a- e-cigarettes do smell. The fact that you have had few complaints may reflect the fact that people are courteous and do not like to get into arguments. I have very much liked to complain several times about e-cigarettes myself.
b- they almost certainly harm people around you although the harm may be less than that of secondary smoke.
c - your last argument obviously does not apply to the present situation. If you ban e-cigarettes in places where cigarettes are already banned, then this ban would not cause an e-cigarette smoker to start smoking ordinary cigarettes. In fact, the contrary is true -- if smokers can smoke e-cigarettes in places in situations where they cannot smoke ordinary cigarettes, that very well may result in an increase of smoking.
You can smoke your e-cigarettes in places and situations where cigarette smoking is allowed.
A - You sometimes get a whiff of the smell. 90%+ of the time a nonsmoker is going to like the smell because people vape things like cake and fruit flavors. Even smells people might find objectionable dissipate quickly. The stench doesn't hang on the users' clothing at all like regular cigarettes. I'm not sure what sort of situation you would have to be in to be bothered...
B - Got some proof that secondhand vapor causes harm? Here is reference to a published indoor air quality study showing:
"Comparisons of pollutant concentrations were made between e-cigarette vapor and tobacco smoke samples. Pollutants included VOCs, carbonyls, PAHs, nicotine, TSNAs, and glycols. From these results, risk analyses were conducted based on dilution into a 40 m3 room and standard toxicological data. Non-cancer risk analysis revealed “No Significant Risk” of harm to human health for vapor samples from e-liquids (A-D). In contrast, for tobacco smoke most findings markedly exceeded risk limits indicating a condition of “Significant Risk” of harm to human health. With regard to cancer risk analysis, no vapor sample from e-liquids A-D exceeded the risk limit for either children or adults. The tobacco smoke sample approached the risk limits for adult exposure."
There's more and more very positive research all the time. Ecig users shouldn't have to prove that it is 100% safe. It is pretty clearly far safer than smoking and a great benefit to the health of people who are unable or unwilling to quit.
C - "that very well may result in an increase of smoking."
You pointed towards a study commissioned by an e-cigarette users group in order to lobby their government. They use a completely arbitrary threshold of what is considered to not have considerable health risks. The study is only being published in an ecig industry journal.
The smell is disgusting, regardless of what the flavor is. The flavor is only there to try to mask the underlying smell, which is gross. Your assumpions about nonsmokers liking the smell are pretty baseless. Everyone i have talked to about it has disliked it intensly.
It is very nice that ecigs appear to be safer than cigarettes, but that does not mean i should be forced to breathe them. I already do not smoke.
"They use a completely arbitrary threshold of what is considered to not have considerable health risks."
No, this was done by researchers using established methods for assessing indoor air quality. It's pretty obvious that you are just a dishonest person, didn't crack open the research and just generally know nothing about this subject.
"The smell is disgusting, regardless of what the flavor is. The flavor is only there to try to mask the underlying smell, which is gross."
Nicotine, propylene glycol, glycerine and water are all basically odorless materials. The last 3 are ingredients in the types of fog machines used at concerts and also common food ingredients. You are either imagining things or lying.
>Your assumpions about nonsmokers liking the smell are pretty baseless.
Most people don't notice at all. I discretely but not secretly vape in restaurants/stores/etc. and have never once been told to stop doing it in over two years using ecigs. I have never once been told that someone was offended by the smell.
As others say, the smell is far weaker that after-lunch booze, deodorant, BO, auto exhaust, bad breath, leather, hand sanitizer, and to a vegetarian, meat.
Sure, you could sniff your coworkers to discover who ate corned beef, and who vaped at lunch, but neither is at the level that we'd call it offensive in an office setting.
The only reason people are complaining is because cigarettes are bad and by extension everything related to everything related is bad, and people love jumping on the bandwagon.
Excuse me? I know it's not reinforcing what you want to believe, but this isn't an echo chamber.
Coworkers are starting to smoke in small meeting rooms where you don't normally get the smell of lunches etc. It DOES smell unpleasant, though it's not nearly as bad as cigarette smoke. Fortunately my coworkers are gracious enough to shower every so often so I can't say that BO is a regular problem.
> Got some proof that secondhand vapor causes harm?
Why is "harm" needed? If I am next to you I'm not interested in you forcing me to take drugs. I don't need to demonstrate harm, I just don't want you to send me drugs.
At least put a filter on the thing so no nicotine comes out of it (i.e. you breath both in and out of it, through the filter).
"I'm not interested in you forcing me to take drugs."
You have got to be kidding me. Whatever amount of nicotine you are getting from secondhand vapor is TINY. You are not getting drugged. It has no psychoactive effects or addictive potential at that level.
Since that whole line of thinking is ridiculous, we consider harm. Being near cooking food, say your neighbors having a BBQ, exposes you to volatile N'-nitrosamines, similar to one of the groups of compounds shown to have some carcinogenic potential in smoking.
These types of things are not found in ecigs (or only in incredibly tiny amounts). There is no burning, carbon monoxide, etc. You are getting more harm from stuff like cleaning product fumes or other air pollution from cars/industry.
With almost no independent studies being done on e-cigs and their impact on the environment around you almost none of the claims you just made can be substantiated as either true or shown to be false.
We need more reliable data.
In general e-cigs should be restricted until they're proven safe. Basically treated like any other kind of cigarette. It is clear from this thread and elsewhere that smokers have zero consideration for others.
There's tons of credible evidence out there that ecigs do not contain most of the carcinogens in burning cigarettes. Even studies done by scientists with big pharma funding will at least mostly acknowledge this.
Ecigs are clearly not "100% safe" but the same goes for the food you eat and all other types of things you put in your body. it isn't about proving 100% safety. It's about showing a vast reduction in harm for people who are addicted to and dying from smoking.
Speaking of "zero consideration for others", anti-nicotine zealots take a quit or die stance. You would rather ban ecigs and force people back to smoking?
That's just ridiculous. I think exhaust pipes from traffic are of much more concern than e-cigs around us. Personally, I find offensive when get hit by a whiff of someone's BO more than e-cigs (which if aren't flavored I can't even tell if they are 'smoking' them).
I'm just curious, do you eat potatoes, tomatoes, eggplant, or cauliflower? If so, you are already ingesting that evil, evil nicotine[1]. In all honesty, I doubt we would be put more at risk by inhaling any trace amounts of nicotine in secondhand vap than we would from interacting with everything else in our everyday lives. Hell, sitting in front of this computer and typing this response is probably shortening my lifespan more than a minuscule amount of nicotine.
Most of the existing evidence is produced by the e-cig industry. Hardly worth the paper it is written on.
As another poster said, we know that nicotine is harmful within its own right, so if e-cigs are throwing it out into the air in unknown quantities that is worrying.
>> Note also that this is an independent study which was not funded by any electronic cigarette company. The two funding sources were the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of Poland and the National Institutes of Health. This adds objectivity and credibility to the work.
The results of this study are close to the evidence from studies funded by ecig companies, making those all the more credible too.
Your study only shows that ecigs are safer than cigarettes. That is probably true and nobody here is disputing that. However, this is not sufficient reason to exempt ecigs from smoking bans. Smoking bans are about protecting the health of non-smokers. And non-smokers do not want the harmful effects of ecigs even if those effects are significantly less than those of cigarettes.
You have absolutely zero evidence that what ecigs put out is harmful to people nearby. If I am in the same room as someone with a severe nut allergy and I am sitting there cracking open peanuts like mad, I could hurt someone else. Should we ban peanuts?
Ecigs aren't even as bad as peanuts because what is in them will never cause some sort of severe, instant reaction like to a person with nut allergies.
We know what is in this stuff. We can go far on the side of erring on caution and extrapolate from how much nicotine is in the liquid and how much people run through in a day, how much nicotine is being put into the air. I have studied this subject extensively. I know the research on how much nicotine gets absorbed into the lungs versus now much escapes. I know how much air a person cycles through breathing in an hour. I know that others are not "being drugged" by nicotine.
You are just a dishonest fearmonger. The few dangerous things that have been found in ecigs (stuff like acetaldehyde and formaldehyde) can be compared to the cancer risks from the other components of tobacco smoke as well as other carcinogens and chemicals which pose a cardiovascular risk.
See J Fowles and E Dybing. Application of toxicological risk assessment principles to the chemical constituents of cigarette smoke. Tob. Control, Dec 2003; 12: 424 - 430.
By far the worst cancer causer in tobacco smoke is 1,3-butadiene. This will be exhaled in smoke and also given off in "sidestream smoke" (the cigarette sits there burning). There is no smoke at all with ecigs and no sidestream vapor, because the vapor is triggered by the user and goes only into their lungs first.
1,3-butadiene is given off from things like having a campfire or BBQ-ing. Should we ban campfires and BBQs? What people are being exposed to is worse than ecigs.
When talking about the ability of substances to cause cancer it's always important to talk quantitatively, because there are a huge number of things that cause cancer and most have effects too subtle to worry about. In the case of nicotine it may cause cancer in humans at the levels smokers experience, but even so it's way less carcinogenic than alcohol, for example. Smoke of all sorts, on the other hand, is horribly carcinogenic and you can make a good argument for banning wood-burning stoves in cities.
As they say, the dose makes the poison. So far, I don't see any evidence that exhaled e-cigarette vapor contains more than a trivial amount of nicotine. That nicotine could be a hazard for the user, but as far as I can tell you'd have a hell of a time getting a significant dose from passive vaping.
If you're looking to avoid even trace amounts of nicotine, staying away from smokers isn't enough. You should probably avoid eating anything in the nightshade family (e.g. eggplant, tomatoes, potatoes, and peppers). It's worth noting these foods contain other toxic alkaloids in low doses too—other parts of the plants with higher concentrations are inedible.
The relevant question here is this: is exhaled vapor from nearby e-cigarette users a significant health risk? How does it compare to other environmental hazards?
Your curry chicken lunch smells, your perfume smells, and your farts smell. It's not about being courteous. Complaining about it just makes you a douche bag. There is a point when a thing is allowed to smell.
>The fact that you have had few complaints may reflect the fact that people are courteous and do not like to get into arguments.
Not 'few' complaints. NO complaints. In 2+ years of regular use. The two cases where I've been asked to stop using them were from people who felt it was their job to do so, not because of any complaint.
>they almost certainly harm people around you although the harm may be less than that of secondary smoke.
[citation needed, really. I'd love to see it.]
>if smokers can smoke e-cigarettes in places in situations where they cannot smoke ordinary cigarettes, that very well may result in an increase of smoking.
I think you're confused about what electronic cigarettes are. Electronic cigarettes do not produce smoke, so it's impossible for them to increase 'smoking.' They produce vapor. It's like saying that the steam rising from your coffee cup is 'smoke,' so all people with coffee should only be able to drink coffee in places where smoking is permitted.
a? Eh? New's to me. I will inform the person sitting next to me smoking an e-cig that it's smelly.
That's unfair actually. I really rather like the myriad of scents he has. Mint, butterscotch, raspberry. I kinda wanted to try it, but I don't actually smoke anything.
b? maybe? The smoke is the issue, really.
c? maybe? At least the smoker I know deliberately pushes down the nicotine ratio he gets from his supplier.
You can argue for erring on the side of safety, but the level of safety you are talking about is unreasonable. What we can say going in, what we know about how cigarettes cause cancer, suggest to us strongly that e-cigs are safer. It is reasonable to act that that assumption, even if there is a possibility that something horrible would be revealed about them later.
"b- they almost certainly harm people around you although the harm may be less than that of secondary smoke."
E-cigs do not harm people in anyway, shape, or form. E-cigs are simply water, nicotine, and flavoring to make them taste a certain way (cherry, coffee, vanilla etc).
I stupidly started smoking at 16 and now at 21, they really have helped me quit. I am all for smoking (electronic or otherwise) outside to respect other people's "airspace", but they are not harmful at all. End of story.
The only harmful "second hand" aspect of them could be people inhaling small doses of nicotine vapor.
E-cigs are NOT just water, nicotine, and flavoring. They contain propylene glycol, vegetable glycerin, nicotine, flavoring, and sometimes water. Your bottles of e-juice should say this on them, actually.
I smoke Blu's and here are the ingredients in the Vanilla flavor; Distilled Water, Nicotine, Natural & Artificial Flavors, Glycerin and Citric Acid.
There is absolutely nothing, in this ingredient list, that is harmful to humans on the level that actual cigarettes (or rightly named, "cancer sticks") are. The glycerin the is only cause for concern, but glycerin is used in so many different products that it is healthy enough for human consumption.
"E-cigs are NOT just water, nicotine, and flavoring"
Ya, they basically are just that.
I love how you cut off the sentence in order to mislead:
> While no epidemiological evidence supports that nicotine alone acts as a carcinogen in the formation of human cancer, research over the last decade has identified nicotine's carcinogenic potential in animal models and cell culture.
It then goes on to say:
> Nicotine has been noted to directly cause cancer through a number of different mechanisms such as the activation of MAP Kinases.[76] Indirectly, nicotine increases cholinergic signalling (and adrenergic signalling in the case of colon cancer[77]), thereby impeding apoptosis (programmed cell death), promoting tumor growth, and activating growth factors and cellular mitogenic factors such as 5-LOX, and EGF. Nicotine also promotes cancer growth by stimulating angiogenesis and neovascularization.[78][79] In one study, nicotine administered to mice with tumors caused increases in tumor size (twofold increase), metastasis (nine-fold increase), and tumor recurrence (threefold increase).
While it was dishonest to cut the sentence off in the middle, the lack of epidemiological evidence basically puts nicotine in the same camp as a ton of other substances that have "carcinogenic potential" but aren't considered a risk. Basically, it's plausible that nicotine is carcinogenic to some degree, but with the carcinogenicity of tobacco explained entirely by other factors, there's no real reason to believe that it's a significant risk, especially for bystanders.
b- they almost certainly harm people around you although the harm may be less than that of secondary smoke.
c - your last argument obviously does not apply to the present situation. If you ban e-cigarettes in places where cigarettes are already banned, then this ban would not cause an e-cigarette smoker to start smoking ordinary cigarettes. In fact, the contrary is true -- if smokers can smoke e-cigarettes in places in situations where they cannot smoke ordinary cigarettes, that very well may result in an increase of smoking.
You can smoke your e-cigarettes in places and situations where cigarette smoking is allowed.