Clive Bates: Ways of Taking Nicotine Without Smoke

So the interesting question is, what happens when we have ways of taking nicotine that don't involve smoke? The smoke-free products, so-called, and there's roughly four categories of these. Vaping products, heated tobacco products, oral nicotine products, and smokeless tobacco has been around for some time. All of these products can deliver a satisfactory dose of nicotine to the user, but without smoke, and therefore without most of the 7,000 chemicals and carcinogens that cause the damage associated with smoking. We know that, not because we've been able to look out 50 years and see what happened. We don't have a time machine, so we don't know what the final results will be. But we don't know nothing either, and we have a great deal of information from so-called biomarker studies. This is where you look at somebody who's a smoker or a vaper, and you look at the level of toxicants in their blood, their saliva, or their urine. And there's been quite a lot of studies of this nature, but they all have one thing in common. They show that the levels of toxicants in vapers are much lower than in smokers.

And that gives us confidence that there's going to be a significant health benefit from switching from the high-risk smoking products to the low-risk vaping products.