Health experts at an Abu Dhabi anti-tobacco conference defended e-cigarettes, in spite of the increasing concerns that the devices are not safe and could lure adolescents into nicotine addiction. However, while experts have come to the defense of e-cigarettes, they agreed that the use of the devices still need more research and should be regulated much like tobacco.
Konstantinos Farsalinos, researcher from Onassis Cardiac Surgery Centre in Athens, told AFP that in a study of nearly 19,500 people, mainly in the United States and Europe, 81 percent said they had stopped smoking by using e-cigarettes.
"In fact, they quit smoking very easily within the first month of the e-cigarette use on average," Farsalinos says. "That's something you don't see with any other method of smoking cessation.
However, the World Health Organization chief Margaret Chan continues to back governments that are banning or regulating the use of e-cigarettes.
Chan, speaking to reporters at a World Conference on Tobacco or Health hosted by the capital of the United Arab Emirates which has thus far banned the use of the devices, said, "Non-smoking is the norm and e-cigarettes will derail that normal thinking, because it will attract especially young people to take up smoking. So I do not support that."
But for Jean-Francois Etter, associate professor at Geneva University, "e-cigarettes and nicotine and tobacco vaporizers should not be excessively regulated".
This could "decrease the numbers of smokers who switch to these new products", benefiting "only the big tobacco industry" whose leaders "will be able to survive in a tightly regulated environment". Etter continued by calling the WHO's stance on e-cigarettes simply "political." "I think that the WHO people should know better than kill alternatives to smoking cigarettes," he said.
E-cigarette advocates argue that the devices offer smokers nicotine in a liquid preventing the combustion of tobacco that releases most of the toxins found in cigarettes.
"Alternatives to smoking do not need to be 100 percent safe, they just need to be much safer than tobacco cigarettes," Etter said. "You choose the lesser of two evils."
One German delegate, who wished to remain anonymous, however, believes e-cigarettes will lead to "dual use" but stopped short of a full ban saying if they are proved to help smokers quit, then "e-cigarettes could easily be sold in pharmacies where you have a controlled product" and ensure they are only sold to adults. But she added, "We need regulation for this product."
