Vaping Is About Reducing Harm, Not Being Harmless
Written by
KALEIGH ROGERS
April 27, 2016 // 06:01 PM EST
A major public health group has come out strongly in favor of vaping as a way to quit smoking. The UK’s Royal College of Physicians—the same group that, in the 60s, first blew the whistle on cigarettes causing cancer—has released a report heralding vaping as an important public health tool that, the group argues, ought to be promoted far and wide as an alternative to smoking.
“In the UK, the use of electronic cigarettes has exploded and they’ve attracted a huge amount of controversy,” John Britton, the chair of the RCP’s tobacco advisory committee and a professor of epidemiology at the University of Nottingham, told me over the phone. “We were looking to provide reassurance to my colleagues in medicine and public health, but also to smokers and the general public, that these products are actually probably a good thing and we should be learning to manage the opportunity instead of considering prohibiting them.”
This endorsement is a pretty big deal because the safety and effectiveness of vaping as a way to quit smoking is still a point of contention for a lot of public health and anti-tobacco groups. These groups share information with lawmakers and the public, which can have a serious influence on policies and smokers’ choices. But, as the report points out, we’ve spent decades looking for ways to get smokers to switch to products other than cigarettes to get their nicotine fix (like the patch, gum, or pharmaceuticals). It’s still too early to know what kind of long-term effects vaping might have, but there’s no evidence to suggest it’s anywhere near as harmful as smoking, so why not add it to the toolbox?
“Yes, we have to be cautious in saying we don’t know what the long-term hazards are, but the key question is ‘are those long-term hazards likely to be as severe or remotely as common as the adverse effects of smoking?’” Britton said. “Electronic cigarettes, however harmful they are, will be nothing like as bad as smoking. So if you’re a smoker, you should make the switch.”
Source: http://motherboard.vice.com/read/va...e-cigarettes-news-royal-college-of-physicians
