Big Ol’ Cigar and a Rubber Snake

Mr. Blackburn remembers buying a cigar, while attending his third-grade field trip to the San Antonio Zoo. He described his purchase: “It was a great big ol’ cigar…and I got a rubber snake, too.” We both laughed. He followed up by describing his attempt to smoke that cigar when he got home, while his dad and older brothers laughed. My, how times have changed… Though we do now, we didn’t always know the dangers of smoking. A friend of mine smoked by prescription (when she was a very young child in the Philippines), to treat her asthma. She didn’t go on to be a life-long smoker, but many people did, asthmatics and others. Many smokers got hooked as teens, back in the day, and though there’s a trending decline in the number of us smoking tobacco these days, there’s a rising new trend on the bus, the playground, in the bathrooms at school, and right in the very classroom; vaping. If you’d like to know more about new vaping data, one place to start might be center4research.org. Made in China, the first e-cigarettes available for purchase in the United States arrived in late 2006. It’s impossible to know the long-term effects of their use, because we’ve only been using them for a little over a decade. We’ll know more as we go along, in the same way we learned about tobacco use. Allow me to share a few things we do know. The following information can be found in a study published by the British Thoracic Society, August 2018: The vaporized e-cig fluid (juice of any flavor, either containing nicotine or not), is cytotoxic. That means it’s deadly to living cells. This isn’t to say the liquid is cytotoxic, but the vaporized liquid; that which is inhaled. The vapor is pro-inflammatory (meaning it causes inflammation in the tissue it touches; first stop is the airways), and it interferes with the body’s ability to cleanup and remove toxins from the lungs (the medical terminology for this is “inhibition of phagocytosis in alveolar macrophages”). Just as breathing exhaust, standing behind a running car would be ‘safer’ than breathing the exhaust from a running car while enclosed in a garage; vaping is safer than smoking. Not surprisingly, and for varying reasons, some will magnify only the benefits of vaping, compared to traditional smoking. Allow me to suggest that not smoking is healthier than smoking, and not vaping is healthier than vaping. We’ve learned to discourage adult smoking and prohibit children from it, hence our third-grade boys can’t buy “big ol’ cigars” like they used to. One of these days, we’ll know more. Until then, be wise. Encourage your kids to inhale fresh air.

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