e-Cigarettes: What is the deal? (spoken in Seinfeld voice)

Searching e-cigarettes on Twitter will surely do one very specific thing.  Confuse the crap out of you!  Look at this picture.  Huffington Post says the vapor juice can increase your chances of getting a really hard to beat staph infection while Reuters says it's a great way to quit.  Both of these should fall under the hashtag WTF.  Allow me to weigh in on this one.  Forget all you think you know about the e-cigarette for a second and let's put some attention on traditional cigarettes; you know the one's with actual tobacco.  Habitual and consistent smoking of tobacco cigarettes will lead to an early death.  Period.  Usually the early death comes with severe pain and suffering as well.  Sure, someone's Grandmother smoked and lived to be 82 and her heart stopped one night while she slept.  Consider this.  How long would she have gone if she hadn't smoked first of all and secondly, YOU are not that woman.  Those lucky few are exceptions to the rule and we seek them out to provide us comfort and to avoid the reality that continuing this habit will lead us to an early grave.

Contemplating our own mortality is never easy.  We tend to create a mindset where we don't have to look it square in the eye.  Look at the marketing done by cigarette companies from the get go.  They were glamorous and showed people living.  Celebrities endorsed them, movies used them, doctors and opera singers were paid to recommend certain brands, tobacco companies gave cigarettes to the troops during both world wars.  Nothing about their advertising speaks of an early death wrought with pain and disease.  Rather, tobacco companies put up images like the Marlboro Man and Virginia Slims show progressive women.  They want you to feel ALIVE when you smoke, not setting yourself up for a bad exit.  Following me so far?

Now, what is happening right now in the world of the electronic cigarette?  The call it an e-cigarette.  Makes it sound totally harmless.  Like e-mail or e-commerce.  And now, you don't smoke an e-cigarette, you vape.  Because it's just vapor.  Right?  Harmless.  Right?  Sure...  I guess.  And that's the problem isn't it?  We're guessing for now...  just like 100 years ago.  What else is similar?  Celebrity endorsements?  Freedom themed marketing?  A healthy alternative?

At the end of the day, either way, you're rolling the dice.  At the end of the day you still wind up addicted to nicotine.  When the smoke settles (pun intended) you must recognize that every time you light up, electronic or otherwise you are handing over control of your mood, decisions, finances and life to a chemical that is lethal at 30-60 mg in humans, weakens the immune system, elevates blood pressure, messes with your hormones, all kinds of stuff, so while you're not dealing with the tar and smoke from tobacco, you're really just exchanging one set of complications from your addiction for another and yes, you're still addicted.  The downside of addiction is for another blog altogether, but nicotine is not good for you no matter how you chose to deliver it to yourself.  And you deserve total freedom from it.

While e-cigarettes may make it a little easier to stop smoking tobacco cigarettes and some studies show a moderate advantage over the patch and gum, do you really believe these people want you to quit?  Really?  They are all drug dealers.  Every one of them.

e-Cigarettes: More than just harmless water vapor

still a bad idea - "A" for effort, but still dumb

Are e-Cigarettes really the healthy alternative to smoking or just an entirely new and different set of
problems?

New research is revealing that the e-cigarettes in fact might actually impede your body's ability to defend itself from and fight off bacteria.  There is also cause to believe that the e-cigarette will actually increase the power of drug-resistant bacteria.  (HOLY pathogen Batman!)

There's a study recently put out by researchers from the VA San Diego Healthcare System and the University of California, San Diego that dug into the effect of e-cigarette vapor on live methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, the MRSA virus, as well as human epthielial cells.

WIKI:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methicillin-resistant_Staphylococcus_aureus

"The virulence of MRSA is increased by e-cigarette vapor," said lead investigator Laura E. Crotty Alexander, MD, VA researcher and assistant professor of medicine in pulmonary and critical care at UCSD, in a press release.

PRESS RELEASE:  http://www.ucsf.edu/news/2014/05/114301/e-cigarettes-expose-people-more-%E2%80%98harmless%E2%80%99-water-vapor-and-should-be-regulated

The release tells us that exposure to e-cigarette vapor increased the virulence of the bacteria, helping MRSA escape killing by antimicrobial peptides and macrophages. The vapor, said Alexander, did not make the bacteria as aggressive as cigarette smoke exposure did in parallel studies her group conducted.

The study states that the e-cigarette vapor led to changes in the body which makes it harder to fight off infection and created a greater resistance to killing by human cells and antibiotics.

"As health care professionals, we are always being asked by patients, "Would this be better for me?" Crotty Alexander said. "In the case of smoking e-cigarettes, I hated not having an answer. While the answer isn't black and white, our study suggests a response: even if e-cigarettes may not be as bad as tobacco, they still have measurable detrimental effects on health."

The research is just the latest in a string of reports on e-cigarettes and potential harmful attributes.

Claims that e-cigarettes are not a danger to smokers and nonsmokers and offer a viable healthy way to quit a nicotine habit are not true, according to a study on the electronic smoking devices released in the past two weeks.

A UC San Francisco research team states there is no evidence to support the claims from e-cigarette makers and advocates.

Another study claims particles from inhaled vapor are being absorbed in deep lung tissue and could present health issues. Another claims the e-cigarette vapor may feature potential carcinogenic elements.

Ultimately, it's you verses nicotine and the people who continue to perpetuate the addiction at your expense.  Choose life and choose freedom.  Stop.  Don't quit.