According to Leah Rosen, who heads Tel Aviv University’s Health Promotion Department: “This is unheard of in the developed world. There’s an epidemiological curve of tobacco use, and as people start to get sick from smoking, the [smoking] rate starts going down, and it never goes back up. We have now broken that trend.”
Ironically this smoking surge parallels increased spending on a wide variety of smoking-cessation efforts ranging from Quit lines to nicotine patches to drugs that curb nicotine dependence.
E-cigarettes deliver nicotine in a vaporized form – the process is called vaping. Millions of people around the world have abandoned smoking in favor of vaping. Juul, a new type of e-cigarette that has captured nearly half of the vaping market in the US, is now available in Israel – as is an e-cigarette produced by Philip Morris called Iqos. The ministry is curiously seeking to ban Juul while allowing Iqos to remain on the market, using claims that they are neither scientific nor evidence-based.
First, the ministry has claimed Juul contains too much tobacco. In fact, Juul contains no tobacco and doesn’t even heat up or convert tobacco to vapor. Rather, as addiction expert Dr. Sally Satel notes, it delivers high concentrations of nicotine that “mimic a regular cigarette’s blood absorption pattern marked by a sharp peak and steep drop-off of nicotine levels. This pharmacological profile holds special appeal for smokers.”
