There are absolutely no benefits to smoking; it’s all risk and no reward. Any notion of it making you look cool is instantly negated by being over 30, which is also around the time those nasty side effects, usually heard about but not experienced in your twenties, become a sobering reality. Yet, in the face of these obvious and unavoidable facts, most smokers find it incredibly hard to stay away.
I have repeated this fact to myself regularly over the past few days, as while most of the country spent the week basking in the long-awaited sunshine, I have spent most of it under my very own storm cloud of unfathomable darkness. Yes, I clearly picked the wrong week to quit smoking.
Mark Twain once said: “Giving up smoking is the easiest thing in the world. I know because I’ve done it thousands of times.” I know how he felt and it is for this reason that my latest attempt fills me with a strange mix of optimism and dread. There have been numerous attempts in the past, with some more successful than others. I once managed to quit for three years, only walking out of a pub one evening as though those three years had never happened. The hooks are in deep and it’s safe to say I’ve yet to find a method that’s truly worked. This time around I’ve gone for hypnotherapy, but one option proving increasingly popular is the electronic cigarette.
E-cigarettes seem to be everywhere I look these days, and I can see the attraction: they let smokers continue the habitual act of holding a small white stick between their fingers and then inhaling a dose of nicotine. But they do so without the tar, smoke and cocktail of other harmful compound chemicals that do the vast majority of harm in a real cigarette.
Instead, the nicotine is delivered to the lungs via a spritz of water vapour from a tiny canister contained within the battery-operated plastic “cigarette”.
In fact, E-cigarettes are for smokers what diversified growth funds are for equity-addicted investors: they allow the addict to get a hit of their drug of choice (growth), without the toxic risks such as volatility. Sure, the plastic ciggie or DGF will never give you the full, heady hit of the original, but surely that’s a small price to pay in order to avoid massive losses or lung cancer?
However, using either product is not without risk: neither have been around long enough for anyone to really know their effects and in both instances there are concerned (and occasionally biased) voices suggesting they should not be trusted as their contents remain unknown. I suspect whatever secrets they might be hiding, they can’t be riskier than the alternative.
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