The situation in Australia, legally at least, is quite different to the American experience (it is against the law to sell e-cigs containing nicotine in Australia, for a start), but the talk of serious health risks is timely, if only because the number of people using e-cigs has increased dramatically around the world in recent years and smoking is, as ever, a serious public health issue. Loading For the moment, let’s put the deaths reported in the US to one side. For one thing, there have been very few, and so far no one has been able to establish what specifically has caused them.

But everyone seems to agree one on thing, whether they like to admit it or not. These people did not die of nicotine poisoning. Nicotine is the stuff that the smoker craves. The sole purpose of consuming the stuff, whatever else it may be mixed with, is to make that craving go away, if only temporarily. But while it is indeed possible to kill yourself by consuming nicotine, you’d need a hell of a lot of it – much, much more than you could consume by vaping, or even smoking three packets of cigarettes a day.

No, the problem is all the other stuff you inhale while getting your nicotine hit, and in the case of cigarettes, that’s a highly toxic cocktail of tars, carbon monoxide, pesticides used in growing tobacco, and dozens of others that are not doing you any good whatsoever. It’s a very long list, and these substances kill around 15,000 Australian smokers a year. Put it this way, if Sir Walter Raleigh turned up today, and tried to put cigarettes on the market for the first time, he would have about as much chance of having his product approved as an asbestos panel manufacturer. Questions are rising about the safety of vaping. Credit:AP So what about vaping? Well, here it gets a tad complex, because “vaping” is a word that covers a lot of ground (think of “alcohol” without specifying whether you’re referring to beer or over-proof rum). While most nicotine vapers in Australia import electric cigarettes by ordering them ready-to-smoke on the internet, many also import fluids, flavours, nicotine and then make up their own mixes. The people you see on street corners emitting vast clouds of fog from weird looking devices are typically “roll-their-own” types. It seems, from the scant evidence we have, that the vapers who recently wound up ill or dead in America would fall into this class, and perhaps pushed their experiments a little too far, and may also have been including psychoactive ingredients like THC, which is found in cannabis.

They may also have had pre-existing medical conditions, but the point is that getting adventurous with mixing vape fluids, to return to the booze analogy, might be as dangerous as distilling your own spirits. Loading So it would seem sensible to have some kind of regime in place whereby the consumer knew what they were consuming, especially the majority who buy pre-prepared stuff. But this is impossible in Australia, for reasons so absurd that it makes lung specialists weep. Nicotine, in Australia, is a Scheduled 7 poison, like arsenic. You would think that this might make it problematic for makers of cigarettes, but no. Cigarettes, cigars, nicotine patches and gum are all given a special exemption by the Therapeutic Goods Administration, which shows us a couple of things – it doesn’t really believe that the stuff can kill you in the doses in question, and that its refusal to give approval to nicotine in e-cigs, while allowing tobacco to be sold with dozens of toxic substances, has no logical basis. You can put nicotine gum in your mouth, but not nicotine vapour. In the meantime, you can buy as many cigarettes as you want.