If you’re looking to stop smoking in London or anywhere, what choices do you have?
- Willpower – really very, very hard!
- Stopping smoking with hypnotherapy
- Nicotine replacement systems e.g. gum / patches
- Nicotine substitute systems e.g. champix
One of the current in-vogue ‘choices’ are e-cigarettes, that are nicotine delivery systems par excellence. They are being manufactured by big tobacco, are currently spending a fortune on advertising.
It can feel a little odd watching smoking ads on TV, as it feels regressive, when you consider the breakthrough ban on all smoking related ads about 10 years ago. And when you think about their purpose (which appears ambiguous), are they there to offer a way out of smoking tobacco? Or perhaps, are they there to recruit people into smoking tobacco via the gateway of e-cigarettes?
Perhaps thankfully, there has been an announcement today about the TV ads being investigated as shown here:
So, what exactly does nicotine do to the body?
The New York Times is one of the world’s leading journalistic brands and I thought you would be very interested to see what they say on nicotine:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/16/health/16qna.html?_r=1&
The top 3 impacts of nicotine inhalation are:
- Raised heart rate
- Elevated blood pressure
- Increased cardiac output and constricted blood vessels
All those lead to long-term hypertension, heart attacks and heart diseases like congestive heart failure and arrhythmias.
So, is the choice of nicotine inhalation a real choice? A fair choice? Equally, is the very powerful advertising being used moral given the impact of nicotine on the body?
As such, I think the answer if you want stop smoking is to ‘not e’.
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