FEBRUARY 3 — Despite the numerous research papers published on the detrimental side effects of vaping, I want to make a counter-argument saying that vaping might be the solution to the smoking epidemic that we have all longed for.

There is a saying that goes "Nothing in this world can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.” However, I would like to add another constant to the equation: Substance abuse, which includes smoking cigarettes and vaping.

Medical researchers have warned the public on the health risks of smoking tobacco since the 20th century. It was a problem in the past; it is currently a problem in Wawasan 2020; and it will continue to become a problem come SPV2030 and beyond.

Health ministries across the world are extremely caught up in the pursuit of reducing the amount of smoking through non-smoking campaigns, educational programmes, taxes, regulations, and governmental policies. Not only are these solutions expensive for taxpayers but they are relatively ineffective as well in terms of return on investments.

Despite many governments’ best efforts, there is no single country on Earth that has a 0 per cent smoking population. The country with the lowest smoking rate is Dominica, and that is because it is a tiny island in the middle of the ocean with a population of less than 75,000. Even then, 8.4 per cent of the population still smokes.

Our government has heavily imposed taxes on tobacco products; in fact, the same pack of cigarettes here in Malaysia costs more than twice that from many of our South-East Asian partners (three times the amount in the case of Indonesia). Yet not only is our smoking rate still relatively high, it has only spurred the growth of the illicit cigarette trade instead.

The fight to reduce the number of smokers is an uphill battle - a fight that most health ministries are participating in. But rather than increasing efforts to reduce cigarette consumption, why not ask a slightly different question instead: How can we make tobacco — or rather, nicotine — healthier for consumers?

"Blasphemy! This writer is trying to encourage more smoking!” I can hear in the distance. But to dispel a common myth, nicotine on its own is not chemically cancer-causing or excessively harmful. It is the combustion of cigarettes, which produces tar and a variety of other chemicals that are significantly more harmful to the human body. The primary concern is that, by itself, nicotine is highly addictive to users, which can form nicotine reliance and habitual dependency.

It is that nicotine dependency that pushes many smokers to resist many governmental initiatives to reduce smoking. That is why you get smokers banding together to file for an appeal to the government to resume their rights to smoking at eateries. So why work against the resistance, when you can use it to your advantage instead?

So how does vaping come into the picture?