Cigarettes go smokeless

WASHINGTON — I had lunch, a cup of coffee and a smoke the other day at the offices of the American Legacy Foundation in downtown Washington. I puffed away for a good 15 minutes, savoring the irony.

Here I was, surrounded by zealous anti-smokers — Legacy is among the nation’s most influential and well-funded tobacco-fighting organizations — yet I had been invited over to partake of all the nicotine I could handle.

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Jim Gensheimer/MBR

Nati Ariali blows smoke from an electronic cigarette he sells at a kiosk in a mall in San Jose, California.

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Jim Gensheimer/MBR

Nati Ariali blows holds an electronic cigarette he sells at a kiosk in a mall in San Jose, California, on March 7, 2009.

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Of course there was a catch: What I puffed on wasn’t a Marlboro or any other combustible cancer stick. I didn’t need an ashtray. The “smoke” was more accurately fog — small, vaporous clouds. I was trying out a controversial new nicotine-delivery device that somewhat resembles a cigarette but is actually a plastic tube with a glowing LED at its tip.

“If you just suck on it, it should work,” scientist David B. Abrams said, handing me an Njoy brand e-cigarette. (That’s “e” for electronic; nothing to do with the Internet, except that the devices are sold there in abundance.) Inside the tube is a lithium battery that warms and aerosolizes a nicotine solution; Njoy says it works like a vaporizer.

After a few puffs, I found myself wreathed in a fine mist of nostalgia. An e-cig supplies none of the flavor or warmth of a real smoke, yet I was transported back to the days when smoking didn’t equal social opprobrium, when hacks like me hammered on typewriters with nicotine-stained fingers, inhaling madly as deadline loomed.

In a word, I got a buzz.

True, you might be sucking on plastic, but the experience is, as Abrams said, “close to the real deal.”

Questions about use

As the Legacy foundation’s resident expert on addiction and smoker behavior, Abrams and other researchers are intrigued by the devices but also deeply concerned. Could they become another weapon in the smoking-cessation arsenal? Or could they hook more young people on nicotine and serve as a gateway to tobacco use?

The products are unregulated, untested in this country and not approved by the Food and Drug Administration, which has sanctioned other nicotine-supplying substitutes such as patches and gum.

Recently, Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.), author of the law that banned smoking on airplanes years ago, sent a letter urging the FDA to take “immediate enforcement action against manufacturers of ‘electronic cigarettes’ and take these products off the market until they are proven safe.” FDA is beginning to get on the case: Although the devices are available online and in scattered retail outlets, the agency says it has halted some imports and is evaluating whether sales require FDA approval.

E-cigs supply nicotine via the lungs — albeit without the tar, carbon monoxide and other nasties in tobacco smoke — and thus provide the almost instantaneous “hit” that smokers crave. They offer that “exquisite regulation of brain chemistry that makes smoking so powerful and rewarding,” said Abrams, a Ph.D. health psychologist who has studied addiction for 30 years.

Health effects studied

In a joint statement, the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network, the American Heart Association, the American Lung Association and the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids blasted e-cigarettes for being “marketed towards young people, who can purchase them in fruit flavors and online, without having to verify their ages.”

Njoy literature claims that one of its cartridges (which contain water, flavoring, propylene glycol and nicotine) will last the equivalent of a half-pack of real butts. Unlike those 10 cigarettes, though, which burn down and get stubbed out one at a time, the e-cig doesn’t go “out.” There’s a danger of sucking down too much at one sitting: Nicotine affects heart rate and blood pressure. At least one controlled study is under way, at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, to find out the impact of e-cigs on nicotine levels in the blood.

“I’m not necessarily saying these products are dangerous,” said psychology professor Thomas Eissenberg of VCU’s Institute for Drug and Alcohol Studies. “I just think we ought to know what people get when they use them before we sell them.”

His study of 40 smokers tries to determine how e-cigarettes deliver nicotine and whether they suppress withdrawal symptoms.

“For example, if you wake up in the morning craving nicotine, will this take care of that craving?” Eissenberg asked. “If it doesn’t, then it’s a failure. If it makes you go back to your own brand, it’s a failure.”

Well, at least a failure as a smoking-cessation product. But evidently trying to avoid government regulation, Njoy and other distributors don’t make any claim to helping people quit.

“Our target market is the legal-age smoker looking for a product to partake of their dependency in places they cannot smoke — and to save a few dollars,” James Leadbeater, chief executive of Njoy, said from company headquarters in Scottsdale, Ariz.

But “one of the issues that the smoker has to get over is to get used to the taste,” said Leadbeater, adding that he has never smoked. (As an ex-smoker, I’d have to agree: The Njoy doesn’t taste anything like the real deal. Its vapor delivered a moist, fruity flavor, reminiscent of a hookah session.) “They have to make a trade-off so they can use it as an alternative in places that they can’t smoke now.”