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Narrator: Kicking the the tobacco habit E-cigarettes? That's right now In Motion.As of 2007
the percentage of U.S. smokers has been cut by more than half since 1955. That still leaves
close to one fifth of the popuplation quite literally
puffing their lives away. The connection to a
long list of illnesses and diseases and cigarettes has played a role in getting smokers and
cigarettes to part ways. Smoking cessation programs take many forms, from nicotine patches
to nicotine gum all the way to medications, but
one product that is relatively new has some researchers concerned.
Foulds:Cigarette smoke contains nicotine, the addictive drug, carbon monoxide, which
is a clear odorless gas that replaces oxygen in your
blood, and what we call tar which is the black sticky
mass of gunk and thousands of chemicals that attach to your lungs and your airways and
cause lung cancer and exposes you to diseases like COPD.
So it is primarily the nicotine that people smoke
for, but it is the other 4,000 chemicals that cause most of the harm to health. So part
of the idea of nicotine replacement therapy like
the patch or the nicotine gum is to give people nicotine
in a cleaner form and gradually wean them off. We noticed that there has been a new
invention, a new phenomenon, called electronic cigarettes.
Electronic cigarettes are shaped like a cigarette. They look like a cigarette, but you don't
light them. They have a little electronic current that
produces a vapor of propylene glycol and it has nicotine in it. It almost completely replaces
the habit, the behavioral smoking.
Narrator: The E-cig removes the tar and other toxic chemicals from the situation and leaves
the user with only the addictive nicotine which
the body craves. The user then has more latitude to
step down from the addiction to the nicotine without suffering the effects of other hazardous
material.
Foulds: Very little was known about electronic cigarettes. We wanted to find out a little
bit more. We decided what better way to learn more about
electronic cigarettes than to interview users. So we did a survey of over a hundred regular
electronic cigarette users. Most of them had used
them for over a year. We asked them a series of questions to find out why they used them,
and how they were using them. and what kind of products
they were using... ...to try to get a better understanding of this phenomenon.
Narrator: A study found that while close to eighty percent percent of long term users
of ecigs have compleely ditched the tobacco habit,
only eight percent were using the most widely marketed
version of cigarette shaped ecigs.
Foulds: So the people in our study were not actually using electronic cigarettes like
the ones that are mass marketed. Now this is the most
commonly used kind of electronic cigarette. But what
we believe is that these kinds of electronic cigarettes don't have enough battery power
to put as much nicotine into the vapor. There have been
studies done in other places where they found that
the nicotine delivery was low. But in our study of regular users, people would use electronic
for about a year. We found that 80% of them were
not using these. They were using slightly larger
models that seemed to have the ability to deliver a stronger battery power so that the
nicotine could into the vapor and deliver an adequate
dose. We think that's these are probably more effective in helping people to quit smoking.
But these are not the kind of cigarettes that people
are using.
Narrator: Until more extensive research can be done Dr. Foulds' research suggests that
smokers trying to quit should rely on proven methods.
Foulds: So there is a 1-800 free telephone counseling service, nationally, that you can
call that will give you good counseling. And we have
medicines that have been proven to be safe and
effective. So nicotine replacements like the patch, the gum, the lozenge, the nasal spray
inhaler and prescription-only medicines, like Chantix
and Bupropion --these have all been shown to be safe
and effective. They'll all roughly double your chances of success.
Narrator: For In Motion, I'm Curt Parker.