The dangers of cigarettes are extremely well-known and have been for decades.
A principal ingredient in cigarettes is nicotine, which is an alkaloid, a naturally occurring nitrogen-containing compound derived from plants, in the words of the American Council on Science and Health. Like most alkaloids, it is toxic at certain concentrations, but the nicotine you inhale in a cigarette is way below that level.
It’s not the nicotine that kills you, at least directly, when you smoke. It’s the thousands of other chemicals, many of them known carcinogens, that are released and carried into your lungs during the tobacco combustion process. In fact, the council reports, nicotine is not even a carcinogen.
But its power to keep you coming back for more — the council calls it one of the most addictive substances known to man — is the vehicle of death, establishing that urge to light up, and then light up again, and again.
In recent years, clever people have figured out that if they separate the nicotine from all those other nasty killer chemicals, they can addict people to nicotine without killing them. E-cigarettes, devices that atomize this distilled nicotine and permit the addict to inhale his or her hit pretty much in the same ritualistic way as with a tobacco cigarette, are the result.
Nicotine patches, which have been around awhile, don’t have the same almost immediate effect as inhaling, nor do they feed the smoking ritual — the hand to the mouth, the deep inhaling — the visible smoke-like mist when you exhale. And an e-cig is a much better icebreaker in a bar than a patch.
And they aren’t cigarettes, of course, so none of that myriad of federal, state or local regulations apply to e-cigs.
Tobacco companies, recognizing when they have a huge market that’s already hooked on their product, see this as a new revenue stream. They can market e-cigs as a safer smoke; they can sell the idea that they are a healthier alternative to tobacco. They can say “Hey, wanna’ quit smoking? Try these.” And you can get them in bubble gum flavors, a flavor lots of people, including kids, might like.
In Indiana, kids can’t buy them (the state banned sales to those under age 18 in 2013), but they can still like bubble gum, at least.
Indiana Attorney General Greg Zoeller doesn’t like the idea of bubble gum flavors for nicotine juice, the liquid that is sold in a mostly unregulated environment all over the country, including Indiana.
He, along with many health advocates, wants that to change. There are too many unanswered questions, he argues, to treat the sale of e-cigs as if you were selling tomatoes by the roadside (which, by the way, have a bit of natural nicotine in them).
Harm may not be proven, he says, but that doesn’t mean it won’t be. We agree. This requires a hard look by the Indiana Legislature and all levels of government, from federal to local.
To fail to do that for a chemical that is among the most addictive in the world would be a gross dereliction of duty.