Electronic cigarette: harm or benefit?

Approximately at the same time, when smokers around the world started real persecution, cunning Chinese invented a device that most accurately simulates the process of smoking. The electronic cigarette gave smokers the opportunity to consume nicotine in an almost customary way, while retaining the maximum of tobacco-related sensations and associated habits - anything that neither chewing gums, plasters, nor tablets could give. The news of the miraculous invention instantly spread throughout the smoking world and thousands of people rushed to buy the coveted novelty. At the same time, these products are nowhere to be found anywhere except on the Internet, and even their sale in a number of countries is not yet authorized, and the doctors' reviews of electronic cigarettes are very reserved and vague. Experts do not say "yes" or "no", and consumers are still confused: so what is an electronic cigarette - harm or benefit?

Only nicotine and nothing but nicotine

What the physicians have succeeded is in the painting of harm from ordinary cigarettes. Thanks to their efforts (it is very useful and necessary, we must admit), the overwhelming majority of the population is perfectly aware of what nasty smacks are smokers. Nicotine, whose drop is known to be fatal to a horse, is almost the least of the evils in comparison with the products of combustion - here you have arsenic, and prussic acid, and lead, and carcinogens. Cigarette smoke corrodes the respiratory tract, trachea, mucous. The list of diseases caused by smoking is long and terrible, the verdict is severe, the payment is inevitable.

And against the background of this whole nightmare "all in white" there is an electronic cigarette. Nothing burns, instead of acrid smoke - harmless steam, there are no pitches, no carcinogens, no other muck. Only nicotine - and nothing but nicotine. And the manufacturers go even further, and now you can buy completely non-nicotine liquid for refueling electronic cigarettes. The cigarette turns into an ordinary inhaler, through which a person breathes flavors, while accurately reproducing the process of smoking. So what is an electronic cigarette - harm or benefit? It seems that it's not so much harm!

I smoke, but I do not bother anyone

Of course, nicotine is also not a sugar syrup, so it's probably not entirely correct to talk about the benefits of electronic cigarettes for the health of a person who smokes them. And about the benefits to others? When using electronic cigarettes, the concept of "passive smoking" disappears altogether, because in its evaporator the liquid is converted into steam, which the smoker inhales and exhales. Steam is not smoke, it has no combustion products, it is harmless to others, has no smell and instantly dissolves in the air, unlike a smoke screen. In many places where smoking is prohibited, for example, in restaurants and on board aircraft, smoking an electronic cigarette is permissible, since it does not bother other people. The main bogey of firefighters - smoking in bed - in the case of an electronic cigarette, too, ceases to be a risk factor, because it does not burn when the smoker does not drag out; Yes there - it does not burn at all!

So what is an electronic cigarette - harm or benefit? At least for the people around, the benefits are obvious.

Insufficiently studied or undesirable to study?

The main argument of the opponents of electronic cigarettes sounds surprisingly "toothless" - their effect on the body, they say, has not been sufficiently studied. At the same time, some scientists who on their own initiative have investigated the composition of the liquid for electronic cigarettes, declare: there is nothing dangerous in them - neither carcinogens, nor diethylene glycol, nor anything else that provokes the development of cancer or other diseases. In these liquids, in fact, not so many substances - in addition to nicotine, with which everything is clear, it is mainly flavors that are successfully used even in the food industry.

There is an opinion that the research of representatives of the so-called "official" medical science does not show anything, since they are not conducted. There is no such order - it is not interested in either a powerful tobacco lobby risking getting a dangerous competitor, or governments that risk losing profits from the sale of tobacco. And if so, then the question, what is an electronic cigarette - harm or benefit - will long hang in the air with tobacco smoke, although it could have long ago turned into steam, give the same WHO clear and unambiguous answers.