You know, even though I haven’t smoked cigarettes in over 10 years, I still miss many things about them. I miss the instant camaraderie with other smokers (an instant camaraderie I now find with parents of 6th graders and/or dog owners), I miss the smell of a cigarette when it’s first lit (but since my husband still smokes, I get that in spades) and I miss blowing smoke (no comments from the peanut gallery about how much smoke I still blow out of other orifices, please.) Mostly, I still miss, even all these many years later, the unique thought pause I could achieve with a cigarette. If I got to a hard place writing or working, I would take a puff of the cigarette, ponder the problem, and then plow on.
A few months ago, I got my husband one of those eCigarette dealios, thinking that it might help him quit his decades-long pack-a-day habit. And even if he couldn’t quit, I thought, the eCigarette nicotine delivery system seems much less harmful than regular cigarettes, because you’re basically inhaling pure vaporized nicotine without all the tar and chemicals.
My husband never cottoned to it. He tried it for a while, but it just didn’t do the trick for him. I guess he likes his tar. Anyway, the eCigarette languished on his desk until I found out that you can get nicotine-free cartridges for it. So basically, it’s like one of those candy cigarettes we played with as kids, where if you blew through it, you’d get a cool pink cloud of powdered sugar, except instead of pink powdered sugar it’s propylene glycol vapor.
So I’m sitting here “smoking”. It’s not a perfect system; the propylene glycol kind of makes my lips tingle unpleasantly, and if you handle it wrong you get a little squirt of liquid instead of smoke, which is pretty damn yucky. But check out this nugget of info I found on Wikipedia (which means it just HAS to be right):
Studies conducted in 1942 by Dr. Oswald Hope Robertson of University of Chicago‘s Billings Hospital showed vaporized propylene glycol inhalation in laboratory mice may prevent pneumonia, influenza, and other respiratory diseases. Additional studies in monkeys and other animals were undertaken to determine longterm effects, especially the potential for accumulation in the lungs. After a few months of treatment, no ill effects were discovered.[17]
So when you’re all dropping like flies from swine-flu induced pneumonia, I’ll be over here puffing. Puffing and chuckling a low, evil, mildly-raspy chuckle.
