After announcing the order I placed for an electronic cigarette over the weekend, a friend of a friend exploded ragefully all over my facebook wall. Smoking is immoral, e-cigs look too much like smoking and are obviously equally immoral, they probably trigger his wife’s asthma attacks too, nicotine causes cancer in rats even without the combustion, so why don’t I just cold-turkey like a real man* would… etc
Anyway. I don’t fight with crazy people, but it got me wondering about how to counter similar claims from rational people in the future. Obviously the best counterargument in favor of e-cigs is that, whether the FDA will rubberstamp them or not, they function as a smoking cessation device. They expel nominally harmless vapor (particularly in comparison to omnipresent vehicle emissions).
Any other suggestions?
*poetic license, I don’t have man-parts
**Reporting topic title for spelling correction
My biggest shrug is that, for me, it’s not about ecig or nothing. It’s about ecig or tobacco. I know smoking tobacco will cause all sorts of bad health effects - acute and chronic. So ecigs might? Okay, sure. Will > might.
But, y’know, remember what they say: you can’t reason someone out of a position that they didn’t reason themselves into. This guy obviously has some moral position on addictions, harmless or no. No amount of reason in the world can reason against morals.
Don’t believe people who say they haven’t been studied at all. They have, although not nearly as extensively as tobacco, of course.
Tell him you’ll give up the e-cig and go cold turkey if he gives up rage and doesn’t get angry about something that doesn’t affect him at all for an entire week first.
If he blows his stack, say, “See, like that. Bad for your heart, you know.”
Well he’s like eleventy years old, and I don’t want a conviction for manslaughter on my permanent record and/or conscience. Therefore, I don’t plan to address his crazy. Besides, that was like 2 days ago. I’m sure everybody forgot about it already (because hey, that’s Facebook donchaknow).
Thanks for the links, WhyNot. I’ve heard that nicotine by itself (without the tobacco component) isn’t really any more harmful than caffeine. Is that true or not really?
You don’t really need a counterargument since the logic broke down when he said “e-cigs look too much like smoking and are obviously equally immoral”. You’re not going to win the argument since there’s no logic involved.
But if you want to use his “logic”…
Sex is immoral because is looks like prostitution.
Cooking is immoral because flour and sugar looks like cocaine (and besides, gluttony is a deadly sin…so there)
A lot of TV shows are immoral because they represent/look like crimes/sins (murder etc)
If he’s religious just go down the 10 commandments or 7 deadly sins and find perfectly acceptable things that “look” like those things that he probably does and tell him they’re immoral as well.
Besides, smoking, while bad for you, really isn’t immoral. Not by my standards anyways.
But, like I said, there’s no logic in his argument so trying to create a real argument isn’t going to work. It’s a waste of energy.
Lettuce not focus on the crazy dude anymore. I just used him for the interesting anecdote, and already said I do not plan to argue against him. I’m not focused on combatting his illogic.
If my intent remains unclear, I’m trying to figure out counterarguments for common arguments against e-cigs, such as: they still contain nicotine, nicotine is still harmful, the vapor is similar to secondhand smoke, they killed my father and raped my mother, etc.
Ahhh, well then. You can get ones without Nicotine.
I would ask them to do some research (but the work on them) to show you that it’s the nicotine that causes cancer and not the everything else that makes up the ‘tar’ that causes it.
Also, the vapor isn’t similar to second hand smoke. I don’t smoke in my house or car, but I’d guess that if I smoke one cigarette in my house it would be a few hours before a non-smoker could walk in and not notice it. Maybe as long as 12-24 hours. OTOH, I can smoke a watermelon flavored e-cigarette all day long and the vapor needs about 2 minutes to clear out before it’s not noticed anymore. The other day I had friends staying the weekend with me. I used my e-cigarette off and on all weekend with them in the same room as me. It wasn’t until the last day that one of them even noticed it. Granted, they weren’t staring at me for 72 hours, but even sitting across the room from me, the vapor doesn’t really drift around for more then a 5 feet or so before it dissipates (unless you’re really paying attention to it).
Light a cigarette in another part of the house or even outside and other people will be able to smell it.
If you were in a cubicle farm, I’d be willing to bet you could use it in there without the next person over having any idea you were doing it.
As has been mentioned - some people are just against any type of drug. Drugs are a matter of will power and they use it to feel superior over drug users.
To me it seems obvious that e-cigarettes are much better than regular - and anything you can do to get off them is good.
I couldn’t find much data on the safety of nicotine by itself. Most stimulants are considered pretty safe, but I think nicotine would be considered stronger than caffeine and probably more likely to have some risk of harm. Not saying that it does, but caffeine is pretty darn safe - so it would be hard to match.
Consider that nicotine is available OTC in patches, lozenges and gum. While I’m loathe to use the “it must be safe if you don’t need a prescription for it” argument ('cause, y’know, you can kill yourself with Tylenol, and if you put a dozen nicotine patches on at once, you’d get awfully sick, even if it didn’t kill you…) there is something to be said for that. At least, a quick argument that probably won’t be picked apart by people without critical thinking skills.
For that matter, I guess I can tell you something about that. Here, from my drug handbook entry on nicotine replacement products, which include the nicotine inhaler:
Obviously, some of those have to do with the mode of delivery and wouldn’t apply to nicotine from an ecig.
For comparison, here’s what it says about caffeine:
Absolutely nothing. No entry. Drat.
I think that the burden is on those suggesting that water vapor is “just like” second hand smoke or aggravates someone’s asthma. The anti-smoking hysteria is this country is being exposed for what it is: hysteria. By being opposed to e-cigs, these people who are against them have confirmed that their objection to smoking was never for second hand exposure reasons but for feelings of moral superiority to those who smoke.
I had a guy tell me that I was just “substituting one bad habit for another.” To me that’s like saying I gave up a daily crack habit but replaced it with extra cup of coffee in the morning. Not all bad habits are equal.
Anecdote alert: I have a friend who HATES cigarette smoke. Can smell it a mile away. Her eyes turn red when she is near it. She refuses to spend the night at her Mom’s house because her Mom smokes.
I (with her permission) exhaled a big vape right into her face. She said that she noted a sweet smell for about a second, but it was definitely nothing like smoke. I vape in her house all of the time.
There’s no evidence that the SHS from a e-cig is dangerous, and besides the nicotine, the smoker is likely much less impacted. *
Thus, as a way to stop smoking tobacco, they are a good idea.
I have a small concern that these are being made cheaply in China. Knowing what we know about their standards of quality control (virtually none), it’s only a matter of time before a “smoker” gets overdosed. Still, almost certainly safer than smoking.
Now, I am not in favor of their use in public as they cause too much confusion.
True. The nice thing about nicotine, though, is that is makes you feel sick as a dog if you just slightly overindulge, so it’s largely self limiting. Many of us have done this with nicotine patches accidentally. Ergh. Not a nice feeling.
I just hope no kids or animals or stoned people get a hold of a bottle of eliquid and drink it. Childproof bottles are a must, but they’re not widely used by eliquid sellers. Yet.
Nicotine is implicated as a contributor to atherosclerosis, the kind of artery clogging that high cholesterol gets blamed for. Depending on your diet, that much is enough to suggest that “harmless” is probably quite inappropriate.
The e-cigs (according to the wiki thing) deliver the nicotine in a steam of propylene glycol, which is another name for anti-freeze (I think it is the kind you use to avoid killing dogs), what the long term effects of inhaling a lot of that are, I have no clue, but it does not really sound like a great idea.
Yes, it’s the “safe” antifreeze. It’s also used in food and make-up.
It’s also used in some prescription nebulizers to make the medication into liquid delivered by inhaling it. Formulations and nebulizer performance - PubMed (Granted, many people use their ecig a lot more frequently than a person generally does nebulizer treatments. Perhaps the dose will turn out to be the poison.)
