My brother just switched from cigarettes to an e-cigarette that uses liquid nicotine. He claims his new habit is no worse than drinking two cups of coffee a day. Really?
There is an abundance of hard science showing that smoking cigarettes is deadly. But cut out the tobacco and the additives, and e-cigarettes are demonstrably less harmful than Camels. Ordinary smokes infamously contain a bevy of nasty ingredients—a little carcinogenic vinyl chloride or toxic arsenic, anyone?
...So e-cigarettes aren’t as bad as their conventional counterparts. But there haven’t yet been any studies to ascertain their long-term health effects.
... “People used to think that light cigarettes were less dangerous, and boy did we get fooled on that one,” says Thomas Eissenberg, a psychology professor at Virginia Commonwealth University who has studied e-cigarettes.
The good news is that, thanks to thousands of guinea pigs like your brother, we should have decent data on e-cigarette safety in the next 15 to 20 years....
