UFR d’Etudes Interculturelles de Langues Appliquées
Département LANSAD ANGLAIS niveau 2
EXAMEN (session 1)
1er semestre 2013/2014
Samedi 11 janvier 2014
Durée : 2 heures - aucun document autorisé.
The e-cigarette revolution
For a product invented in 1963, just as the harm caused by tobacco was starting to become
widely known, their recent popularity has been astonishing. Early versions were heavy,
delivered an inadequate "hit" of nicotine and suffered from what was unkindly described as a
"hernia effect" – users had to suck hard to get anything at all.
E-cigarettes, as almost everyone must know by now, look and feel like real cigarettes and are
designed to mimic the experience of smoking without the harmful consequences. They consist
of a battery, an atomiser, a heating coil and a cartridge of liquids used for creating the inhaled
mist which reproduces some of the effects of smoking minus the cancer-causing chemicals
caused by burning tobacco.
Product labelling is inexact but most contain nicotine in a solution of either propylene glycol or
glycerine and water, and sometimes flavours such as vanilla and apple. The atomised mist
resembles smoke when exhaled but research to date has not shown the vapour to be harmful.
Tobacco smoke contains 4,000 chemicals, in addition to the nicotine that smokers want, which
form the sticky residue in the lungs known as tar. The cigarette has been compared to a dirty
syringe for taking nicotine – and the e-cigarette as its pin-clean substitute.
But conventional cigarettes are very efficient vehicles for the delivery of nicotine – deep into
the lungs where smokers want it – and this has proved difficult to reproduce. E-cigarettes are
not as effective as the real thing – but now come acceptably close to satisfy many smokers.
And they are more satisfying than nicotine patches and gum.
Does that make them safe? It certainly makes them safer. Nicotine is the closest we are likely
to get to the perfect drug. Its effects are diverse; it stimulates, calms and enhances feelings of
pleasure, but has few side effects. Its great advantage over other drugs is that its effects are
mild. It is the instrument of its delivery – the cigarette – that is lethal.
That is what led the Royal College of Physicians (RCP) to call in 2007 for e-cigarettes and other
forms of nicotine delivery to be made more widely available, on the "harm reduction" principle.
Even if they are little more effective at helping smokers to quit than nicotine patches and gum,
as evidence shows, there is an immediate and substantial health gain merely by moving
smokers on to safer substitutes.
Adapted from The Independent, Monday 09 December 2013
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