EGO-CE4 e-cig

My new e-cig arrived today. I took the advice of Nisakiman and Alan Cairns (who I believe lives in north Devon, and hasn’t been too well in recent years), and bought an EGO-CE4. Two recommendations were quite enough.

It’s over twice the size of the Titan 510 I bought 5 years ago. It’s about as long as a regular biro or pen. And about half as thick again. It’s quite a robust piece of engineering. It doesn’t have a LED on the front that lights up when you draw on it. And it has a fairly large, transparent tank called a ‘clearomizer’ which can hold up to about 1.6 ml of e-juice, and what look like a set of woven wicks inside. The battery screws on the front end.

But I had a bit of a hard time getting it working.

The first problem was with one of the little plastic bottles holding e-juice. It had one of those child-proof tops on it. And that entirely defeated me for about 10 minutes. I finally had to get out a pair of pliers, tighten them round the top, and unscrew it that way.

The next problem was getting the e-juice out of the bottle. Because although it was plastic, it was strongly resistant to pressure. And also the e-juice turned out also to be e-goo which didn’t flow easily. So the pliers got applied again around the waist of the bottle.

And then there was the problem of where to put the e-goo in. The little folding manual said:

Once you cannot see much e-liquid in the clearomizer then it is time to refill with e-liquid. Drop e-liquid from bottle into the clearomizer (DO NOT drop e-liquid into the centre tube area), you can refill up to 1.6 ml e-liquid.

Since I hadn’t actually put any e-liquid in the thing, I deduced it was time to refill it. I examined the opening at the end which screws into the battery, and spotted the central tube area, and with the e-goo bottle clenched between the jaws of the pliers, applied e-goo around the central tube.

Nothing happened. The e-goo just pooled around the central tube, and none trickled down into the clearomizer tank. But since it said a bit further on that it might take a few minutes for the e-goo to get in, I decided to go out and do some shopping, leaving the clearomizer stood on its mouthpiece, clenched by the pliers. (This was the third use of the pliers. They were proving to be an indispensable aid. I was beginning to think they should include a pair with every e-cig kit.)

But when I got back an hour later, the e-goo was still just pooled around the central tube. None had got into the tank.

I then remembered that on the webpage where I’d read about it, there was an embedded video that demonstrated how it worked. So I watched that again. And when it came to filling the thing, the demonstrator simply unscrewed the mouthpiece, and slipped the nozzle of the e-goo bottle in there.

The manual hadn’t mentioned unscrewing the mouthpiece. And I’d been trying to fill it at the wrong end. And in the process I’d probably terminally damaged the delicate heating mechanism, which was now thoroughly soaked in e-goo.

But now, with pliers gripping the bottle, I finally managed to squeeze some e-goo into the tank, and waited while it slowly slithered to the bottom.

I then wiped away as much as I could (i.e. hardly any) of the e-goo that I’d put in the wrong end, and screwed the battery in. I wasn’t sure if the battery was charged or not. It said that charging was indicated by a red light on the charger coming on, which turned green when it was fully charged. But my charging unit came equipped with both a red light and a green light that both cunningly came on at the same time.

Anyway, with it all assembled, it was time to turn it on. And to turn it on I needed to press a little button 5 times in succession. When I did this, a LED flashed a few times, indicating that it was on. And when I did it again, the LED flashed again, indicating it was off. And after a few more presses, I soon didn’t know whether it was on or off.

But then, after about two hours of intensive effort, interspersed with several cigarette breaks, it finally started working. The battery was indeed charged. And it was indeed ‘on’. And I had not destroyed its delicate heating mechanism after all.

And soon I was wreathed in vapour. And far more of it than I ever got out of my Titan 510.

So I started reading the manual again, to discover that…

The electronic cigarette and all its components should be kept out of reach and sight of children at all times, and stored in a non-damp environment. Clearomizer e-liquid is toxic if swallowed. Very toxic if in contact with skin.

Which sent me rushing to the bathroom to wash my hands, because I’d got quite a lot of e-goo more or less everywhere while trying to get into the wrong end. At least cigarettes aren’t toxic if they come in contact with skin.

And out of sight of chiiiildren?

I wondered if there might be any children in my flat, that had somehow managed to creep in. But after a while I decided that if there were any, they were probably all long since dead, and I’d find them under the kitchen sink one day, smoked deep brown like haddock, and shrivelled to a tenth of their normal size.

The dire warnings were repeated on the e-goo bottles, but with one devastating addition:

May contain traces of nuts.

May contain traces of nuts! I thought this liquid was supposed to just be nicotine and a couple of other harmless compounds. The idea that it might contain nuts had simply never crossed my mind. And if it might contain traces of nuts, then it was surely just as likely to contain traces of cabbage, or engine oil, or Polonium 210?

Which set me thinking that, since these things are going to become illegal (the reason I bought it), then probably the liquid would become illegal as well, and could only be bought on the black market – where fake e-cig e-liquid might consist of nothing but nuts, cabbage, engine oil, and Polonium 210.

Anyway, now that I’ve got it, and it seems to work very well, it’s going back in its box until the occasion arises where it’s the only available smoking option.

Until then, I’m sticking to tobacco.

It’s much safer.

And I don’t need pliers.

To Hell With These People

Does anyone pay any attention to this garbage? I mean, really, do they? Case one:

Sugar consumption should be halved to help reduce health problems such as obesity and tooth decay, the World Health Organisation (WHO) has warned.

The WHO set out draft guidance advising a dramatic reduction in sugar intake amid growing evidence that it contributes to chronic diseases.

The move follows calls by some leading scientists and campaigners for the current recommended daily limits on sugar intake to be halved to 5 per cent of an individual’s overall calorie consumption – the equivalent of six “level” teaspoons a day for the average adult…

The move comes a day after Britain’s chief medical officer suggested that a sugar tax should be introduced in order to curb obesity rates, saying research was likely to find that the ingredient is “addictive”.

Dame Sally Davies, Britain’s chief medical officer, is likely to know what the ‘research’ is likely to find, because the conclusions that this sort of ‘research’ intends to reach are always set out in advance.

Case two:

High-protein diet ‘as bad for health as smoking’

Research finds that people who eat diet rich in animal protein carry similar cancer risk to those who smoke 20 cigarettes each day

Which sort of suggests to me that smoking 20 cigarettes/day must be pretty harmless.

Dr Gunter Kuhnle, a food nutrition scientist at the University of Reading, said: “While this study raises some interesting perspectives on links between protein intake and mortality… It is wrong, and potentially even dangerous, to compare the effects of smoking with the effect of meat and cheese.”

He claimed that sending out such statements “can damage the effectiveness of important public health messages”, adding: “The smoker thinks: ‘why bother quitting smoking if my cheese and ham sandwich is just as bad for me?’ ”

Exactly. And it’s the conclusion I’ve already drawn. I drew it quite a long time ago.

Case three:

Passive smoking causes lasting damage to children’s arteries, prematurely ageing their blood vessels by more than three years, say researchers.

The damage – thickening of blood vessel walls – increases the risk of heart attacks and strokes in later life, they say in the European Heart Journal.

In their study of more than 2,000 children aged three to 18, the harm occurred if both parents smoked.

Experts say there is no “safe” level of exposure to second-hand smoke.

The research, carried out in Finland and Australia, appears to reveal the physical effects of growing up in a smoke-filled home – although it is impossible to rule out other potentially contributory factors entirely.

I grew up surrounded by smokers. And so did pretty much everybody from my generation. And if they found that children’s blood vessel walls were thickening, mightn’t that have been because they were still growing? Because, if they’d measured the lengths of the children’s legs as well, they might also have discovered that their femurs also increased in length and thickness at the same time.

What they’re really saying is that if children grow to adult size, that’s ‘premature ageing’.

To hell with these people.

…

Extra bonus (H/T Leg-iron):

NHS England patient data ‘uploaded to Google servers’, Tory MP says

A prominent Tory MP on the powerful health select committee has questioned how the entire NHS hospital patient database for England was handed over to management consultants who uploaded it to Google servers based outside the UK.

Smoking Breaks

Chris Snowdon has a piece about a Guardian report that smoking breaks at work cost British businesses £8.4 billion a year.

However, the next day (H/T Harley), the Guardian also carried a response to the report:

it was with expletive-flecked incredulity that I read BHF’s latest pronouncement – that smokers “cost British businesses £8.7bn a year in lost productivity”. The average smoker apparently takes four fag breaks a day of nearly 10 minutes each, according to research commissioned (for how much?) by the charity. Yeah, plus those shiftless smokers take nearly a whole sick day more a year than your non-smoking employees, sneers the BHF loftily to its new corporate mates.

Nobody* seems to have pointed out that smokers only started taking smoking breaks once indoor smoking had been banned. Before that, nobody took any smoking breaks at all. Whatever you were doing, you just lit up when you felt like it. No break from work was needed at all.

So, it’s not smokers that cost British businesses £8.7 bn a year: it’s the government-imposed smoking ban which prevents them from smoking at their workplace like they used to.

Also, back when we could smoke at work, we quite often had 15 – 20 minute tea breaks or coffee breaks where everyone stopped work, and had a mug of tea or coffee, and talked about football or something.  There used to be one in the morning and one in the afternoon.

But I don’t remember anyone ever claiming that tea or coffee ‘addicts’ taking two coffee breaks a day were costing British businesses £8.7 bn a year in lost productivity. And yet precisely the same charge could have been levelled at them as is now being levelled at smokers.

It’s nonsense anyway. Nobody’s productive 100% of the time. We gossip. We have cups of tea. We sometimes take a newspaper into the toilet, as my own anecdotal workplace research reveals.

It’s difficult to maintain concentration for long periods of time. Tea and coffee and cigarettes help maintain that concentration, which is why enlightened employers allowed them. And once concentration is lost, the quality of the work being done declines. Mistakes start being made. In such circumstances, it’s best if someone takes a break, has a nap or a cup of tea and a cigarette, and comes back refreshed.

So the tea and coffee breaks increased productivity, rather than decreased it. Take away all the tea and coffee and cigarette breaks, and productivity wouldn’t increase: it would decrease dramatically.

…

* Actually, Chris Snowdon does say that any lost productivity from smoking breaks would be “an externality created by smoking bans”.

Diverse Opinions about Ukraine

Keeping an eye on Ukraine, and reading lots of opinion pieces:

Guardian news:

Vladimir Putin has lost the plot over Ukraine, according to the German chancellor, Angela Merkel.

US reports said Merkel phoned Barack Obama on Sunday evening after speaking to the Russian president to press him to back down from his invasion of Ukraine and occupation of the Crimean peninsula.

“She was not sure he was in touch with reality, people briefed on the call said. ‘In another world,’ she said,” the New York Times reported.

The vast gap between Putin’s and the west’s perceptions of what is taking place in Ukraine is adding to the pressure on the White House to take the lead in what US experts are calling the defining international crisis of Barack Obama’s two terms.

Julia Ioffe in the New Republic:

Putin, sees the world according to his own logic, and the logic goes like this: it is better to be feared than loved, it is better to be overly strong than to risk appearing weak, and Russia was, is, and will be an empire with an eternal appetite for expansion. And it will gather whatever spurious reasons it needs to insulate itself territorially from what it still perceives to be a large and growing NATO threat.

Frank Furedi in Spiked:

Anyone who follows the Western media could be excused for imagining that Russia is a rampant, aggressive and expansionist power, just waiting for a chance to re-conquer its neighbouring states. The reality is that, for all the occasional nationalistic posturing of President Vladimir Putin, Russia has turned into a classical defensive status quo power. Since the break-up of the Soviet Union, Russia has experienced a diminishing of its power and influence. It has struggled to keep a grip in the Caucasus and faces a radical Islamic movement that is far more formidable than any of the forces that directly challenge Western societies. On its Western front, Russia feels threatened by political and cultural pressure from Europe. In such circumstances, it is understandable that to a significant section of the Russian elite, it seems as though the very integrity of their nation is at stake.

Brendan O’Neill in Spiked:

No sooner does the great bear of the East speak or act on an issue beyond its borders than Western observers, of both a right and left-wing persuasion, switch off the bits of their brains that do actual thinking in favour of indulging in thoughtless Moscow-mauling.

The right does it because it desperately misses the Cold War, when the world was neatly split between good guys and really, really bad guys, and it hopes that by posturing against Putin it might resuscitate, however fleetingly, that old West-flattering, heart-swelling global divide.

And left-leaning observers do it because they miss 1989, when many of them cut their political and media teeth by reporting on Eastern Europeans’ uprisings against Soviet power, and now they hope that every instance of stone-throwing against Russia or one of its friends is another Velvet Revolution in the making

Janet Daley in the Telegraph:

Vladimir Putin has marched into the void left by Barack Obama

Putin clearly felt confident that he could reclaim those countries which he believes to be within Russia’s own sphere of influence, and justifiably respond with outrage when they got ideas of their own about being modern self-determining European states. There is a vacancy for world domination – and Putin, wearing his most implacable face, has put down his marker.

Pat Buchanan:

Under George W. Bush, our National Endowment for Democracy helped to engineer color-coded revolutions in Serbia, Ukraine, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan, but it failed in Belarus. We have a long track record of meddling.

And was it not interference in the internal affairs of Ukraine for John McCain to fly to Kiev, go down to Maidan Square, and do his best imitation of Mario Savio in Sproul Plaza?

If the Cold War is over, why are we playing these Cold War games?

Ron Paul:

If you asked most Americans how they feel, my bet is that you would discover they are sick and tired of the US government getting involved in every crisis that arises. Certainly the American people want none of of this intervention in Ukraine. They understand, as recent polls have shown, that our interventionist foreign policy is only creating more enemies overseas. And they also understand that we are out of money. We could not afford to be the policemen of world even if we wanted to be.

Anatole Kaletsky:

Putin’s decision to back himself into this corner has been derided by the Western media as a strategic blunder but it is actually a textbook example of realpolitik. Putin has created a situation where the West’s only alternative to acquiescing in the Russian takeover of Crimea is all-out war. And since a NATO military attack on Russian forces is even more inconceivable than Putin’s withdrawal, it seems that Russia has won this round of the confrontation. The only question now is whether the new Ukrainian government will accept the loss of Crimea quietly or try to retaliate against Russian speakers in Ukraine—offering Putin a pretext for invasion, and thereby precipitating an all-out civil war.

Richard Cohen in the Washington Post:

Putin’s first mistake was to not acknowledge that Russia is, to resurrect what was once said about the Ottoman Empire, the sick man of Europe. Since the end of the Cold War, it has lost much of its empire — all of the old Eastern Europe satellites (Hungary, Poland, etc.) and even countries that Moscow had swallowed whole; Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, for example. Russia has become a corrupt petrostate. Oil fuels the economy, and alcohol fuels the population.

All very diverse. Nobody is agreed about anything – except that there isn’t going to be all-out war between Russia and the West.

Which means that Putin can do whatever he wants. So Russia will probably invade eastern (predominantly ethnic Russian) Ukraine when it suits it to do so.

An Unchanging Moral Order

I’ve been taking a slight interest in the travails of Patricia Hewitt and Harriet Harman.

The links that left Harriet Harman being forced to deny support for paedophiles date back nearly four decades when the Labour deputy leader was an official in the National Council for Civil Liberties.

Miss Harman, along with her husband Jack Dromey – now a frontbench Labour MP – and Patricia Hewitt, a former Labour Cabinet minister under Tony Blair, all worked for the council in the 1970s.

In 1975, the campign group – which lives on today as human rights watchdog Liberty – controversially granted official “affiliate” status to the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE), a body which lobbied openly for child sex.

Tom O’Carroll, PIE’s founder and described as a “sexually predatory” paedophile, was put one of the Council’s working groups, and in spring 1977 he was allowed to make a speech at the Council’s spring conference.

During this period, the Council stepped in to defend paedophiles against “hysterical and inaccurate” newspaper attacks.

Today I came across something that made it a lot darker and murkier.

Lost in the plethora of material being written on the Ukraine and Crimea is the nauseating tale of Patricia Hewitt connected with the call for the age of consent to be lowered to ten and for incest to be decriminalized.

So back when they were both working for the National Council for Civil Liberties, they were both supporting a paedophile outfit. And Patricia Hewitt also wanted incest to be decriminalised, and the age of consent lower to 10? One wonders what the hell else these people were pushing for.

What really gets me about this is that Patricia Hewitt was the health minister who led off the 2006 House of Commons debate that resulted in the introduction of the public smoking ban. And she’d been a big player in the NCCL too. Yet in pushing hard for the smoking ban, in my view she brought about a profound loss of civil liberty in Britain: the liberty to sit in a pub and drink a pint of beer and smoke a cigarette.

Yet while she was taking away liberties from millions of smokers with one hand, she was pushing for new liberties for thousands of paedos and mofos with the other.

She clearly has a completely different set of values than mine.

But where did it come from? How did she acquire this new set of values, in which what was formerly right had become wrong, and what was formerly wrong had become right?

I certainly don’t get the impression that it was the result of any sort of deep thought.

Instead, my impression is that the Hewitts of the world (and there seem to be one heck of a lot of them these days) believe that moral rules can be changed at will, and that if enough people – a ‘consensus’ – think that something that used to be regarded as wrong is actually perfectly all right, then we can (and should) all adjust our moral codes accordingly. We can make up morality as we go along.

So if enough people decide that, say, killing people is okay, then we should change our moral codes accordingly, so as to ‘keep up with the times’.

But to me that looks like moral chaos. Because something that is right one day can become wrong the next day, and then right again the day after. It’s no morality at all.

My own view, for what it’s worth, is that there exists an unchanging moral order which it is our business to discover. We must find out what is right and what is wrong, not just decide for ourselves what we would prefer to be right or wrong as it suits us.

I suppose that I see that unchanging moral order as akin to the laws of physics, which it is also our business to discover, and which a long line of illustrious physicists have toiled to reveal.

But the Hewitts of the world seem to think that you can just make stuff up, and if enough people agree that it’s true and right, then it’s right and true. If enough people think that incest is okay, then it’s okay. And if enough people think that secondhand smoke is a danger to health, then it’s a danger to health. And if enough people believe that carbon dioxide is heating the planet, then it ‘s heating the planet. And the truth about anything is whatever anyone wants or imagines it to be.

But in my view, that way leads to madness and to disaster.

Greenpeace Is A Religious Cult

Or so says Patrick Moore, one of its twelve founder members:

MOORE:  It is a powerful convergence of interests among a very large number of elites, including: Politicians, who want to make it seem as though they’re saving the world; environmentalists, who want to raise money and get control over very large issues like our entire energy policy; media, for sensationalism; universities and professors for grants. You can’t hardly get a science grant these days without saying it has something to do with climate change. It is a kind of nasty combination of extreme political ideology and a religious cult all rolled into one.

In the video above Moore says that Greenpeace moved very sharply to the left in the mid-80s, which was when he dropped out of it.

I can well believe it. I had a good opinion of Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, and all sorts of similar outfits. But in recent decades my opinion of all them has been in free fall. Because whatever worthy causes they espoused when they were founded, they seem to have all metamorphosed into something else, while continuing to trade off their earlier reputation.

In the long video below, Moore says that Greenpeace was founded in about 1970 in response to the threat of nuclear war. And they campaigned very successfully to stop atmospheric nuclear tests. After that, he said, they just kept looking for more and more issues over which to confront people.

He left in the mid-80s because Greenpeace wanted to rid the world of Chlorine (which is an element), largely because it was used in many pesticides. And instead of being just anti-nuclear-war, they’d become anti-nuclear-everything. And it continued to be confrontational.

I vaguely wondered whether the War on Salt – sodium chloride – was a Greenpeace initiative.

For much of my life I’ve been watching friends get sucked into one cult or other. It all started with the Beatles and their Indian guru. After that, the floodgates opened.

I never shared the enthusiasm for cults. I stayed well away from all of them. Perhaps because, raised as a Roman Catholic, I felt I’d been a member of a very large religious cult, and it had taken me quite a long time to extricate myself from it, and I had no wish to join another one any time soon.

But perhaps we are living in a time when a great many people are adrift, and open to cult thinking of one sort or other. It might be suggested that Nazism and Communism are cults. And that Tobacco Control is another religious cult. And the most dangerous cults are those which claim to be ‘scientific’ in some way or other, because then they don’t look like religious cults.

Anyway, as a Greenpeace founder, Moore is clearly someone who broke away from the cult that he had helped found. I think it’s worth listening to such people.

Interesting Times

As I read Dick Puddlecote, it seems that in the Tobacco Products Directive, e-cigs are to be banned by the EU from 2016:

Bypassing proper debate and objective consultation, the EU just steamrollered it through anyway. The snus ban was maintained despite being harmful to European health, and after ignoring overwhelming public disapproval; bans on tobacco flavours, smaller tobacco pouches and packs of ten were promoted on the back of utter piffle; and effective e-cigs banned from 2016 despite huge evidence of their benefits but only innuendo and lies in favour of the ridiculous regulations now inflicted on them. (my emphasis added)

I’m not in the least bit surprised. Big Pharma wants to maintain its monopoly on nicotine replacement products. E-cigs couldn’t be allowed to break the monopoly. So ‘research’ was rapidly done to show that these new products might be dangerous (even though there’s nothing in them that isn’t in pharma products). And of course e-cigs looked like cigarettes.

I just hope that a few disappointed and angry vapers start to realise that all the ‘research’ is fixed. The ‘researchers’ know what they want to find before they do any ‘research’. And in the case of e-cigs they wanted to find some faint risk somewhere. And so of course they found some.

That’s how ‘science’ is done these days. You start with the conclusions you want to reach, and then you go looking for evidence that supports those conclusions. And then you publish a paper in some prestigious journal setting out the evidence, and drawing the conclusions.

And maybe a few vapers will see that this is what has happened. It’s so blatant as to be glaringly obvious.

But if a few vapers see that the ‘research’ is fixed, will they go on to question other ‘research’ too? Like all the other health-related ‘research’ about salt and sugar and soda? And also the ‘research’ that showed that smoking tobacco causes cancer and more or less every other malady known to man?

Probably not. After all, if someone has switched from smoking to vaping, they’ve likely done so out of worries generated by the earlier tobacco ‘research’ – which they believed.

But I think that all the research in this field has exactly the same character. It’s all fixed. The conclusions were set out in the beginning, and then evidence was mustered to support the conclusions.

For example, the very first UK study on smoking and lung cancer, the Doll and Hill London Hospitals study, very rapidly focused entirely on smoking, and completely ignored all the other evidence they had amassed. It now seems to me that there is every reason to believe that it was always intended to focus on smoking. The conclusion – that smoking caused lung cancer – had been predetermined. It was simply a matter of finding enough evidence to make what looked like a plausible case for it. And then relentlessly promoting this conclusion for the next 50 years.

The same applies with sugar, salt, alcohol, meat, and all the rest. The conclusions – that they’re all harmful – were drawn in advance. The ‘research’ was then conducted to find some evidence, however tenuous, that supported the conclusions.

And it most likely applies with global warming. The conclusion – that human-generated carbon dioxide is dangerously warming the planet – was decided at the outset. The ‘research’ then set out to find evidence that it actually was doing that. And now, after 20 years of slight cooling, the conclusion is being adhered to, and any number of reasons put forward to explain this ‘pause’. It’s the policy, and facts and figures are being fixed around the policy.

Why do they do it? Money, mostly. Clearly that’s the case with Big Pharma and e-cigs. They needed to wipe out the competition. And it looks like in Europe they’ve succeeded in doing so. And it may also have been the case with tobacco as well that Big Pharma wanted to make big bucks selling Nicorette to worried smokers trying to kick the habit after they’d read about Doll and Hill’s ‘research’.

But also there’s an eugenic element as well. These people know how other people should live. And they know that they shouldn’t smoke or drink or eat too much sugar or salt or meat. And they also know that the industrial civilisation of the past 200 years needs to be replaced with a low energy, low impact alternative. And if it requires lots of lies to be told to stampede people in these directions, they’ll lie from dawn to dusk. Because it’s all in a ‘good cause’.

But I think what they’ll end up with is a situation where nobody believes anything they say, about anything.

I know because I’ve reached that point. These days I wonder whether there’s anything that can be believed at all, about anything.

And also, when people become increasingly incredulous at what they’re told by ‘experts’ and ‘researchers’ and ‘scientists’ and ‘authorities’, they might also notice (the point of DP’s post) that the political class no longer represents the people who elected them.

We are entering interesting times. When we no longer know who we can trust, or what we should believe.

…

But anyway, I thought that if e-cigs are going to be made illegal, now is probably the time to buy one, and a stock of refill e-juice to go with it. I bought an e-cig about 5 years ago (same time as Leg-iron, and same model). I hardly ever use it. But it did come in very handy a few years ago when I got a bad cold and cough, and had reduced my tobacco smoking to near-zero. But the technology seems to have advanced quite a long way in the past 5 years, and some of the new ones seem to produce copious clouds of vapour. I came across an acquaintance of mine smoking one in a local pub (yes – inside). But I forgot to ask him what make it was. It looked like a cigarette, but was about twice as big. And he kept it in little box in his pocket. And it produced an amazing cloud of vapour.

So I thought I’d ask if anyone has any recommendations.