Ciggies

Ciggies

   My mother-in-law smokes, and like many smokers, has done so for most of her life.  Well into her 80s, she still faithfully puts down about $100 monthly for her half-pack-a-day habit (make that about $400 per month if you're a 2-pack daily person).  According to the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), this just adds more sales to the 264 billion cigarettes made in the U.S., currently among the top four producers of tobacco (although like most farming, tobacco is now mostly run by massive corporations on huge farms; from USDA statistics, tobacco farms dropped from nearly 180,000 in the 1980s to about 10,000 by 2012).  And since the growth of addicted and casual smokers is actually showing a decline in the U.S. (relatively speaking, since nearly 20% of adults in the U.S. still smoke (those with mental illnesses, especially those with PTSD, depression and bipolar disorder, are especially prone to smoke) and every day more than 3,000 youths, some in middle school, start taking their first puff toward being hooked), the sales target now becomes other countries such as China, India and Brazil (each among the top four producers of tobacco).  Smoking accounts for 20% of all deaths in the U.S. (that's one out of every five people).  And perhaps even more surprising (as an article in The Atlantic revealed) "...how many people, even highly educated people, realize that 82 percent more American women now die of lung cancer than die of breast cancer?"

   And about those billions and billions of cigarettes...do you ever wonder where all those butts end up, you know, those ones you see on the sidewalks and in the streets?  Would you believe that they are sometimes considered, "in sheer numbers, the world's most prodigious source of litter," said Sierra magazine, a cumulative total of 55,000 tons of butts annually in the U.S. alone.

   But it's getting the facts about what is actually in a cigarette that is the tough part, for tobacco companies insist that the information is proprietary and not all that necessary for the public to know; in fact, the last release of data by the tobacco companies (grudgingly done primarily due to a government mandate) was in 2004, and that report showed 600 additives put into the tobacco of each cigarette.  By the time you actually light that cigarette, the chemical interaction jumps that ingredient list to over 7,000 (there's your second-hand smoke data); and while the tobacco lobby in Congress is not quite as large as it once was (primarily due to the flood of lawsuits brought on by both federal and states attorneys general) John Boehner and Mitch McConnell are still the largest recipients of tobacco lobbying money.

   So it was surprising when some years ago, Wired magazine (which typically donates a page to breaking down the ingredients of a product, and this can range from lipstick to breath mints) did a short breakdown of cigarettes titled, A Refreshing Hint of Tear Gas.  This title alluded to one of the chemicals, phenyl methyl ketone which "is a major component of tear gas, which should come as no surprise to anyone who's hung out in a smoke-filled bar."  And here's another, ammonium hydroxide which is: Essentially ammonia in water.  There is some evidence that ammonia reacts with tobacco to free the nicotine, making it more accessible to the bloodstream (manufacturers dispute this).  Of course, the Material Safety Data Sheet warns that inhaling ammonia vapors, whatever the source, may damage the upper respiratory tract.  Other additives include things to keep the addictive nicotine in your body longer, keep the tobacco lit longer (one reason a cigarette can sit there and sit there and burn ever so slowly without going out), and of course, the flavors.

   Which brings us to the latest venture, that of electronic cigarettes, or e-cigs.   And speaking of flavors, how many of these do you recognize?:  Bubblegum, banana, dragon fruit, raspberry, watermelon, cola, lemonade, pina colada, vanilla custard, caramel, peppermint, roasted almond, mango and dozens and dozens of others, a virtual smorgasbord when a smoker orders an e-cigarette packet (which can be legally mailed to your home, unlike actual tobacco cigarettes which cannot).  And the debate revolves around their safety vs. that of tobacco cigarettes, something even health experts say can't be tested until long term studies arrive (on average, it takes 30 years for lung cancer or heart disease to show up after regular tobacco smoking, a key medical argument used by those trying to sue tobacco companies).  The damaging smoke and resulting chemicals from e-cigs indeed appear to be basically gone, turned into an innocuous vapor (which is still little studied but apparently far more inert compared to the smoke from burning tobacco);  but the nicotine and several of the other chemicals are still there in the liquid nicotine capsule that is at the top of each e-cig.

   Still, with such flavors available, and the perceived safety of the e-cigs, are the manufacturers targeting teens?  This is the question aimed at the Food & Drug Administration which regulates tobacco products (you can still voice your opinion to them until July 2, 2015).  Teen usage of e-cigs has nearly tripled, according to the CDC, making its way down to middle-school students.  But here's what Discover had to say about the supposed health benefits of e-cigs: But despite the claim that e-cigarettes offer a healthier alternative to smoking, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported in April that the number of calls to poison centers involving e-cigarettes jumped from a single call per month in September 2010 to 215 calls per month in February 2014.  Nearly 6 in 10 of those calls involved people younger than 20, and 51 percent of the total calls involved kids younger than 5.  Even when properly used by adults, e-cigarettes have been shown to have immediate adverse effects on respiratory function.  They produce more ultrafine particles than cigarettes do, and they cause the same reduction in the amount of nitric oxide exhaled by users — a consequence long associated with smoking’s harmful cardiovascular effects.
   
   Remember the earlier comment about tobacco lobbying money in Congress?  For the most part, Congress opposes any new regulations on e-cigarettes and has perhaps battled so successfully not to regulate them as a tobacco product (or prevent their marketing to teens, for e-cigarettes are now actively being product-placed in major motion pictures, again something that tobacco companies are banned from doing), that the current FDA commissioner, Margaret Hamburg, has stepped down (she was a leading proponent of regulating e-cigarettes as a tobacco product)...the battle over regulations is expected to heat up even further as the decision over such regulations nears within a month or so.

   So why the fight against their importing or marketplace sales (after all, e-cigs were first invented in China).  For one thing, an unanswered question is whether e-cigs actually help addicted smokers to stop smoking entirely (you can order the e-cigs with ever-decreasing amounts of nicotine, including e-cigs with no nicotine).  And the market is big, so big that the major tobacco firms are buying up the e-cig manufacturers.  But increased sales of e-cigs would harm the smoking cessation market, currently dominated by large pharmaceutical companies such as GlaxoSmithKline and Pfizer (their nicotine patches and such are considered medical tools and thus, not subject to the rules of tobacco regulation).  Europe has also rejected efforts to regulate e-cigarettes (fearing the same result here in the U.S., some states such as New York and the city of Chicago have imposed their own restrictions on the use of e-cigarettes...Brazil has banned them outright, according to Bloomberg Businessweek).

   Smoking and tobacco has threaded its way through the world, and has done so for centuries.  The idea of big pharma battling big tobacco will prove an interesting one; but the rise of e-cigarettes have now led to e-cigars and e-pipes.  And while bars and auditoriums may not appear smokey, the song "hooked on a feeling" might prove prescient, especially when no regulation asks what ingredients and chemicals are being used and  inhaled.  Still, the bottom line is not the marketing or the legislation or the coolness factor;  the simple question is whether people want to stop smoking, or keep smoking, or start smoking...no matter how young you are, even your children in middle-school.  Check it out, the new Marlboro Child (by the way, the original Marlboro Man died of lung cancer).