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Using e-cigarettes does differ from tobacco in a very clear way which is that
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it doesn't involve inhaling tobacco smoke, and as the constituents of
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smoke are the things that kill smokers, that has to be a good thing.
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People die from the tar, the other constituents of smoke, but not the nicotine.
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So the nicotine isn't the harmful component and electronic cigarettes allow smokers to get the nicotine
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without all the other harmful stuff that comes along in cigarette smoke.
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The first thing to note when considering the safety of e-cigarettes
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is that the vast majority of e-cigarette users are people who are either still smoking,
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and using them to cut down on the amount they smoke, or have used them to stop smoking.
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If we try to put a figure on the relative risk of electronic cigarettes compared with smoking,
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my view is that it's going to be well under 5 percent of the risk,
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possibly slightly more for cardiovascular disease
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but substantially less for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and lung cancer.
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When you look at the concentrations of and the nature of the toxins in cigarette smoke,
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and then you compare that with e-cigarettes you see that really there's no comparison.
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Most of the toxins in cigarette smoke aren't present at all in e-cigarette vapour
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those that are present are in concentrations that are a hundred times less or more.
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Some people say that the advent of electronic cigarettes is renormalising tobacco smoking –
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so we see people using these devices, and it's making smoking more normal again.
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Interestingly, we're just not seeing that in the data we have.
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All that it does is normalise electronic cigarette use.
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And if we could normalise electronic cigarette use for the nearly 9 million people in the United Kingdom
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who are still addicted to tobacco, that could only be a good thing.
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I think it's really important that people be reassured
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that e-cigarettes, whatever you might see in the press,
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are considerably safer than smoking,
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and the evidence is pretty good that they can be effective in helping people to stop.