E-Cigarettes Help Smokers Quit

If you want a truly frustrating job in public health, try getting people to stop smoking. Even when researchers combine counselling and encouragement with nicotine patches and gum, few Dunhill cigarettes smokers quit. Recently, though, experimenters in Italy had more success by doing less.
A team led by Riccardo Polosa of the University of Catania recruited 40 hard-core smokers—ones who had turned down a free spot in a smoking-cessation program—and simply gave them a gadget already available in stores for $50. This electronic cigarette, or e-cigarette, contains a small reservoir of liquid nicotine solution that is vapourised to form an aerosol mist. The user “vapes,” or puffs on the vapour, to get a hit of the addictive nicotine (and the familiar sensation of bringing a cigarette to one’s mouth) without the noxious substances found in cigarette smoke.

After six months, more than half the subjects in Polosa’s experiment had cut their regular cigarette consumption by at least 50 per cent. Nearly a quarter had stopped altogether. Although this was just a small pilot study, the results fit with other encouraging evidence and bolster hopes that these e-cigarettes could be the most effective tool yet for reducing the global death toll from smoking.

But there’s a powerful group working against this innovation—and it’s not Big Tobacco. It’s a coalition of government officials and antismoking groups who have been warning about the dangers of e-cigarettes and trying to ban their sale. In the past, conservatives have leaned toward “abstinence only” policies for dealing with problems like teenage pregnancy and heroin addiction, while liberals have been open to “harm reduction” strategies like encouraging birth control and dispensing methadone.When it comes to nicotine, though, the abstinence forces tend to be more liberal, including Democratic officials at the state and national level who have been trying to stop the sale of e-cigarettes and ban their use in smoke-free places.