Vaping: The battle for acceptance is rising; What do you think of vaping E-cigs

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Natalia Jakobowska has not tried any of the cheesecake varieties yet.

“But I’d love to,” says the 29-year-old nurse, who has settled so far on plain old vanilla as her flavor of choice.

There are dozens and dozens of other taste options she could pick from in the connoisseur market that is emerging around electronic cigarette smoking in Canada.

But ah, that word — smoking! It’s verboten among the tens of thousands of people in this country who have taken up the tobacco alternative in recent years.

“We’re vapers,” Kate Ackerman says emphatically.

“Cigarettes produce smoke. So that’s smoking. Electronic cigarettes produce vapour. So that’s vaping,” says Ackerman, a director of the Electronic Cigarette Trade Association of Canada.

The vapour electronic cigarettes produce is all but odourless and, many argue, far, far safer than tobacco smoke for users and anyone within second-hand range.

While odourless, however, so called e-cigarettes are producing the stench of controversy as their popularity rises.

This mostly revolves around regulatory questions about their actual safety and where they can be used. There is also concern among many that electronic cigarettes could be a gateway to the tobacco variety.

Jakobowska has vaped in shopping malls, on smoking-restricted patios and at the Cambridge cosmetic clinic where she works, all without a whisper of complaint, she says.

“No one has ever said anything,” says the long-time smoker, who hasn’t had a puff of tobacco since she took up e-cigarettes last year.

Just last month, however, complaints were launched about a passenger vaping on an Air Canada flight from Calgary to Toronto, the CBC reported.

Air Canada forbids in-flight vaping.

In several jurisdictions, both here and in the United States, there are now concerted attempts to shrink vaping spaces to the dismal, butt-strewn plots allotted smokers.

“But smoking legislation was created because smoke has been proven to be dangerous,” says Ackerman, who runs her own e-cigarette company outside Calgary. “It’s dangerous to the bystander, it’s unpleasant, it stinks. It’s a bad thing.”

Lacking evidence to show second-hand health impacts — and any offensive smell — electronic cigarettes have largely escaped indoor bans.

But that’s left a free-for-all in terms of allowable vaping space, with businesses and institutions largely left to classify their premises as they see fit.

No one knows quite how many vapers there are across the country right now. Last month Health Canada said it would commission a $230,000 study on the number of e-cigarettes sold here over the past two years.

But Ackerman says usage is booming, with the number of shops and web vendors specializing in the devices and their muliplying accessories having risen from half a dozen to more than 200 since 2010.

And the number of available flavours has grown proportionately.

The flavourings are among e-cigarettes’ key selling points says Ackerman, with everything from cherry cheese cake and blueberry pie to tobacco, liquor and wine tastes being infused into the products.

And as with cigar or wine aficionados, Ackerman says a burgeoning vaping culture, “an incredibly huge social network,” has gown up around the devices.

Ackerman says Facebook pages and Internet chat rooms now abound and attract thousands of vapers to discussions about flavorings, recipes and the myriad delivery devices coming onto the market. These can range from $10 corner store disposable products to refillable, rechargeable systems that can run between $25 and $150.

There are also handmade, “artist” models. Some hard-core vapers will pay up to $300 and $400 for one of those.

The problem with these customized devices is that some of the artists have proved poor electrical engineers. “There have been stories of batteries blowing up,” Ackerman says.

But electronic cigarettes’ main selling point, says Ackerman, is the presumed health improvements over burned tobacco products.

“The main thing is this is an alternative to smoking cigarettes, it’s a harm reduction product,” she says.

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The e-cigarettes utilize small heating elements to vapourize a propylene glycol liquid. It’s the same stuff that produces fog at rock concerts.

“It’s also what’s used in asthma inhalers, it’s used in hospitals to purify the air,” says Ackerman, who smoked for decades before turning to e-cigarettes. “And it doesn’t take a lot of heat. It vaporizes very readily.”

While propylene glycol is a known irritant, Ackerman says, it has none of the carcinogenetic or artery-hardening properties that tobacco smoke carries.

And the myriad tastes, when blended by reputable manufacturers, come from the same regulated, flavour additives the food industry uses every day, she says.

“Some people like crème de menthe, some people like whiskey flavours, cooler flavours,” Ackerman says. “And because it’s just food flavoring, you can really do a lot, you can get very connoisseur driven.”

In many countries outside of Canada, however, the propylene glycol fuel is also infused with nicotine. Though it’s the addictive agent in cigarettes, nicotine itself is not a carcinogen and is classified most often as a stimulant in the same vein as caffeine.

But citing nicotine’s addictiveness — and a lack of evidence that smoking-cessation benefits outweigh potential risks — Health Canada has refused to approve the sale or import of devices or liquid refills containing nicotine.

That hasn’t stopped many — likely the majority — of Canadian vapers from buying the nicotine juice online.

Yet even with a nicotine additive, electronic cigarettes remain far safer than their tobacco alternatives, many experts say.

Dr. Gopal Bhatnagar, a cardiac surgeon at Mississauga’s Trillium Health Centre, is so certain of their health benefits that he founded the e-cigarette company 180 Smoke to help people quit the tobacco version.

Bhatnagar, who has seen his share of cigarette-ravaged hearts, says vapor is far safer than tobacco smoke as a nicotine delivery medium.

“Tobacco smokers, people who take combustibles, they want the nicotine, it’s the tobacco byproducts that kill them,” the former Trillium chief of staff says. “Tobacco has over 6,000 carcinogens in it . . . stuff that also stiffens arteries, which leads to cardiovascular disease as well.”

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Importantly, Bhatnagar says, vaping can calm the powerful psychological cravings for cigarettes — whether it’s delivering nicotine or not. He says traditional nicotine replacement products — like gum and patches — wean only a quarter of smokers who try them off of cigarettes.

“People want the oral and manual sensation of a cigarette . . . they want to put something in their mouth, they want to hold something,” Bhatnagar says. “I do feel the electronic cigarette, it provides that.”

That was nurse Jakobowska’s experience when she was quiting tobacco.

“It helped psychologically,” she says. “When you’re talking on the phone, when you go outside, have a drink, when you’re driving, it’s helpful in those situations.”