Are Smokeless Cigarettes Safe?

The popularity of smokeless cigarettes has increased to an extent that they don't need an introduction anymore. To a great extent, this popularity of smokeless cigarettes can be attributed to aggressive marketing by the manufacturers. Most of these advertisements tell you why smokeless cigarettes have an edge over traditional tobacco smoke, but what they don't tell you is the fact that even these cigarettes have some health risks of their own. These very health risks of smokeless cigarettes have put them under the scanner of late. Before we move on to find an answer to the intricate question - are electronic smokeless cigarettes safe for our health, let's go through some advantages they have over their traditional counterparts.

Smokeless Cigarettes vs. Cigarettes (Tobacco Smoke)

Smokeless cigarettes - also referred to as electronic cigarettes or e-cigarettes, are electronic devices which appear and act like traditional tobacco cigarettes, but don't use tobacco like them. As their name suggests, smokeless cigarettes do not produce harmful smoke - a notorious trait which happens to be a typical characteristic of their traditional tobacco counterparts. As in case with traditional cigarettes, even smokeless cigarettes provide doses of nicotine to the body, however, the method used in the two differs by a great extent. Instead of tobacco, smokeless cigarettes use liquid nicotine which is stored in a mouth piece and delivered in form of vapor which is produced by heating this liquid using an atomizer. As a result of this, you are not subjected to tar or those 4000 odd harmful chemicals that are likely to cause harm to you when you smoke tobacco. More importantly, absence of smoke also keeps the ill-effects of passive smoking at bay.

Are Smokeless Cigarettes Safe for Human Health?

'It is smoke in traditional cigarettes that kills you, and not the nicotine in it' - now that's one statement which you are likely to come across in most of the smokeless cigarettes advertisements. That - however, is just a misconception, and nicotine is as harmful for human health as the various chemicals in tobacco smoke are. While an individual resorts to smokeless cigarettes considering that they are harmless, he eventually gets addicted to nicotine to an extent wherein withdrawal seems impossible. More importantly, nicotine addiction is a severe problem which has the tendency to cause irreversible damage to the brain in the long term. Owing to their nicotine content, these cigarettes are also considered to be harmful for individuals who are sensitive or allergic to nicotine.

While the manufacturers argue that smokeless cigarettes are devoid of harmful chemicals present in tobacco smoke, the fact that chemicals like Propylene Glycol (PG) - which are used in smokeless cigarettes, haven't yet come clean in terms of their effects on human health is something that one cannot turn a blind eye to. The acute toxicity of Propylene Glycol is no doubt low as most of the smokeless cigarettes reviews reveal, but in a long term even this low toxicity can snowball into major health issues in humans. Even though side effects of smokeless cigarettes exist in plenty, lack of testing of these cigarettes has kept most of the people in dark about their alleged side-effects.

FDA and WHO Opinion

Even though the manufacturers argue that smokeless cigarettes are helpful when it comes to smoking cessation, marketing them as smoking cessation aid is prohibited in the United States as per the guidelines stipulated by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Even the World Health Organization (WHO) is of the opinion that manufacturers shouldn't market smokeless cigarettes as smoking cessation aids as there is no concrete evidence to support this claim. The very fact that two of the most eminent organizations of the world voice their concerns about the safety of smokeless cigarettes gives us all the more reasons to question the credibility of these cigarettes.

At the end of the day, one cannot ignore the fact that it is very difficult for the government of any country to ban products - like cigarettes, which generate a huge chunk of state revenue and have a business lobby backing their production. In such circumstances, the onus is on us to take into consideration these smokeless cigarettes risks, and cease their use. Irrespective of whether you take in nicotine through tobacco smoke or through a smokeless cigarette, you are bound to become dependent on it at one point of time, and taking the severity of this dependence into consideration, it is best to avoid it in the first place.