Miserable Welsh puritans want to ban e-cigarettes in enclosed public spaces – malign compassion at work

I haven’t smoked a cigar for two months (pause for applause – not a sausage). I was only puffing on those little Café Crème things, but my habit had crept up from two to seven a day, and I knew that if I didn’t do something I’d be up to 15 or 20 before long. Inevitably, I’ve put on half a stone, but I’ve stopped coughing and my breathing’s better. It’s been about 100 times easier than giving up my 40 a day cigarette habit 13 years’ ago. Back then, I used Nicorette gum and nicotine patches: this time it’s been gum and E-Lites electronic cigarettes.

I’ve been addicted to nicotine since I was thirteen. I basically switched cigarettes for nicotine gum, of which I get through between 10 and twenty a day. I managed to cut back to the 2mg version for many years, but I moved back up to 4mg variety two years’ ago (I can't remember why). I did check with a pharmacist (who turned out to be an expert on the subject) whether Nicorette gum might be doing me long-term harm. “Only to your wallet – you’re chewing the most expensive gum in the world,” he replied. “But it’s cheaper and better for you than smoking, so don’t worry too much about it.”

My system’s still flooded with soothing, concentration-boosting nicotine but there’s no tar or thousands of potentially harmful chemicals going into my lungs. That’ll do for now.

Electronic cigarettes, as you know, produce harmless, nicotine-drenched vapour when “smoked”. They don’t taste much like the real thing (and even less like cigars), but they replicate the physical sensation of smoking tobacco. The nicotine hits the central nervous system in a comforting fashion within a few seconds, and – importantly - there’s that familiar abrasive catch in the throat when the vapour is inhaled, you get to expand your lungs and the “smoke” does look satisfyingly like the real thing as it’s exhaled (although it disperses much more quickly and doesn’t leave any odour behind).

It could turn out that e-cigarette vapour causes mouth, throat, oesophogal and lung cancer in some people, plus any number of other horrific side-effects. But the chances of it being as harmful as tobacco seem slim, and – from my experience so far – they’re far less addictive (if I leave my e-cigarette upstairs, I can’t be bothered fetching it, whereas in the past I would willingly have crossed a minefield if there had been a packet of Benson & Hedges on the other side).

Several countries and American states have banned electronic cigarettes altogether, and they’re banned from public spaces (enclosed or otherwise) in other places. The reasons given range from the suspicion that they could turn out to be harmful to users in ways yet undreamt of to the fear that non-smokers will start using them and graduate to cigarettes – and, of course, children keep being mentioned as a “vulnerable” group.

Today, Wales has joined the hysterical health Nazi contingent by proposing to outlaw the use of electronic cigarettes in confined public spaces (I suppose they mean pubs, restaurants and offices) on the grounds that they could have an impact “on the enforcement of Wales' smoking ban” and that they could “normalise smoking behaviour”.

The medical and political establishments are at sixes and sevens over whether to further restrict their use or not. The antis want tighter controls over what manufacturers can put into e-cigarettes, and for a ban on children being allowed to buy them, and for more research to be undertaken into their effects etc. The e-cigarette industry supports all of these proposals, the government has already announced a ban on under-18s buying them, and, according to the BBC, the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency is expected to license e-cigarettes as a medicine in the UK from 2016, which will mean tighter checks on the manufacturing process. So it’s being sorted.

What the extreme antis need to decide is whether they actually want adults to quit smoking tobacco or not. If they do, then they really should be encouraging pubs, restaurants and offices not to ban e-cigarettes. The argument that they'll encourage people who would otherwise not have smoked to become addicted to nicotine strikes me as absurd: is there any proof that any non-smoker has ever been tempted to start chewing nicotine gum to see what it’s like (it tastes horrible, by the way)? And is there any proof that a single one of the 1.3 million Britons currently using e-cigarettes wasn’t a smoker to start with?

I suspect the real problem for purse-lipped puritans is that electronic cigarettes make giving up tobacco too easy: they want us to suffer for our sins – they want quitting to be difficult. The problem is that smoking tobacco is just so damned pleasurable: there is almost nothing on earth to compare with lighting up a cigarette after a meal. And you can indulge the habit for years without suffering any ill-effects (apart from financial ones, of course). Unlike alcohol, over-indulgence doesn’t result in you making a right tit of yourself. I’ve known people who were able to quit smoking without much bother, but the vast majority of us simply can’t. As a naturally addictive (i.e. weak-willed) person, I want all the help I can get. Electronic cigarettes are an absolutely wonderful invention, and our puritan authorities need to unpurse their prim little mouths and cut us some slack.