The New Straits Times, November 1, 1996
Q: Recently I read about a new vanilla-flavoured cigarette being promoted by the tobacco industry. Is it a safer brand of cigarette? Is it all right if I try it?
A: A Singapore based multinational tobacco company recently started selling what it claimed to be the world's first vanilla-flavoured cigarette. However, it is important to understand that this has not in any way changed the dangerous associated with cigarette smoking.
To give flavour to cigarettes is nothing new since many chemicals are being added to different types of cigarettes to give them their own 'taste'. The kretek or clove-cigarette is one good example. Others have a more subtle taste.
In fact, vanilla is yet another chemical that joins the thousands that are already known to exist in a cigarette. To date, almost 4,000 substances have been identified, some poisonous and very detrimental to health.
And even as the vanilla-flavoured cigarettes are being promoted, two teams of scientists have a long last demonstrated the final link in the chain between cigarettes and cancer. In a landmark study, they showed precisely how a chemical in cigarette smoke can damage a gene (identified as 'p53') that otherwise suppresses the haywire cell growth of cancer, making the body more susceptible to cancer.
Although vanilla in general poses no known health dangers, its use in cigarettes seems trivial if not outright dubious. The cigarette company claimed that the flavouring is to make smoking more socially acceptable and eliminate annoyance to non-smokers by adding 'perfumed' scent to the polluted air. This is tantamount to saying that it all right to expose oneself to cigarette smoke.
Such a claim is a poor attempt to shift the focus of consumers away from the many health hazards related to cigarette smoke. It is an insult to argue that the non-smokers are only concern about the bad odour of the smoke, and not the pollutants in the smoke itself. Cigarette smoke is just as dangerous and non-smokers are invariably forced to inhale them as passive smokers.
The vanilla scent can only mask the nauseating odour of cigarette smoke, not the harmful effects is causes. This is a point that cannot be overemphasised; if one is really concerned, then the best way is to stop dealing with cigarette altogether, never mind the vanilla scent.
The so-called new cigarette is another sales gimmick 'to sweeten the medicine' as it were, except that unlike cigarettes, medicines do more good than harm. The more appropriate description in this case should perhaps be 'sweetening the dadah' because cigarette-smoking is more akin to drug-taking behaviour, and cigarettes are just another type of dadah which is abusive, addictive and habit-forming.
