and relationships in a world more complex and challenging than it was when they were wrongly imprisoned,” Tolin said. “The lack of any immediate established safety net for exonerees to secure housing, counseling, treatment, education or employment support is a harsh reality and an area in need of attention and reform.”

Satterberg said the decision to seek to have Olebar released from prison was based on an independent investigation that concluded he was innocent of the robbery charge.

“It is unfortunate that he has not taken advantage of his freedom and the compensation from the state and that he finds himself back in trouble with the law,” Satterberg said in a statement.

Resource: http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/crime/wrongfully-convicted-seattle-man-who-got-500k-from-state-now-charged-with-dealing-meth-selling-stolen-guns/

Two men appear in court after police chases across Christchurch

Two men have appeared in court after two police pursuits across Christchurch.

Ricky Shane Stampa, 31, of Somerfield, was arrested and appeared in the Christchurch District Court on six charges relating to a police pursuit of a Toyota Starlet.

Police said road spikes had to be used several times after the chase began in Bower Ave, New Brighton, about 3.30am on Friday, before the vehicle was brought to a stop in Milton Street, Sydenham.

The police chase had been abandoned at one stage because the vehicle was being driven erratically, but police continued to track the car on a network of CCTV cameras that can be viewed at the Central Police Station.

Stampa has entered no pleas to charges of reckless driving on Bower Ave, failing to stop for the police, driving while disqualified, assaulting a police sergeant when the chase was over, resisting five police officers, and possession of a glass pipe for smoking methamphetamine.

Judge Noel Walsh refused him bail and remanded him in custody for a video-link appearance on February 4.

A second man appeared in court after a second car chase that began in Woolston early Friday.

Ethan Olegovitch Budayev was charged with failing to stop for a police officer when he was speeding, reckless driving in Milton Street, driving while disqualified, and possession of a glass pipe for smoking methamphetamine.

He was remanded for a further appearance on February 1. His bail conditions will keep him at his mother's home in Woolston each night under a curfew, and he is not allowed to consume drugs, nor drive any vehicle

Resource:http://www.stuff.co.nz/the-press/news/75917067/two-men-appear-in-court-after-police-chases-across-christchurch

Police find stolen gun, drugs during traffic stop

GALVESTON, Texas - Two women were arrested after police found a stolen gun and drugs in their car during a traffic stop in Galveston.

Police stopped a 2011 White Chevrolet Tahoe Jan. 8 in the 1200 block of Ninth Street for failing to signal a turn.

Officers found that the driver, Lydia Jordan, had no license, and the front-seat passenger, Krystal Hernandez, was not wearing a seat belt.

A K-9 unit from the Galveston Independent School District Police Department performed a search of the outside of the vehicle and detected the odor of narcotics coming from the vehicle, authorities said.

Officers searched the vehicle and found a digital scale, narcotics packaging material, a glass pipe, a stolen Smith and Wesson handgun, black bags filled with with pills, including Xanax and Alprazolam, and many packages of methamphetamine weighing 23.89 grams, authorities said.

Both women were arrested and taken into custody.

When Hernandez was searched at the jail, officers said they found 43 grams of methamphetamine. She was charged with possession of a controlled substance.


Jordan was charged with driving without a license.

The investigation into the stolen weapon is ongoing.

Resource: http://www.click2houston.com/news/police-finds-stolen-gun-drugs-during-traffic-stop

On Disappointment

The philosophy of the ‘New Year, New Me’ recognises that however disappointed you might have been by your last year, you will improve, and due to some cosmic equation the next year will be kinder to you. So we choose achievements to work towards. Some people start hitting the gym, some take up knitting and some of us attempt ‘Veganuary’ (it’s been a week and I want to die).

2015 was full of disappointment. But there can be no disappointment without initial longing, although it necessarily falls to a depressing anti-climax. It goes without saying that the most obvious entwining of disappointment and desire is sex. That’s just me? Oh, OK. Introduction over.

First huge disappointment: the long-awaited Fifty Shades of Grey finally hit the big screen in 2015. I had been anticipating the arrival since reading the entire trilogy in a fortnight as a teenager. I had wanted to be as prepared as possible for the big day when I was granted passage into an exciting new world of spiritual and physical connection between two people (ft. butt plugs).

Most people only need to lose their virginity once to learn that the realisation of desire can be disappointing. Having not learnt my lesson the first time, I relived my adolescent naïveté and allowed myself to be excited for the film’s release. In fact the experiences were not dissimilar; they both followed stuttering female protagonists romanticising intimate relationships with sociopaths. My Ex didn’t have a helicopter, though. He didn’t even let me stay for breakfast. (Advantage: Christian Grey.)

hankfully the film didn’t deter me from lusting after sociopaths – just taught me the valuable lesson of ensuring they earn enough to support you in your decision to stop chasing that pipe dream of a career in journalism. (Advantage: Anastasia Steele.)

As we were discovering our kinks and quirks, the general election kicked off, bringing with it the tall glass of warm milk to lull us into our Freudian nightmares: Ed Miliband.

I say this because Ed was the ultimate Dad. He dressed exclusively in outfits from the Blue Harbour range at M&S, tripped over his own feet, and floundered under pressure. Yet the Milifandom rose to national notoriety, and Ed became an unlikely sex symbol. He even met with philosopher/philanderer Russell Brand in a competitive display of who could soak their politics in more pheromones.

I was totally on the Milibandwagon. I dreamed of getting stuck deeper down Miliband’s throat than most of his vowel sounds. But the old adage held true, nice guys finish last. And he did. He was disappointed; I deflated.

Desire was met with disappointment even at Christmas, the time for gluttonous surfeit of pleasure. Nothing made this clearer than the John Lewis advert. Yearning only for contact with the world, an elderly man was left stranded on the moon with only the trappings of bourgeois capitalism to keep him company. Sorry Old Man exiled on the moon, let’s hope a nicely wrapped commodity bridges the boundless distance you feel from humanity.

And so, we ended 2015 feeling thoroughly downtrodden. We don’t dare to dream; no one even had enough hope in the future to watch X Factor. Why would we? We are austerity Britain. But disappointment is a fact, and we must embrace it.

Remember how fervently you wished for an offer from Cambridge? Remember how eager you were to arrive and etch your mark upon those cold stone walls? Remember the first time you stayed up all night on an essay only to be told that ‘No, you STILL don’t understand the postmodern condition’?

Desire is often disappointing. But that rarely diminishes it. We feel deeply disheartened when things don’t go as we wished they might. And then we chase something else. Disappointment paves the road to self-improvement. It also paves the road to finding your strengths, and playing to them. (Disappointed in your inability to write astutely about issues that you care deeply about? Why not just write derogatory jokes about politicians as sex objects?)

Is there a case for optimism in 2016? The biggest news story so far has been a puddle. Half a million people watched a live stream of people trying to cross a rather large puddle. It seems ludicrous, but it might be brilliant.

That puddle was clearly a fucking nuisance. But some bright spark decided to film it. It entertained people around the world. Someone made £11 selling the stagnant puddle water on eBay, and if that’s not the dream of every venture capitalist then I don’t know what is.*

We are all gingerly stepping around the Drummond puddle, circumventing the dirty water that symbolises our fear of everything going wrong, making us soggy and smelly and late. Don’t fear the puddle. Don’t walk through it either. But make the most of it, however you see fit, especially if that means using it as a baggy allegory in your first column of term.

(*There is a significant chance that I also don’t know what the term ‘venture capitalist’ means.)

Resource: http://www.varsity.co.uk/comment/9505

Two Hagerstown residents arrested on heroin charges

A 3-year-old boy was among the people who were inside a Hagerstown home on Tuesday afternoon when authorities raided the residence during a heroin investigation, according to court records.
Washington County Narcotics Task Force agents wrote in the statement of probable cause that the boy and a woman were in a third-floor master bedroom when police used a search warrant to enter the home at 749 Monet Drive.

The woman with the child was not charged in connection with the incident.

But Lindsay Susan Fisher, a 26-year-old woman who lived at the residence and was found in a third-floor hallway after police forced their way inside, was charged with distribution of a controlled dangerous substance and conspiracy to distribute a controlled dangerous substance, court records said.

Fisher also was charged with one count of possession of drug paraphernalia and two counts of possession of a controlled dangerous substance other than marijuana.

Less than 10 minutes before the home was raided at 5:30 p.m., narcotics agents allege Fisher sold $480 worth of heroin to a confidential narcotics informant inside the three-story town house, which is near Pangborn Park in Hagerstown's North End.

Police said the informant was given $500 in task force funds to make the heroin purchase. The informant was fitted with an electronic-monitoring device that allowed investigators to monitor and record any conversations that occurred during the operation, the charging documents said.

At 5:22 p.m., the informant met Fisher outside the Monet Drive residence, and the two walked inside. Fisher then left the home and got into a four-door Honda that pulled up outside. She left the vehicle at 5:24 p.m. and re-entered the residence with a bag containing suspected heroin, the documents said.

Officers who were observing the transaction pulled the vehicle over as it drove away and arrested 31-year-old Quian Christopher Taylor of North Locust Street in Hagerstown, the documents said.

Taylor was charged with one count each of distribution of a controlled dangerous substance, conspiracy to distribute a controlled dangerous substance and possession of a controlled dangerous substance other than marijuana, according to court records.

Police said they recovered $480 of task force money from Taylor's right hand.

A tan-colored powder that was recovered from the informant after the buy tested positive for heroin, the documents said.

Investigators said a glass pipe, a plastic bag containing a green vegetable substance and a digital scale were among the items that were found during the search.

Fisher and Taylor are being held on separate $75,000 bonds at the Washington County Detention Center.


Resource:  http://www.heraldmailmedia.com/news/local/two-hagerstown-residents-arrested-on-heroin-charges/article_bdd251be-a3ac-11e5-a0f7-fb2d4a4308b2.html

Insidious fix

Vaping is touted as the easy way to quit smoking, but is it really and is it any less harmful?

So you want to give up smoking? E-cigarettes are being touted as the smoother way of kicking a tobacco addiction, but the jury is still out on whether this truly is the case. Part of the problem is medical studies aren’t keeping pace with a booming industry that’s busy developing new products.

“There are only a handful of randomised controlled trials and the earliest involved devices that have now been superseded by new technology,” says Professor Chris Bullen of the University of Auckland’s School of Population Health. “The newer, second-generation products are much better at delivering nicotine; some can deliver as much as the standard cigarette.”

Smoking e-cigarettes, known as vaping, has quickly grown in popularity, especially in the US and Europe, where there are many devices to choose from. They mimic real cigarettes by heating a solution (e-liquid) that usually contains a blend of nicotine, propylene glycol and flavourings, producing a vapour the user inhales.

“There are thousands of flavours to make the experience more attractive,” says Bullen. “Many people go with the tobacco flavour that most resembles their preferred brand of cigarette, but you can also get flavours like coffee and whiskey. In Europe, vape stores are on the main streets and are very slick, with beautiful products displayed in glass cases.”

In New Zealand it’s illegal to sell e-cigarettes as a tool to quit smoking. Although some devices are available in retail stores, any products containing nicotine can be imported only in small amounts for personal use, so there is a thriving online trade.

“What we do know is that most of these products, if they are decently manufactured, contain a lot less junk than cigarettes,” says Bullen. They produce neither carbon monoxide nor many of the other chemicals that are known carcinogens.”

Bullen carried out a trial in 2013 comparing e-cigarettes to nicotine patches, which showed similar rates of success in helping people quit smoking: 7.3% of the vapers and 5.8% of the patch wearers stopped. However, a subsequent population-based study from the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine found that smokers who used e-cigarettes were 59% less likely to quit than smokers who never used e-cigarettes.

“We found at six months that many people had become dual users,” says Bullen. “This raises big questions. Is it good just to cut down on cigarettes? Is it a pathway to quitting or might it actually delay it?”

He believes vaping has the potential to become a substitute for cigarettes – like the opioid medication methadone is for users of the drug heroin. “You may well keep your nicotine addiction ticking over and it may be a socially acceptable addiction like coffee or alcohol. We need to have a discussion as a society – is this a reasonable alternative?”

With e-cigarettes now a multibillion-dollar industry and tobacco companies buying into it, this seems a discussion we urgently need to have. Although proponents may claim that after only a few days of switching to vaping users notice all the benefits of quitting, from easier breathing to a better sense of taste and smell, the long-term effects of this method of filling the lungs with nicotine haven’t been proven.

“What happens if you vape 30 to 40 times a day over 30 years? No one knows what that does to your lungs,” says Bullen.

There is also a concern that flavours like bubble gum and chocolate may attract younger people to vaping, creating a whole new market, as well as questions over whether improving the delivery of nicotine is a good or a bad thing. “People may not have to puff as hard, but will they keep needing more nicotine or will they reach a level where it’s enough? That’s an unknown.”

Bullen is about to do another trial comparing new-generation e-cigarette devices with nicotine-replacement therapy. “We need more information so the Ministry of Health can decide how to regulate these products, and make sure they are as high quality and safe as ­possible.

Resource: http://www.listener.co.nz/lifestyle/health/insidious-fix/