Should pharmacy sell e-cigarettes and encourage smokers to vape?

摘要

Healthcare professionals are not expected to encourage people who don't already smoke to vape,and if you look at survey data provided by Action on Smoking and Health(ASH),the number of never-smoking people who start vaping is negligible1.But we do need pharmacists to get the message across to smokers that switching completely to vaping will significantly reduce the damage they are doing to themselves-by as much as 95%,as suggested by Public Health England(PHE)2.The divisive and myth-fuelled debate on vaping has raged for some years now,and while we argue our positions on the use of e-cigarettes as a stop smoking aid,more than 1.7 million people have already stopped smoking with these devices,at no cost to the NHS1.During my time as manager of Leicester's Stop Smoking Service-the first in the UK to adopt e-cigarettes to help smokers quit-we witnessed hundreds of successful quits using e-cigarettes,and with no adverse events.People who have quit with vaping have reported the same health improvements that quitters achieve with nicotine replacement therapy(NRT)or prescribed medicines,such as varenicline or bupropion.