While many people think that Sir Walter Raleigh introduced tobacco to Britain in 1578, reputable histories of the industry tell us that is was probably Sir John Hawkins and/or his crew of sailors who first brought it to this country in 1564 or 1565.
Many years earlier in Canada, Jacques Cartier had come across natives on the island of Montreal using tobacco,
"In Hochelaga, at the head of the river in Canada, grows a certain herb … Men alone use it, and …they pulverize this herb and place it at one end (of a hollow piece of wood or stone), lighting it with a fire brand, and draw on the other end so long that they fill their bodies with smoke until it comes out of their mouth and nostrils as from a chimney. They claim it keeps them warm and in good health.”
We now know – have known in fact for some time – that while it may have kept them warm, it certainly didn’t keep them in good health.
One man who recognised this was Hon Lik, a Chinese pharmacist (and smoker) who had seen his father die of lung cancer. Although a patent for an electronic cigarette had been filed in the USA in 1963, Hon Lik’s development was the big step forward in e-cigarettes and their use has grown hugely. In 2014, the global e-cigarette market was worth c. US$7BN per annum and it is rising rapidly.
For many people, one of the principal reasons for taking up smoking e-cigarettes, or vaping as it’s called, is to try to wean themselves off the highly dangerous ‘real’ cigarettes with their inbuilt tar and carcinogens. And while there is still debate in some camps about the health risks of e-cigarettes, the fact is that over 2 million adults in the UK now use them regularly.
Crucially, it’s now recognised that e-cigarettes are helping people quit smoking tobacco. The most recent reputable report by Public Health England states confidently that e-cigarettes are 95% less harmful than smoking. In an article in the Daily Telegraph, Professor Linda Bauld, Cancer Research UK’s expert on cancer prevention said, “Fears that e-cigarettes have made smoking seem normal again or even led to people taking up tobacco smoking are not so far being realised based on the evidence assessed by the important independent review. In fact, the overall evidence points to e-cigarettes actually helping people to give up smoking tobacco.”
And it’s against this background that JAC Vapour continue to develop their unique product range, providing UK engineered e-cigarettes to help smokers make the switch from smoking to vaping by offering bespoke solutions for individual smoking habits. And that’s the subject of our next blog.
Stuart McRobbie, Director, Nine Twenty Sales and Marketing