Guard Your Agency

Photo: Photo by Chiara Summer on Unsplash.

In the European Respiratory Society meetings in Amsterdam, I listed as international experts discussed nicotine and vaping.

They showed once-confidential documents confirming tobacco companies had lied about nicotine. While CEOs of tobacco companies testified before congress that they didn’t believe nicotine was addictive, their documents proved they knew and were manipulating nicotine in cigarettes to maximize addiction.

Ironically, the conversation among the world’s leading pulmonologists centered on how to optimize the delivery of nicotine through vaping to help people get off tobacco. If the concentration of nicotine isn’t adequate to give the user a “mouth hit”—that optimal immediate transmucosal nicotine rush—it will not adequately quell the nicotine craving to keep someone from returning to cigarettes.

There is good reason to help people find freedom from the numerous carcinogens of tobacco, but I found it unsettling that international health experts were discussing how to optimize a near-perfect deliver device to administer one of the most addictive substances in the world.

As millions of people, many of them nonsmokers, move to vaping, society will pay an unfathomable price. Lung cancer rates will go down, and that is wonderful, but addicting generations of souls to nicotine will extract a consequence yet to be reckoned with.

Even when socially acceptable, addiction robs people of the divine gift of choice. Don’t give up your agency.