A 12-Step test: Is AA for you?

Addiction and Recovery

By Bob Gaydos

Perhaps the most important tool of recovery from alcoholism is self- honesty. In a society that often seems to revolve around drinking, it’s a rare person who easily admits he or she can’t drink the way everyone else seems to be able to do. Socially. Responsibly.

Two things about that:

1. Not everyone else is drinking socially or responsibly. It’s difficult to know what’s really going on in people’s lives away from social settings.
2. Acknowledging that one can’t “drink like everyone else” is not an admission of weakness. It’s an acceptance of reality that can be a lifesaver. That’s where the self-honesty comes in.

Many people who are successful in recovery from alcoholism spend a good deal of time looking at themselves. Examining their motives. Judging their actions. It’s a way of warding off some of the things that alcoholics can use as excuses to drink.

Self-inventory is a critical part of the 12-Step recovery pioneered by Alcoholics Anonymous 75 years ago. Three of the 12 steps specifically deal with inventory-taking. Obviously, honesty is crucial to the process.

But the first honest moment for an alcoholic comes in admitting there’s a problem. Accepting it may have to come later. To help people determine if their drinking is something other than social, AA World Services has created a 12-step questionnaire. It’s the first step at what is hoped to be honest self-appraisal.

At this time of year, with people typically looking back at what was and perhaps looking forward to changing some things, it seemed like a good time to offer the AA questionnaire. There are other, similar questionnaires, some of which are used as diagnostic tools. This test can be taken privately, right now. Above all, for your own sake, be honest.

Is A.A. For You?

Answer YES or NO to the following questions.

1. Have you ever decided to stop drinking for a week or so, but only lasted for a couple of days?

Yes  No

2. Do you wish people would mind their own business about your drinking-- stop telling you what to do?

Yes  No

3. Have you ever switched from one kind of drink to another in the hope that this would keep you from getting drunk?

Yes  No

4. Have you had to have an eye-opener upon awakening during the past year?

Yes  No

5. Do you envy people who can drink without getting into trouble?

Yes  No

6. Have you had problems connected with drinking during the past year?

Yes  No

7. Has your drinking caused trouble at home?

Yes  No

8. Do you ever try to get "extra" drinks at a party because you do not get enough?

Yes  No

9. Do you tell yourself you can stop drinking any time you want to, even though you keep getting drunk when you don't mean to?

Yes  No

10. Have you missed days of work or school because of drinking?

Yes  No

11. Do you have "blackouts"?

(A "blackout" is when you have been drinking hours or days which you cannot remember. This is a pretty sure sign of alcoholic drinking.)

Yes  No

12. Have you ever felt that your life would be better if you did not drink?

Yes  No

According to AA, if you answered YES four or more times, you are probably in trouble with alcohol. The organization says this is based on results of thousands of people in A.A. saying so for many years. It also says, “Remember, there is no disgrace in facing up to the fact that you have a problem.”

If the results suggest a problem, it doesn’t mean you must go to AA for help, but you might want to consult a professional for verification and possible treatment. Or, you can go to an AA meeting. Maybe do both.

Help

• Alcoholics Anonymous: http://www.aa.org/
• AA Orange County: http://www.orangenyaa.org/; (845) 534-8525
• AA Sullivan County: (845) 295-1010
• AA Ulster County: (845) 331-6360
• National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence: national@ncadd.orgwww.ncadd.org
• Alcoholism & Drug Abuse Council of Orange County: www.adacinfo.com; (845) 294-9000
• Recovery Center, Monticello: 845-794-8080

bobgaydos.blogspot.com

Nothing grand about this old party today

By Bob Gaydos

Donald Trump, the face of the GOP?

I almost don’t know where to start with this. The disintegration of the Republican Party, from a proud political party dedicated to the advancement of its view of the American way of life into a hostile, bigoted, fearful, reactionary group beholden to wealthy forces that care only for enhancing their own way of life, has left me confused, angry, fearful and sad.

It’s not just the sorry collection of presidential candidates the party has put forth. Nor is it just the inability of a Republican-led Congress to do anything but oppose every initiative by a Democratic president and, out of pique, shut down the entire government. And it’s not just the utter disrespect the party that constantly spouts patriotism demonstrates for the Office of President at every opportunity.

What confuses and saddens me the most is the apparent willingness of rank-and-file Republicans and Republican officials at every level of government to sit quietly by as if to say that everything Trump, Carson, Cruz, Huckabee, Christie, Fiorina, Rubio, Bush, Paul, et al say is OK. No problem. So it’s a lie. So it’s hateful. So it’s racist. So it’s stupid. So it's unconstitutional. So it’s inflammatory. So it’s really not the American way. So what? We’re okay with it.

Why do I feel this way? Because I don’t hear any Republican saying otherwise. Have you heard a Republican mayor, council member, county legislator, county executive, state legislator, governor, district attorney, etc. say publicly that Donald Trump’s utterings are racist, fascist and play to people’s fears? That they could lead to violent behavior on the part of individuals who feel justified because, after all, they are only responding to the words of the leading Republican presidential candidate?

I haven’t. Not one. Republican presidential candidates only began dumping on Trump recently when he said that all Muslims should be banned from entering the United States. Some party leaders joined them in criticizing Trump. This was apparently one Trump too much for them. It’s not what America stands for, they said. Not what the Republican party stands for, they said.

True. But Trump has been saying ugly stuff like this for weeks with no one complaining. Especially no rank-and-file Republicans. Did they expect him to stop on his own?

I know they're out there, those rank-and-files. I live in the middle of them. And I know that some of them certainly don't agree with much of what Trump, Cruz, Rubio, Fiorina, Paul, Bush, Carson, Christie and the rest have had to say about immigrants, guns, global warming, and Planned Parenthood, not to mention threatening Social Security.

While I have never belonged to any political party, I understand and respect their function in our society. I don't understand how longtime Republicans have let a super-conservative, ultra-religious, anti-science, anti-education, anti-government, anti-fact fringe element take control of their party without managing so much as a murmur of disagreement.

Sarah Palin was the warning flare. She was photogenic, but embarrassingly dumb. But she was the Republican candidate for vice president. Trump, Cruz and Carson are merely the culmination of years of Obama-bashing and dancing to the orders of Fox News and the brothers Koch. As the messages grew angrier and uglier, always rooted in fear and fiction, Republicans marched merrily, unquestioningly, along.

To Donald Trump. An adolescent bigot and misogynist with a huge ego, a couple of billion dollars in the bank and no allegiance whatsoever to the Republican Party. How dumb is that?

If Republicans now blow their party up in a desperate attempt to convince Americans that the American Way is the way of old, angry, closed-minded, resentful, greedy, white men who are constantly being told the government is their enemy, Rupert Murdoch will lose no sleep. His Fox News puppets will find another flock to boost their ratings and sell their books. The Koch brothers will find others to carry their water, selling their principles for generous campaign contributions. And Trump will go on being Trump, a reality TV star divorced from reality.

A two-party political system depends on at least a minimal effort by both parties to work together for the common good. If one party is, instead, intent on opposing everything the other proposes and does so in an increasingly hostile, intractable manner, there is no governing. It’s merely making lots of noise, fueling fear and anger among voters in the hopes of gaining power. It is a cynical, dangerous philosophy that can infect the entire body politic if allowed to go unchecked. That’s why I am frightened of this unwillingness by Republicans to call out the fear-mongers in their midst.

The Republican Party has been festering for years under the threat of Tea Party retaliation for those who dare to disagree. Just look at the sorry example of former House Speaker John Boehner. That festering sore has erupted in the form of Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, Ben Carson, Bobby Jindal, Mike Huckabee, Scott Walker, Marco Rubio, Carly Fiorina, Chris Christie and all the rest.

Even George Pataki, former New York governor and comparatively sensible Republican presidential candidate, is not immune. Pataki has declared, correctly, that Trump is "unfit to be president." But with his showing in the presidential polls at less than one percent, Pataki felt it necessary to declare war on ‘’radical Islam.” Send in the troops, kill them all, he Tweeted. His poll numbers didn't budge.

He has obviously been in the wrong political party from the beginning of this campaign, but not to worry. Pretty soon there won't be a Republican Party, at least not one to which he and all those other silent Republicans once belonged. That Big Tent they once spoke of has been folded and stuck in the garage. Sorry, women, Mexicans, gays, blacks, Muslims, college students, union members, atheists, scientists … Maybe some other time.

There’s nothing grand about this old party today.

bobgaydos.blogspot.com

A $15/hr livable wage, not a minimum wage

By Bob Gaydos

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo
... wants a $15/hr minimum wage

When New York’s Gov. Andrew Cuomo raised the ante on the state's minimum wage a couple of weeks ago, saying that $15 an hour sounded good to him, he also changed the nature of the political debate about what people get paid.    

For those who decide such things -- well-paid politicians, usually -- no longer is it a question of how little can we get away with paying people to do boring, tiresome jobs we wouldn't do ourselves, but rather, what constitutes a minimum amount people can actually support themselves on? What’s a minimum livable wage?

With echoes of his late father’s call to take heed that all are included in the fruits of a prospering society, Cuomo did an about-face on the $15-an-hour wage shortly after signing on to that rate as a minimum for fast-food workers in the state. A panel appointed by Cuomo had recommended the $15 minimum and the state labor board agreed. Cuomo made it official. That rate will be phased in over six years.

But that left the state with the somewhat awkward circumstance of largely part-time, fast-food workers earning more than some people working at other, full time jobs in offices, schools, etc. Challenged on this contradiction, Cuomo was quick to recognize it. If $15 an hour is the minimum that fast-food workers need to live in New York without depending on other assistance, it certainly is a fair minimum wage for all workers in the state, he agreed. He said he would urge the state Legislature to approve the increase.

On cue, Republicans went into mock shock at the thought that every New Yorker should be able to earn, not just a wage, but a livable wage. Alluding to the governor’s own comment of a few months ago that a $15-an-hour minimum wage being sought by fast-food workers was “too high” and that $10.50 an hour was more realistic, State Sen. Jack M. Martins, chairman of the Senate Labor Committee, said, “I really don’t know what happened between $10.50 six months ago and $15 now. What’s the significance of $15? In my mind it’s a political number. The governor has not established $15 as a fair number.”

Well, I can’t read the governor’s mind, but let me answer Martins’ question anyway. What happened between $10.50 an hour and $15 is that the Republican-controlled state Senate flatly rejected Cuomo’s request for $10.50 and agreed instead to phase in a raise in the state minimum wage from $8.75 an hour to $9 an hour next year. Apparently, Republicans senators -- who are paid a base salary of $79,500 a year and receive a $172 per diem allowance -- consider a quarter-an-hour raise to be a major beneficence.

So maybe Cuomo did some calculations, mathematical and, yes, political, and decided it made no sense any more piddling around with proposals for small, incremental increases when the math added up otherwise. At $15 an hour, for a 40-hour week, someone would earn about $31,200 a year. That’s a barely livable wage for someone with a small family, but it’s a lot better than the $21,840 that a $10.50-an-hour salary adds up to.

In fact, that $21,840 is barely above the $20,090 federal poverty level for a family of three, according to government figures used to qualify people for a variety of assistance programs, including Medicaid. The $9-an-hour rate New York legislators generously approved comes to $18,720 for a full time, 40-hour work week. Of course, fast-food franchises typically don’t hire anyone for a 40-hour-week, thereby saving on overtime, insurance, sick pay, vacation and other benefits. The $15-an-hour rate would at least help workers make up for some of those exclusions.

The idea didn’t originate in New York. The cities of Los Angeles, Seattle, San Francisco, Oakland and Berkeley have plans in motion to raise their minimum wage to $15 an hour. New York would be the first state to do so.

But is it, as Martins questioned, a fair number? Apparently New Yorkers think so.Two recent surveys showed a solid majority of residents in favor of the $15 minimum wage. A Quinnipiac University poll found that 62 percent approved of $15 an hour, with Democrats and Independents favoring it and Republicans opposing. A more recent survey conducted by Siena College found that 59 percent of respondents support an across-the-board $15 minimum wage, while 38 percent oppose it. Again, Republicans were against the rate, Democrats in favor. That speaks volumes about what the two parties stand for.

The business community in New York has, not surprisingly, joined with the restaurant industry in arguing against the $15-an-hour wage. Senator Martins even said many fast-food franchise owners were “scared” of the proposal and worried about their ability to stay open. Cuomo couldn’t say anything about that prospect for political reasons, but I can’t help but think that a few less fast-food establishments would be a major boon for the entire country, reducing obesity and other health problems and lowering health costs along the way, including Medicaid and Medicare expenses.

Business associations have also raised the usual argument that raising the state’s minimum wage would force some employers to cut payrolls. That’s just an argument to keep wages stagnant while profits rise. It also never seems to come up when top executives get huge raises.

In reality, when the wages of the lowest-paid workers are increased, they spend more money on goods and services and depend less on taxpayer-funded government subsidies. The money doesn’t go into offshore accounts. As opposed to the Reaganesque trickle-down GOP fantasy of giving the wealthy tax cuts so that they will invest more in the economy and thereby raise workers’ salaries -- never happened, never will -- a higher minimum wage actually trickles up through the economy, benefitting everyone.

And for all the doom-and-gloomers accusing Cuomo of playing to the populist mood of the country, there’s also the political reality that Cuomo is not about to casually alienate the state’s business owners. He says the new wage would be phased in over a period of years, allowing businesses to plan. He also says he’d propose tax cuts for businesses (they love that) and look to reduce other burdens (regulations), so that the increase would be affordable.

It sounds fair to me. In fact, it sounds like something I could live with.

bobgaydos.blogspot.com

For alcoholics, no time like the present to get help

Addiction and Recovery

By Bob Gaydos

Yankees pitcher C.C. Sabathia entered
rehab on the eve of the playoffs.

“I need help.”

The ability to utter that simple phrase can sometimes be the difference between life and death. It most certainly is the most important first step on the road to recovery for someone struggling with a problem with alcohol or drugs.

According to New York Yankees manager Joe Girardi, those are the first words Yankee pitcher C.C. Sabathia said when he walked into Girardi’s office on Oct. 6 during the team’s lost weekend in Baltimore.

“I was shocked,” Girardi said.

Maybe he was; maybe he wasn’t. It certainly wasn’t the kind of news Girardi needed to hear after watching his team play listlessly in losing three games to the Baltimore Orioles. The Yankees were supposed to be getting ready for the playoffs, but looked more like they were getting ready to take the rest of the year off. Now, here was one of the pitchers who Girardi was counting on to pitch in the playoffs telling him he was entering an alcohol rehab immediately and would not be available to the team for the rest of the year.

The timing could not have been worse ... for the Yankees. For Sabathia, it was apparently perfect. Indeed, for an alcoholic looking for help, timing is everything.

Girardi’s response -- the entire Yankee organization’s response -- to the news was also, from all appearances, perfect. Do what you have to do, C.C. Take care of yourself. Get help. We’ll soldier on without you and see you next year.

That didn’t stop some fans and commentators on sports radio shows from wondering, even complaining, about the timing of Sabathia’s decision. In essence, the complaints boiled down to: How could he do this on the eve of a playoff game? Doesn’t he have any loyalty to the team? How about that big paycheck he’s getting? If he’s had a drinking problem for a while, why couldn’t he wait a little longer and go to rehab when the Yankees weren’t playing baseball any more?

Except that Sabathia couldn’t wait and the Yankees knew it. With addiction, there is no “if.” There is only “now.”  “If I could just hang on until the playoffs are over and then go to rehab” could easily dissolve into “if only we had insisted he go to rehab when he asked for help.” The nature of the disease is to deny and to rationalize. It’s not so bad. I’ll cut down. No one will notice. The team needs me. I can handle it.

Until he can’t. The hope might be that no serious damage occurs to the alcoholic or anyone else during any period of waiting until it’s “more convenient” to get help. Unfortunately, that’s not always the case. Too often, in fact, that cry for help turns into a sigh of futility. What the heck, the alcoholic says; this is who I am. Why fight it? Who needs rehab? My life’s a mess anyway. I’ll just drink until I die.

That’s why, when that moment of clarity comes, via some painful self-realization of the alcoholic or with the perhaps not-so-gentle prodding of loved ones, the time to act is at hand.    

Brian Cashman, the Yankees general manager who signed Sabathia to a $161 million, seven-year contract in 2009, heard the news in a conference call that included Sabathia, Girardi and, significantly, Sabathia’s wife, Amber. “What CC is dealing with is a life issue,” Cashman said later at a press conference. “It is bigger than the game. … “All that matters now is what’s happening now, which is obviously he’s going to get the help necessary in a structured environment.”

Sabathia, who has had problems this year on and off the playing field, seemed to grasp the significance of his decision. He released a statement saying, “I love baseball and I love my teammates like brothers, and I am also fully aware that I am leaving at a time when we should all be coming together for one last push toward the World Series. It hurts me deeply to do this now, but I owe it to myself and to my family to get myself right. I want to take control of my disease, and I want to be a better man, father and player.”

At 300 pounds, Sabathia has been a bigger-than-life man, a proud man, a team leader, an all-star pitcher and World Series champion. He is also a husband and father. In humbling himself and publicly admitting he needs help to deal with alcoholism, he has at least suggested that he sees life in a different way today, that he has had a moment of clarity. If it is genuine, as his family, friends, fans and teammates hope, he will have taken the first step towards a life of recovery. For an alcoholic, there’s no time like the present for that.

bobgaydos.blogspot.com

The GOP turns back the clock on women

By Bob Gaydos

Donald Trump, "debating."

     North Korea announced recently that it was moving its clocks back 30 minutes, thereby creating its own time zone a half hour behind Japan and South Korea, for whom North Korea has no love. 
    Not to be outdone, the Republican Party in the UnIted States revealed that it was turning its clocks back 60 or 70 years, creating a world in which women’s lives, health -- indeed their very dignity as human beings -- does not matter if it means losing votes in the party’s presidential primaries.
     Since North Korea has never really left the Cold War era, the world will survive its time change with little inconvenience. It is not so easy, however, to dismiss what is happening with the Republican Party. Never mind Lincoln, this is no longer even the party of Eisenhower, Reagan or Bush the senior.
     What was billed as a presidential debate, turned out to be an all-out misogynistic effort to cast women as second-class citizens, or less. Donald Trump, who has made himself the mouth and face of today’s Republican Party, has received much of the post-debate criticism for his crude remarks about women in general and debate moderator Megyn Kelly in particular.
     Kelly dared to question Trump about his at various times calling women “fat pigs, dogs, slobs and disgusting animals” and wondering what a women contestant on his TV show, “The Apprentice,” would “look like on her knees.” Kelly asked him if this was the kind of person who should be sitting in the Oval Office. He replied that he had no time for “political correctness.’’
      After the debate, Trump called Kelly a “bimbo” on Twitter, saying she “behaved very badly” and some of her questions “were not nice.” He also said in a post-debate interview, “You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out her wherever.” 
     This, of course, is Trump and, predictably, he does not apologize for anything he said. He mistakes common decency for political correctness. He is a bully and an embarrassment as a presidential candidate for a major party, but an embarrassment created by the very Fox News network for whom Kelly works. And he gets applause and laughs from Republican audiences who come to hear him say what many of them apparently believe.
       But not one of the other nine men on stage with Trump on Thursday saw fit to call him out for being a sexist pig. In fact, most of them had their own fuel to add to the anti-female furor. There was Sen. Marco Rubio insisting that women who were rape or incest victims should carry their pregnancies to term and Gov. Scott Walker refusing to make an exception on abortion if the woman’s life were at risk. Even after the debate, not one of the 16 other Republican candidates for president could simply say straight out that Trump’s remarks were crude, offensive, or, at the very least, inappropriate.
      Even the lone female candidate, Carly Fiorina, relegated to the junior varsity debate of seven candidates that preceded the main event, couldn’t call Trump out by name. She only managed to say, “It’s not helpful to call people names” or “engage in personal insult.” Fiorina is a graduate of Stanford, Maryland and MIT and ran Hewlett Packard for six years. If Trump were one of her executives at HP and said the things he has said about women, you can believe he would have heard, “You’re fired!” loud and clear. But she’s running for president as a Republican and so she apparently feels she can’t afford to insult the people who show up to listen to Trump say whatever comes into his mind. By the way, she also opposes paid maternity leave.
       There’s more. There’s Jeb Bush insisting that the federal government spends too much money on women’s health care and the willingness of several GOP candidates to shut down the federal government to avoid funding for Planned Parenthood, which is a vital source of health care for millions of women and, although attacked routinely by Republicans as a source of abortions, is, in fact, a major force for reducing the number of abortions.
       Some Republican “strategists” say the media focus on Trump and his penchant for insulting large groups of people (Mexican immigrants are “rapists and murderers,” Sen. John McCain is “no war hero” because he was captured), will not do any lasting harm to the party because Trump will not win the nomination. That is absurd.
       Whether he is the eventual candidate or not, Trump has already shown the GOP for what it is -- a party driven by fear. There is a pathological fear of offending the ultra-conservative, white, mostly male, “Christian” moralists who threaten to reject any Republican candidate who does not share their fears of people who are different from them, be they non-white, gay, non-Christian, young, immigrant, or even a president of the United States who happens to be black.
        Now, it’s women. More than half the population of the country. Without strong support from women, no candidate can be elected president. In every presidential election since 1988, women have supported the Democratic candidate. Yet not one Republican candidate for president this year has something to offer females as a reason for deserving their votes. It is a cavalcade of clowns (Trump, Rick Perry, Ted Cruz, Ben Carson, Bobby Jindal), con men (Mike Huckabee, Rand Paul), bullies (Chris Christie), religious zealots (Rick Santorum), phonies in the pocket of PACS (Bush, Walker, Rubio) and fear-mongers (too many to list).
        North Korea changed its time zone because it hates Japan. However impractical the move, it won’t do serious harm and North Korea actually has some history to help justify it (World War II). Why Republicans are behaving as if they hate women is incomprehensible and possibly suicidal. And they can’t blame it all on Donald Trump.

bobgaydos.blogspot.com

E-cigs: Way to quit smoking or new way to get hooked?

Addiction and Recovery

By Bob Gaydos

Is it a Catch-22 or a smoke screen? Are e-cigarettes the most promising product to come along to help smokers quit their nicotine addiction, or are they a clever, new way to get non-smokers hooked? Or, are they both?

At this point, no one can say for sure, but there appears to be an informal and growing consensus that electronic cigarettes represent a real health benefit for longtime smokers. That’s because e-cigs do not contain tobacco and the many harmful substances that are released and inhaled when cigarettes are smoked. At the same time, there is concern that too little is known about possible negative health effects on e-cig users and bystanders of chemicals that are released when their vapor is inhaled.

That is an important health issue, but the purpose of this column is to discuss addiction. In that regard, again because of the newness of the product, there is too little information to know if e-cigs, as widely touted, can actually help smokers break their nicotine addiction. Even more significantly, as the Food and Drug Administration says on its web site, “It is not known whether e-cigarettes may lead young people to try other tobacco products, including conventional cigarettes, which are known to cause disease and lead to premature death.”

As public health campaigns against tobacco products have

sharply reduced sales of tobacco products in the United States, e-cigarettes have quickly blossomed into a $2-plus billion industry that shows no signs of slowing down.

Cities and states have scrambled to pass laws regulating where e-cigs can be used. New York City bans using them wherever smoking is banned. (You must be 18 to buy them.) In an effort to provide uniformity to the law, the FDA is poised to extend some or all of its regulations for tobacco products to electronic cigarettes. That has a lot of smokers upset, saying the government shouldn’t make it harder for people trying to quit smoking by vaping -- the term for using e-cigarettes.

E-cigs use a battery to heat and vaporize nicotine that is mixed with water, flavoring and a base (two types) to carry the mixture. Unlike traditional cigarettes, cigars and pipes, there is no combustion -- the source for the health problems. For e-cig users, it’s more like inhaling fog, with a shot of nicotine (in varying doses), while enjoying the same hand-to-mouth, tactile experience of lighting up. Smoking without the smoke.

Again, that sounds like a sensible way to help longtime smokers avoid the serious health risks associated with using combustible cigarettes, while still getting their nicotine fix. It says nothing about that fix -- the addiction to nicotine. Some studies have raised concerns about the addictive power of the nicotine used in e-cigs, even at lower doses.

Meanwhile, many anti-smoking groups and health experts pose this question: If e-cigarettes are being sold as a way to reduce the harm of smoking tobacco for longtime smokers, why are they also being marketed in such a way as to attract thousands of young users who have never smoked traditional cigarettes? (It is worth noting that big tobacco companies are also big sellers of e-cigarettes.)

The fear, cited by the FDA as well as public health advocates, is that electronic cigarettes may act as a gateway product, luring young users into trying tobacco products.

A recent report in the Journal of the American Medical Association lends weight to that fear. The report noted that, in a recent study, 16 percent of 10th-graders reported using e-cigarettes. The study said that the group of teenagers included those who had smoked before (43 percent) and those who had not and that, in follow-up studies, the teens who had never smoked before were more likely to try smoking traditional cigarettes after trying e-cigs. Curiosity? Suggestibility? Peer pressure? Being a teenager?

Among those who suffer from it and those who treat it, there’s a saying: Addiction is a disease of more. In other words, if I can feel this good with just a little nicotine, how good can I feel with even more? Or, if this is such a cool experience -- making believe I’m smoking even though I’m not inhaling any nicotine -- how cool can it be with the real thing?

Sukhwinder Singh and his wife, Satnam Kaur, own Smokers Heaven, an e-cigarette shop in the Town of Wallkill in upstate New York. He says 75 percent of his customers are trying to quit smoking. “They’re trying to go from smoking thousands of chemicals, to one, nicotine.” He says many have been advised by their doctors to switch to e-cigs.

Singh says he only sells flavorings made in the United States (not China) because there are more controls on the ingredients, another concern for the FDA. “I don’t push nicotine on anyone,” he adds, saying that he tries to steer younger non-smokers who are curious about the product to non-nicotine mixtures. He and his wife sample the choices of hundreds of appetizing-sounding flavors -- without nicotine -- so they can tell their customers what they are like.

The fact that e-cigs are also cheaper than combustible cigarettes -- many more puffs per buck -- adds to the argument that they are a sensible, harm-reduction, health product.  But the FDA says there is as yet no proof of that. If they came under FDA control, e-cig makers would have to pass scientific muster to gain approval for sale. That could be expensive and time-consuming.

But even if producers eventually do offer scientific evidence of harm reduction, e-cigs are still delivery devices for a highly addictive substance -- nicotine. For this reason, the FDA is being urged, at the very least, to make e-cigarettes subject to the same regulations that prohibit companies from advertising and marketing tobacco products in ways designed to appeal to young consumers.

Are e-cigs safer for some? Maybe so. Time will tell. But even time won’t erase one question: If there’s no addiction to quit (no harm to reduce), why risk creating one?

rjgaydos@gmail.com

E-cigarettes and the FDA

Electronic cigarettes, also known as e-cigarettes, are battery-operated products designed to deliver nicotine, flavor and other chemicals. They turn chemicals, including highly addictive nicotine, into an aerosol that is inhaled by the user. Most e-cigarettes are manufactured to look like conventional cigarettes, cigars, or pipes. Some resemble everyday items such as pens and USB memory sticks.

Only e-cigarettes that are marketed for therapeutic purposes are currently regulated by the FDA Center for Drug Evaluation and Research. Currently, the FDA Center for Tobacco Products regulates cigarettes, cigarette tobacco, roll-your-own tobacco and smokeless tobacco.

FDA has issued a proposed rule that would extend the agency’s tobacco authority to cover additional products that meet the legal definition of a tobacco product, such as e-cigarettes.

http://www.fda.gov/NewsEvents/PublicHealthFocus/ucm172906.htm