G-SPOT: The smoking hot new way to kill you softly

I am a cigarette addict and have been for more years than I care to remember. Likewise, over the last three or four decades, I have attempted to quit smoking several times, occasionally with moderate success.

If memory serves, the longest period I quit smoking for was about a year. I was fine and didn’t miss the little white sticks of death. However, like Michael Corleone and the Mafia, just when I thought I was out, something would trigger me, and I would be pulled right back in. I suppose that’s just my life.

Unlike many who quit and then, with the zeal of the newly converted, go about lecturing everyone about the ills of smoking, I was quite happy to let sleeping dogs lie. Especially after quitting for the umpteenth time.

I have now reached a point in my life where, quite frankly, quitting so as to add a few more years to my life is no longer an attractive proposition, and so I continue to smoke, and actually, I am aware of all the risks and still I enjoy it.

That said, counterintuitive and hypocritical as it may seem, and it is, I am always ready to tell others, especially those who have not started yet, what an awful habit it is and why they should never start.

This is why I was recently quite annoyed by someone I came across speaking in the facile language of someone clearly captured by the tobacco industry. This person spoke about tobacco harm reduction and was trying to suggest nicotine pouches, ‘smoke-free’ products and vapes as “alternatives” to cigarettes.

He tried to push the point of view that, while of course smoking is bad for you, the tobacco products he was advocating for were less so.

These alternatives, by the way, are manufactured by the same cigarette companies. Many of these companies only ‘pivoted’ due to a mix of market survival, strict regulatory pressures and corporate rebranding and still make and sell traditional cigarettes.

One cigarette company executive I wrote about some years ago put it this way: “We are embarking on our next growth phase, further shifting to a better, more sustainable business by driving the development of the smoke-free category and leveraging our leading commercial model, which places the consumer at the core, to switch more adult smokers to our smoke-free products.”

Forgive the pun, but as far as I was concerned, this was all smoke and mirrors. 

The point here is that none of these products is any better for you than the other. Meanwhile, Kenya’s Health Ministry has previously highlighted that more than 100,000 children in Kenya under the age of 17 are actively using vapes and electronic cigarettes.  

Public health advocates have pointed out that the tobacco and vape industries aggressively market to children using fruity flavours and sleek, easily hidden designs.

The fact of the matter is that nicotine is the addiction-causing substance. Scientific evidence demonstrating that vapes and nicotine pouches are less harmful than cigarettes rests heavily on the principles of tobacco harm reduction. 

While the science supports these alternatives as being less harmful, public health bodies emphasise that ‘less harmful’ does not mean entirely safe. Clinical findings from bodies such as the European Society of Cardiology stress that nicotine in any form “constricts blood vessels, spikes heart rate and elevates blood pressure”. 

Experts in the field have even said that heating certain vape e-liquid flavourings can create trace amounts of toxic aldehydes, such as formaldehyde, the stuff used to embalm dead bodies. In what world is this a less harmful thing? 

While medium-term data shows massive health improvements when smokers switch completely, the exact effects of inhaling vapourised chemicals or using pouches are still being studied. 

I remember some years ago, the former president of Health Professions Council of South Africa, Dr Kgosi Letlape, saying: “I’ve observed that there are four groups of addicts in relation to the tobacco industry: The government are addicted to the taxes, the industry is addicted to profit, the smokers are addicted to nicotine and the healthcare professionals or experts are addicted to forming positions based on opinions rather than science.” 

For me, that says it all. Now, please excuse me as I light another cigarette. Cough, cough.