Do you think nicotine-free e-cigarettes safe?

 The question may be strange for experimented vapers but it seems to be a matter of concern for most beginners or with a limited experience in this domain. Is the nicotine-free e-cigarette dangerous or a matter of concern?

The first thing to consider to correctly answer this question is the context in which vaping is established: here, we are interested in the context of tobacco harm-reduction.

Tobacco harm reduction

As you can read, “harm-reduction” suggests that the personal vaporizer/electronic cigarette is not harmless and will probably never be. The Professor Riccardo Polosa is used to mention that “breathing pure mountain air is surely the safer for your health”.

Nevertheless, public health professionals who got interested in the e-cigarette agreed to present it as a safer, a less dangerous product compared to the combusted tobacco present in cigarettes; from a relative point of view . And even if a consensus on the level of harm-reduction is still not achieved, the harm-reduction effect itself is no longer under question.

To support this idea, one of the most cited scientific reference in this mid-2016, is the Public Health England’s report, stablishing that the personal vaporizer is at least 95% safer than combusted tobacco.

Pure Nicotine is an important factor in vaper’s satisfaction

Now, whether nicotine, present in e-cigarette refills, enhances the absolute risk related to vaping or not is another question to which the answer is certainly yes. Yes, because nicotine, like caffeine, is a a neurotoxic substance.

Nevertheless, at the dose delivered by personal vaporizers or even combusted tobacco cigarettes, nicotine is harmless to health, just as caffeine. One can find several substitutes that contain nicotine (NRTs) in the form of gums and patches in pharmacies, that do not require a medical prescription. Their use is recommended for smoking cessation and the risk associated to their use, even on the long-term is negligible. The most important remains to get rid of smoking.

One has now to consider the way the e-cigarette can be part of smoking harm-reduction. By reducing the risks associated to smoking, the personal vaporizer offers to smokers a safer alternative to smoking and a an additional option even if the official recognition by specialists of the e-cigarette as a smoking cessation help is not homogenous among countries. The procedure for e-cigarette manufacturers to record their product as a smoking cessation help and obtain a medical label is very expensive and most of the time prohibitive.