Gone in a puff of smoke

It's hard to deny the iconographic allure of a cigarette, no matter what the health repercussions may be. Whether it's a vintage photograph of Bob Dylan, smoke curling around his frizzy hair, or Lauren Bacall on set, seductively pulling on a cigarette between takes, cigarettes have their presence entrenched in the American mindset.

But even in an expanding world of portable technology, where people feel comfortable clipping phone receivers to their earlobes as if they wandered off the set of Star Trek, it's still difficult to imagine smokers taking well to a battery-operated, pen-sized cigarette.

"I took it around to a couple smokers here, and they all said the same thing: It's too effeminate," Pamela Clark, a tobacco researcher at the university's school of public health, said. "They wouldn't be caught dead smoking that in public.

"Every time we've had a smoking machine - a nicotine delivery device that doesn't look like a cigarette - every time, it's failed," she added.

Electronic cigarettes are currently available on retail markets all over the world - a model similar to the one Clark had on hand (made by NJOY) is available on Target's website. The device vaporizes varying amounts of nicotine saturated in small cartridges, producing a thick vapor resembling smoke when the user inhales. Because nothing is actually being burned, the process is healthier than actually smoking, Clark said.

"Smoking is the most dangerous thing you can do," she said. "It's better to jump out of airplanes - I know, I've done it."

However, Clark was sure to note "any other form of nicotine delivery has its problems too." While it is widely believed vaporized tobacco is absorbed at the mouth and throat level rather than in the lungs, "there isn't any information" to confirm an answer either way, she added.

Clark and university researcher Elbert Glover recently concluded work on a smokeless tobacco study involving a product fairly new to Americans: Snus (rhymes with "loose"), a chewable alternative meant for on-the-go nicotine delivery. After Clark and the researchers get on their way with a grant to study hookah smoking - she said the act of smoking hookah is far worse for your health than most people tend to think - the Department of Public and Community Health hopes to begin a study this spring involving the electronic cigarette. Aside from the basic how-to, Clark said it isn't even clear exactly how vaporizers work.

"Nobody knows, except for those that make them," she said.

Frank Bartscheck, vice president of vaporizer manufacturer Vapir, Inc., said years of the company's independent research "has been poured into" the Oxygen Mini, its latest portable vaporizer.

"Not only are you able to enjoy the product that you've enjoyed previously, but you're able to do it the healthy way, and you're not constricted or confined to using it where only there's an outlet to plug it in," Bartscheck said. "Vaporizers, while effective for home use, have not gained any truly effective units for those on the go, which of course smokers are often on the go."

Despite its slightly awkward loading mechanism, the Mini seems to be a logical product of healthy thinking and the need for nicotine wherever, whenever.

"If you are a tobacco smoker, you can use our vaporizers to wean yourself off smoking and do it in a way that is considered by many to be healthier," Bartscheck said.

When given a pass at the electronic cigarette, senior family science major Ashley Wilt didn't see the usefulness or the appeal of vaporized nicotine.

"It's a bunch of crap," she said. "It doesn't taste like anything."

Senior environmental science and policy major Keith Presley agreed the design of the electronic cigarette was a little effeminate, but said the vaporized nicotine was "not bad."

"It gets the oral fixation, which is kind of a big thing," he added.

After expressing the idea of quitting smoking come graduation, junior American studies and Spanish major Ashleigh Edwards said the electronic cigarette was "definitely as pleasing as a cigarette."

"If this would offer any health benefits, I would use this instead," Edwards said.

zherrm@gmail.com