E-cigarettes all the rage as more seek alternate nicotine fix

Such a cloud as this might look foggy enough to clear out a restaurant. But the cigarette is an electronic gizmo that only simulates tobacco smoke. The haze is a nicotine-laced vapor that dissipates quickly. Controversy lingers.

Such a cloud as this might look foggy enough to clear out a restaurant. But the cigarette is an electronic gizmo that only simulates tobacco smoke. The haze is a nicotine-laced vapor that dissipates quickly. Controversy lingers.

Tuesday, July 9, 2013

The way old-time movie stars endorsed tobacco cigarettes, actor Stephen Dorff makes the pitch for electronic cigarettes in retro-looking black-and white.

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E-cigarettes such as this brand, NJOY, mimic the look of a tobacco cigarette all the way to the glow at the end, thanks to an electric light.

“We’re all adults here,” he says, finding an audience of 100,000 on YouTube. “It’s time we take our freedom back. C’mon, guys. Rise from the ashes.”

Dorff’s appearance in commercials for blu electronic or e-cigarettes is the latest puff in a whirl of assertions and disagreements over numerous brands of these, technically speaking, nicotine delivery devices.

Battery-powered e-cigarettes produce vapor from liquid cartridges, not tobacco smoke.

About 3.5 million Americans use e-cigarettes, according to the Tobacco Vapor Electronic Cigarette Association, headquartered in Georgia.

E-cigarettes are “not a proven nicotine replacement therapy, ” according to the World Health Organization, and Dorff never says he wants to quit.

Consumers have “no way of knowing” how safe e-cigarettes might be, according to the federal Food and Drug Administration.

The ad claims “safer.” Arkansas prohibits sales to minors.

E-cigarettes offer practically as many flavors as snow cones.

Tobacco taste is one, and menthol, but also peach, cola, cotton candy, cinnamon, blueberry and bubblegum.

“Smokers” can choose cartridges with more or less nicotine, or even no nicotine, the addictive chemical in tobacco. If “no nicotine” really means none at all (another point of disagreement), the prospect allows for make-believe smoking almost like a candy cigarette.

An e-cigarette is like a pretend version of the real thing in other ways, besides. Inhaled, it glows as convincingly as an electric fireplace. An LED light mimics the look of burning tobacco. One brand of e-cigarette, NJOY, comes in a flip-top plastic box that snaps like a Zippo lighter.

The hand-to-mouth motion of smoking is the same, although leaving out the gesture of flicking ashes.

The vapor dissipates quickly, but it looks like smoke. It curls from a person’s lips like smoke. It wafts out a person’s nose, too, like - well, but it’s not.

E-cigarettes do just one thing authentically the same as smoking tobacco. The device delivers a hit of nicotine to suck down the same as tobacco smoke, and Little Rock chest and lung surgeon Dr. Matthew Steliga does not make believe he likes the idea.

“Yes, smoking is bad,” Steliga says, but even if e-smoking is less bad, “that doesn’t make this all right.”

“Patients ask me all the time” he says: E-cigarettes aren’t tobacco, aren’t regulated like tobacco, don’t produce irritating smoke and messy ashes, don’t bother people at the next table, don’t necessarily even look like cigarettes, and so, Doc - how about it?

“They’re looking for permission,” Steliga says. “They want me to say yes.” Lacking proof that the gizmos do nothing worse than deliver a whiff of satisfaction, he says, “I can’t … I don’t see e-cigarettes as part of a healthy life.”

Steliga is part of a new program at UAMS to help cancer patients quit smoking. Backed by a grant from the Arkansas Cancer Coalition, the Tobacco Cessation Clinic aims to use every means known to work. But e-cigarettes are not part of the plan.

“If you’re interested in quitting,” the doctor says, “we have better ways.”

Doctors sometimes prescribe nicotine inhalers for people who want to quit tobacco. The idea is to cut back on nicotine little by little. If the strategy works, then, finally, the craving is gone. But these are medical instruments, about as sexy as an asthma inhaler.

E-cigarettes are something else. If Humphrey Bogart and Robert Mitchum looked cool with their trench coat collars up and their cigarettes smoldering, then so do e-cigarettes look cool.

If the TV series Mad Men makes a person want to beg a light off Don Draper, then e-cigarettes look like something Draper’s ad agency could sell like Chevys.

ALL AGLOW

The basic idea goes back to the invention of a “smokeless cigar” 50 years ago, according to the vapor cigarette association. Today’s e-cigarette was a Chinese invention.

The cigar never ignited. The e-cigarette has been available since 2000, and Americans caught the drift three or four years ago.

E-cigarettes are so new and little studied, the FDA questions “how much nicotine or other potentially harmful chemicals are being inhaled.” Whatever it is, more and more people are apt to be inhaling it.

Today’s trend is hot enough to attract the same big tobacco companies that manufacture Camels and Newport cigarettes. R.J. Reynolds is behind Vuse e-cigarettes, and the Lorrilard Tobacco Co. makes blu.

Once a curiosity to buy online, e-cigarettes are “the next logical step into the grocery channel,” according to May’s issue of the trade journal Progressive Grocer. Attractive packaging makes it easy to convert a “first-time purchaser to a repeat customer.”

Some e-cigarettes look like filtered tobacco cigarettes, some more like flutes or fountain pens, and some are more elaborate, like Dr. Who’s sonic screwdriver.

RISE FROM THE ASHES

Blu spokesman Dorff ’s choice looks like a cigarette-size black tube with a blue light on the end.

The Public Enemies and Immortals tough guy declares he has been smoking for 20 years. (If so, ever since he was 19.) But now, he has discovered the “smarter alternative.” He gets to the point in words made of smoke-like breaths of vapor:

“The point is, you can smoke blu virtually anywhere.”

He cites a basketball game as one place to smoke an e-cigarette with no worries about no-smoking restrictions against tobacco cigarettes.

“No smoking” typically does not apply to nicotine patches, nicotine chewing gum and nasal spray, all of which do the same thing as an e-cigarette, being a source of nicotine without tobacco.

The difference, Steliga says, is that “nobody says, ‘I want to wear a patch and chew gum for the rest of my life.’”

“Virtually anywhere” does not include the UAMS campus - certainly not the medical center’s Tobacco Cessation Clinic, where Steliga joins registered nurse Claudia Barone, advanced practice nurse Patricia Franklin and respiratory therapist Erna Boone.

“We don’t know enough about [e-cigarette] vapor and its effect on people in enclosed areas,” Barone cites as at least one reason the devices are off-limits at UAMS. She notes the latest word on e-cigarettes in November’s The Medical Letter on Drugs and Therapeutics.

The report concludes that: “Electronic cigarettes might help some smokers reduce their consumption of tobacco cigarettes, but they still contain nicotine and may also contain tobacco-specific carcinogens and other toxic substances.”

(CANDY) CIGARETTE BREAK

For now, e-cigarettes come without the surgeon general’s warning against tobacco, and former U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Richard Camona has gone to work for NJOY.

Carrot sticks are easier and cheaper to buy than e-cigarettes, which cost around $8 for a single-use cigarette or $80 and up for a refillable, rechargeable kit. But e-cigarettes are more freely available than once-plentiful, old-time candy cigarettes.

“Candy cigarettes have all but disappeared,” according to the Blair Candy Co. of Altoona, Pa.

They can’t be called candy cigarettes, anymore,” due to a government regulation,” the company’s website goes on. And these now-called “candy sticks” don’t have the fire-red tips they had before.

But otherwise, “they’re just the same,” and so “we’re happy to offer the same brand you’ve been enjoying for years, with that distinct, softly sweet flavor.”

Style, Pages 29 on 07/09/2013