Bethlehem-Ma’an- Smoke-free nicotine products, such as e-cigarettes, heated tobacco, chewing tobacco, and e-cigarettes, are significantly safer than smoking traditional cigarettes and have proven highly effective in helping smokers quit a potentially deadly habit. Nicotine is certainly addictive, but it is smoke that kills. It is therefore extremely important to adopt the most effective methods to encourage smokers to quit, even gradually, with the help of innovative alternatives developed by companies such as Philip Morris International.

This is where expert opinion comes in to prove the importance of providing helpful alternatives. In this regard, Professor Peter Hajek, Professor of Clinical Psychology and Director of the Tobacco Dependence Research Unit at the Wolfson Institute of Preventive Medicine, Queen Mary University of London, who was speaking as a smoking cessation expert at the 8th World Congress of the World Association of Dual Disorders (WADD) and the 26th Congress of the Spanish Society of Dua
l Pathology (SEPD), which brought together more than 2,000 international mental health experts in Mallorca, said that after more than a hundred studies, many of which focused on the ingestion of toxins during e-cigarette smoking, it now represents only a fraction of the risks involved in burning tobacco, which occurs with conventional cigarettes.

Professor Hajek is in favour of young people not consuming nicotine in any form, but the main concern is that smoking kills and causes cancer and cardiovascular disease, while the risks of e-cigarette smoking are much lower. He believes that the idea of ??banning cigarettes in which tobacco is burned is a good idea, but if we want to avoid the black market and criminal networks, access to less risky alternatives must be made available to adult smokers.

The smoking cessation expert also mentioned the importance of eliminating passive smoking, stressing that the emissions from e-cigarettes are so low that they do not harm others, because the toxins responsible for sm
oking-related harm are produced by burning tobacco in traditional cigarettes, and most of them are not present in e-cigarette aerosols, and the few chemical compounds present in them are at much lower levels, hundreds of times lower. However, he did not rule out the possibility of some impurities, which can be corrected, and which constitute only a small part of the health risks posed by burning tobacco.

He also mentioned that we should encourage smokers to switch to e-cigarettes by reducing taxes, making them cheaper, and promoting them as a much less dangerous alternative.

For her part, Georgian addiction expert Tata Asatiani stressed in a television program dedicated to reducing tobacco harms, while speaking about nicotine, that it is very important to distinguish between nicotine and products that rely on burning tobacco. Nicotine does not cause life-threatening complications, but the carcinogens in cigarette smoke do. She stressed the need to try to replace cigarettes with something less harmful, and t
hat bans and restrictive measures are useless.

Source: Maan News Agency