YES

Oxford Mail:

Dr Helen Salisbury, a GP at Jericho Health Centre and honorary senior clinical lecturer at University of Oxford

Heart attacks, lung cancer, emphysema, osteoporosis and impotence are just a few of the joys of smoking.

Cigarette smoking contributes to the deaths of approximately 100,000 people in the UK each year and is the leading cause of preventable death and disease.

In this context we should be using every tool available to help people to kick the habit.

The addictive part of tobacco is the nicotine but most of the damage to health comes from tar and other components of smoke, so satisfying the craving for nicotine without the need to inhale smoke is a good way to reduce harm.

Nicotine replacement, in the form of chewing gum, patches, inhalators, mouth sprays and lozenges, has been available on prescription for many years and has helped many people stop smoking.

The available evidence suggests that e-cigarettes are equally (and possibly more) effective as an aid to quitting, and so far no major harms have been discovered, so it seems logical to extend NHS prescribing to include it.

Most courses of nicotine replacement last 12 weeks and it would make sense for prescriptions of e-cigarettes to be similarly time-limited.

Concern has been expressed about e-cigarettes being a gateway to cigarette smoking in teenagers but there is no evidence yet to support this.

Bystanders inhaling secondhand vapour is another worry and opinion varies about whether the rules about smoking in public places should also apply to e-cigarettes, but this should not influence whether they can be prescribed.

Stopping smoking saves money both for the individual and the NHS, but, more importantly, quitting will help my patients to achieve more years of health and life, so I welcome e-cigarettes.

NO

Oxford Mail:

Dan Greenall, who runs Oxford Vapours in Witney and Ox Vapours in Abingdon

E-cigarettes have never been a ‘quitting aid’ – they are a ‘smoking alternative’.

E-cigarettes do help many people quit, regularly, but that action is down to the individual involved and a combination of willpower, intent and personal necessity and not promoted by the actual devices themselves.

E-cigarettes do not address the reasons people smoke, the stress and strains on people’s lives or the escapism, the root of the problem.

The UK would do well to learn from other countries who take a social service approach to addiction therapy if we want to effectively tackle the bigger picture of the problem.

In this context, an e-cigarette is just another device that could be added to a list of products already available on the NHS, such as inhalers, patches, chewing gum and tablets. Looking at the evidence, they are not helping people stop smoking for good. For many with deep-rooted addiction problems manifested in nicotine/tobacco use, an e-cigarette will simply not be effective.

Adding any extra service to the already struggling NHS does not sound like a great idea, especially when switching from smoking cigarettes to vaping is a personal choice and not necessarily a health decision.

E-cigarettes are most certainly much safer than cigarettes, but it’s still not healthy.

Running in the park is healthy.

Eating your greens is healthy.

Stopping smoking all together is healthy – changing the way you ingest nicotine is not healthy, it’s a personal decision.

Should we really be opening GPs’ doors to a flood of people changing their method of brain stimulant rather than finding ways to free up their precious time to deal with people who really need medical care and attention?

Making e-cigarettes available on the NHS will reopen the door to ‘Big Tobacco’.

This decision, intertwined with potential over-regulation of the market, will most certainly take at least 20 per cent of trade from the independent, home grown, high-street businesses. In a worst-case scenario, these businesses will disappear completely.

In an economy battling unemployment figures, strangling this kind of local entrepreneurship could be predictably catastrophic.