Personal Injury: How Safe are E-Cigarettes | BPC Law Blog

We’ve known for decades that cigarettes are deadly and can cause so much damage to your body. In a move to help smokers quit, e-cigarettes have become extremely popular. However, many Sydney lawyers are wondering if they’ll be approached by smokers who want to sue the manufacturers of e-cigarettes for personal injury. So how safe are e-cigarettes, and are they just as bad as the real thing?

An e-cigarette

E-cigarettes are a relatively new invention, and like all new things, we don’t know an awful lot about the long-term effects of replacing cigarettes with e-cigarettes, or personal vapourisers as they’re also known. What we do know is some of the short-term benefits for smokers switching to e-cigarettes.

One of the main selling points of the e-cigarette is that it’s got a high success rate in getting long-time smokers to quit smoking cigarettes. The traditional e-cigarette works by evaporating a special liquid so that it becomes a nicotine vapour. When you smoke an e-cigarette, you inhale the nicotine vapour and receive the same effect that you would from a normal cigarette without the bad side-effects like lung damage and cancer. But it can’t all be good, can it?

Unfortunately, in terms of using the e-cigarette as a part of an arsenal to help smokers quit, Australia is very far behind other countries like the UK. In Australia, e-cigarette or personal vapouriser devices are sold freely, but they aren’t classed as a therapeutic good. More worryingly is the fact that the devices have no real benefit for smokers without the nicotine solution, and as nicotine is classed as a poison in Australia, there’s nowhere to buy it except overseas from less than reputable sources.

This means that the real danger of the e-cigarette is not the device itself or it’s intended use but the nicotine solution inside. If the solution is created and handled properly there’s no concern, but without regulations and legislation to allow it to be created in Australia, e-cigarette smokers are having to put themselves at risk to quit traditional tobacco smoking by using an e-cigarette with a nicotine solution that’s not up to code.