Vapid Vaping

I have been complaining about my throat being scratchy and irritable every time I walk into studio. For a long time, I couldn’t figure out why this is, and then last week I walked into what looked like a steam room; except the steam wasn’t steam, it was the vapour being puffed out of an e-cigarette. 

Sky Tshabalala looked like a legal version of Snoop Dogg, enveloped in a cloud of vanilla vapour. And the penny dropped. My sudden bouts of coughing and spluttering were a reaction to the flavoured vapour in the air from both Darren and Sky’s e-cigarettes, which they happily puffed in the enclosed environment.  

I’ve been meaning to bring up the subject of e-cigarettes for a while now. I encounter them everywhere! People smoke them in their cars, in their offices and even in tiny enclosed spaces. 

People I’ve spoken to make the argument that you can smoke your e-cigarettes wherever you want to because it’s just water vapour; the cool word is called vaping. But for me, if you’re going to be a smoker, you should be outside. At the end of the day, it is still a cigarette; it still makes clouds of smoke, and psychologically that bothers me! 

So for people who don’t know what these are, e-cigarettes were invented by an American and then mass produced by the Chinese, and now they’re ubiquitous. They are exactly what the name suggests: an electronic cigarette. And it comes with vials of scented oils, battery packs and back-up batteries; you may as well be going camping!  

But the craze that seems to be rapidly replacing actual smoking is huge.  

There’s a new law being proposed in South Africa that would ban one from smoking in a car if there’s a person in that car that’s under the age of 18. This is an amazing law that I would absolutely welcome. I don’t believe that you should be smoking near people, which is why this law of smoking 5 meters from an entrance to a building is a fantastic one. And in fact some universities are now making their entire campuses non-smoking, which means that you have to stand outside the gates of the campus if you want to smoke. And if it’s a big campus like UKZN, for example, you could be in Pinetown smoking your cigarette and then driving to class. And that would be a good thing. 

I’ve never been a proponent of any law that seeks to control free choice. But if that choice is doing harm to other people, then it needs to be looked at. And in South Africa there are very strict laws when it comes to where you can smoke and where you can’t. I think the evidence is in; smoking is bad for you, and so you should not inflict it on people who don’t want to smoke. And if we need laws to govern this because people are irresponsible and won’t do the right thing, then we have to control it. 

It’s the same as drinking, for example. People say: I can drink because it’s not hurting anyone else, but the fact is: it has the potential to hurt others. For example: if you drink when you drive, if you drink when you operate heavy machinery and so on, you know it’s against the law and the law will come down harshly on you if you contravene this. 

So in the same vein, science tells us that secondary smoke is bad for people who don’t smoke and so we need to protect the people who don’t smoke from those who do.     

The question that needs to be asked though is: is there enough research that speaks to the effects of the secondary inhalation of these vapours from e-cigarettes? From reading the material on the matter, there are some findings, but not a lot. So for me, the jury is still out on this one. I don’t believe that enough research has been done on the subject yet. And as for the information that’s available on the internet; how long-term is that? 

If e-cigarettes, conservatively, came into effect in 2000, that’s fifteen years ago, is that time ample enough to have done long-term studies? Is fifteen years extensive enough to beg the question: what is the long-term effect of secondary e-cigarette vapour?

We don’t know. And until we get a small room, pump some e-cigarette vapour into it and make Darren and Sky sit inside for long periods of time to see what happens to them, we will never know. And that ideally should be done over a period of thirty years! 

Do you mind people smoking e-cigarettes around you? 

You can email Terence Pillay at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter: @terencepillay1 and tweet him your thoughts.