I wasn’t really sure if this should go in CS or IMHO, so move it if you want.
From Wikipedia, for those who don’t know what these things are:
These things are really great. I have a DSE-901 and I love it - tastes better than cigarettes and it’s not bad for me at all - but I do have a couple of complaints.
First and foremost is that they just don’t seem like they’re quite ready for primetime. The atomizers tend to die every couple weeks, and the batteries don’t last much longer. How many other recharchable batteries have you seen that only last 20 charges? They can’t even get that right. Still, even with the frequent part replacements, it still ends up a bit cheaper than regular cigarettes.
My other complain is that it seems like every company that sells these things is just some lone guy working out of his basement who barely managed to spend the twenty lazy minutes it takes to make a 1997-looking website. Half the sites don’t even have shopping carts! You email your order to the guy, he tells you what your total with shipping will be, and you send him a PayPal! And it’s always PayPal. I have yet to come across an e-cig merchant that actually takes regular credit cards.
I’m hoping that both of those things will change with time, though. This seems like a technology that could really take off, big time. Almost every time I show mine to a smoker, they end up wanting one themselves. And because it replicates the act of smoking so well, it could work to get people off cigarettes who normally might not even try to do so. These little metal tubes have the potential to actually save millions of lives and billions of dollars in health care costs.
Not a smoker, but I did see several Asian companies showing these things at the consumer electronics show last month (CES). The problem most of them were having was finding a US distributor, hence the difficulty in finding someplace to buy them.
I’ve read about them and Jose Canseco was plugging them on the Howard Stern show recently. They sound too good to be true to me. I quit in August of 2006 after smoking for over a decade and have had a fairly easy time of staying off them except for a few stumbles. I would like to have something “harmless” like this for those few times when I’m out partying and a cigarette starts to sound like a really good idea, but I dunno. I’m afraid I’d look even dumber than I would with a real cigarette (which you realize after you quit is surprisingly dumb), and I’m just not 100% confident that it’s really safe. Plus it might just make me want a real one.
I’m surprised that the US tobacco companies have not jumped on this market, but maybe they are still smarting from the failure of R. J. Reynold’s Premier smokeless cigarette, the story of which was memorably told in “Barbarians at the Gate”.
If you think you look stupid with a regular cigarette, you’re going to look really stupid with these. The medium sized one is a little longer than a 100 cigarette, and the smallest ones are 80-something millimeters. The largest are in the 150mm area, but the cartridges and batteries for those last far longer than the shorter ones. I have a medium-sized one, and the battery seems to last me through the workday, though I am still supplementing it with regular cigarettes.
Anyway, yeah, they look a little goofy, especially when nobody knows what the damn things are. I still have yet to come across a person IRL who heard of them before I showed them mine. They have an LED on the end that lights up when you inhale, which I think is kind of cool, though.
For anyone who is interested in these, I would recommend checking out the e-cigarette forum.
I’m really loving mine, but it’s worth noting that while the effect of the vapor entering your lungs is similar to smoke, it’s not quite the same, and it doesn’t feel quite as fulfilling as a cigarette. However, it is far and away the very best substitute I’ve ever seen, and it tastes a lot better.
That’s vapor. It dissipates pretty much instantly and leaves no discernible smell behind.
e: a lot of the companies selling these say that you’re even allowed to smoke them in non-smoking areas. I’ve found that the vapor goes away so quickly that I can discreetly smoke it in the large datacenter where I work without anyone even noticing.
It’s not clear whether nicotine by itself has long-term carcinogenic properties. It does look like Cancer’s Little Helper, though, in that it may help precancerous cells take that extra step. It’s got a lot of different effects on cells.
If you get one of these things, don’t kid yourself that inhaling a potent toxin deep into your lungs is “harmless”.
Still, it’s got to be healthier than cigarettes. My friend/roommate, who’s been using his for two weeks, used to hack up smoking-related things in the bathroom so loud every morning that it would wake me up all the way in my room. He doesn’t do that anymore. At all.
Inertia so far, mostly. I only just got it four days ago, and I still have half a can of tobacco left (I make my own cigs with empty filter tubes, tobacco, and an injector).
The reason, I think, these things haven’t made much of a splash is because the anti-smoking movement just doesn’t want to hear it. To them cigarettes are just “evil” and they want them eventually banned entirely, not “improved”.
A few years ago PBS’ Nova did a story that included these things, The Search for a Safer Cigarette, and that was pretty much the gist of it. Its like expecting anti-gun people to promote safer firearms, it just ain’t gonna happen.
Biggest thing I learned from that show was that it isn’t really the nicotine that’s dangerous, but the VOCs that get created thru the combustion.
It may not be harmless, but its absolutely medically proven that its about a million times more harmless than regular smoking. Nicotine may be little worse than caffeine without all the other toxins present in tobacco smoke.
