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Vaping not as bad as smoking!

Maswood Alam Khan from Maryland, USA | Tuesday, 16 February 2016


Everyone has a different story. It was a day about fifty-five years ago when for the first time I smoked a cigarette at the backyard of a tea stall, near my school at Brahmanbaria, at the behest of one of my naughty classmates. The brand was 'King Stork'. He gave me a stick to try. It was horrible, but I didn't care because I was such a novice. I can only imagine how dumb I looked. I coughed and felt choked as I inhaled and exhaled clouds of smoke that brought on a bitter feeling of nausea. When now I see a teenager smoking, all I can picture is my furtive day that set off my perilous voyage of smoking.
I have ever since enjoyed smoking as it relieved my boredom and aided my relaxation. Whenever I ran out of cigarettes I found it almost unbearable. It was like a pill that relieved my stress. Old movies, where smoking was always sublime, greatly inspired me to smoke. I had the dexterity to blow smoke rings that would rise and glide elegantly, earning me attention and admiration from a crowd. It was impossible to resist my temptation to light up a cigarette when I was in a melancholy mood or, say, when my mind drifted away to cast a listless glance at the meaninglessness of life as I would listen to the sombre tone of Hemanta Mukherjee singing Keno Jamini Na Jete Jagale Na, Bela Holo Mori Lajey  (Why did you not awaken me before the night ended?).
But, as I look back on my life, I realise that by smoking I have committed a slow-suicide, a gradual self-murder that, like homicide, should be punishable by law. Not only had I been killing myself, I have directly or indirectly encouraged during the last half a century a plethora of youngsters to tread my suicidal pathway. According to religious beliefs, smoking is sinful. And perhaps there should also be a law to punish a wilful smoker with the charge of an attempted suicide. Any jury, comprised even of smokers only, should not pardon my liberty of smoking on the grounds of a justifiable slow-suicide.
With the benefit of hindsight, I can sympathise with parents who wished their children did not pick up the bad habit of smoking. I now understand why my father thought I was ruining my life by smoking. As a token of my penitence, however, I made several attempts to quit smoking, but my every single attempt proved futile until, thanks to my nephew Tashfiq Islam, I discovered only two months back a contraption that appears strange and a little complicated, a vaping device that has helped me at long last to say goodbye to cigarettes. This is an electronic device called vapouriser by which I vape. Determined to help me quit smoking, my nephew smashed my two full packets of cigarettes that I tried to hide in order to smoke a stick or two surreptitiously. He has thus succeeded to turn me into a full-time vaper.
The vapouriser helps me inhale and exhale vapour extracted from tobacco-free natural ingredients, reducing to a great extent the harmful effects of smoking. The main ingredients of vaping are benign chemicals such as vegetable glycerin and propylene glycol blended with a natural or synthetic flavour of your choice. You may choose tobacco flavour if you don't want to forget your long smoking habit. A different flavour like that of mango or strawberry or something else is a good choice if you don't want to evoke the toxic memory associated with cigarettes. You can add a minuscule amount of nicotine and enhance the temperature of the vapour to enjoy almost a similar kick of smoking. Buy a bottle of readymade e-juice from a vendor to refill the tank of the vapouriser or make a huge savings by homemaking the same juice if you have a penchant for chemistry.
To a long-time smoker, vaping may be a bogus substitute or an unpalatable imitation of smoking, an unpleasant exercise akin to what in Bengali we figuratively call Dhuder Shaad Ghooley Metano meaning "to be satisfied with whey in the absence of milk". True. But  Ghool (whey) is not as bad as we suspect. In America, whey is marketed as a protein-rich dietary supplement and various health claims are attributed to it.
Question is which habit is safer: vaping or smoking? The jury is still out as to whether or not vaping is safe or healthy. However, most people would agree that vaping is a much healthier and safer alternative to traditional cigarettes. If you blow cigarette smoke out on a napkin it will turn yellow instantly. With vapour the napkin will remain white. This gives an idea as to what smoking may be doing to the inside of our lungs. Clearly the compounds found in vaped steam are deemed less harmful than the cancer-causing agents found in traditional cigarettes. But less harmful doesn't necessarily mean safe.
Anybody who has started vaping would say vaping is way better than smoking a cigarette or a cigar or any other tobacco product and it helps a long-time smoker quit cigarette smoking. According to a recent study, smokers are 60 per cent more likely to quit with the help of an electronic smoking device.
One stick of cigarette contains well over 4,000 toxic chemicals including 43 known cancer-causing (carcinogenic) compounds and 400 other toxins. This includes nicotine, tar, and carbon monoxide, as well as formaldehyde, ammonia, hydrogen cyanide, arsenic, and DDT. On the other hand, in the juice of a vapouriser or an e-cigarette there is no toxic chemicals except controllable nicotine or even no nicotine at all. The other advantages in vapourising include no flame, no burning of tobacco, no unpleasant smells, no dirty ashtrays, and you can puff wherever or whenever you want, and you can satisfy, at least partly, your craving for cigarette smoking. And it is less expensive.
Thousands of people around the world have already turned to electronic cigarettes in hopes of avoiding the heart and cancer risks associated with smoking conventional tobacco products. Now that cigarette industries are scared of vaping industries, lobbyists of cigarette manufacturers are leaving no stone unturned to prod scientists and researchers to sniff out demerits of vaping. Studies have already been published suggesting that vaping may pose immune, behavioural, and reproductive risks. But, such risks are already there even for those who drink excessively unpurified water or heavily caffeinated beverages. Such negative studies against vaping are not surprising at a time when cigarette industries are facing their real enemy for the first time in their history.
Most of us who smoke know well that it is more a habit and brainwashing than an addiction. We should ask ourselves why other habits, some of them enjoyable ones, are easy to break, yet a habit that tastes awful, costs us a fortune and kills us is so difficult to break? By answering the question you can find it easy to stop smoking, if you are a smoker and if you try vaping.
In fact, one of the many conundrums about smoking is that when we are actually smoking a cigarette, we look at it and wonder why we are doing it. It is only when we have been deprived that the cigarette becomes precious. A smoker is hooked to his cigarettes. So, when you and I believe we are hooked, we can never be relaxed unless we do something that feels like smoking. What, then, is a better idea than vaping, an activity that will not make you feel deprived of inhaling and exhaling those dense clouds of smoke? With a little bit of practice with your vapouriser, you may also show your talent in blowing those smoke rings that would look like magic.
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