PUFF AWAY SMOKELESSLY

SMOKE-FREE: Greetings, smokers! Now you can bury your bad consciences because here it is, the harmless cigarette that tastes of tobacco, satisfies the nicotine craving and can – almost – replace the conventional cigarette. The only thing it doesn’t provide is the main health damager, the smoke.

With nearly 1,800 Europeans dying every day as a result of smoking, the announcement of the smokefree cigarette sounds like the answer to health authorities’ longstanding prayers for an end to smoking. The new invention may well achieve that, believes the inventor of the considaret, pharmaconomist Anders Leonhard Jensen. He is busy getting final approvals and reckons that the first 40,000 packs of the smokefree cigarette will reach the market around Christmas 2007.

“We are currently in the process of fitting out production facilities while we wait for final approval from the Danish Medicines Agency. When it comes, smokers can puff away with a clear conscience.”

Tobacco taste
Anders Leonhard Jensen, 47, is a smoker himself and has been since he was 16. For the last 8 years, he and an old school friend have experimented with the idea of developing a replacement cigarette, which tastes of tobacco and satisfies the need for nicotine, but does not create the harmful smoke.

“In contrast to smoking cessation products, the considaret, as we call it, contains not only nicotine but an originallydeveloped flavouring which satisfies the smoker’s need to enjoy a cigarette,” says Jensen. “The nicotine, which is a liquid, is extracted from ordinary tobacco and encapsulated together with the flavouring in a small aluminium capsule which is placed in a plastic tube. A small device perforates the capsule, whose contents are then inhaled. The effect lasts for about 10 minutes, just like a conventional cigarette.”

’Souls’
To make the illusion of smoking without smoke as convincing as possible, the cigarette tubes will be wrapped in cigarette paper and sold in a traditional cigarette pack. The price will probably be the same as for cigarettes.

“Smoking dependency has many aspects,” says Anders Leonhard Jensen. “But two key parameters are the physical dependency on nicotine and psychology. Smokers react like Pavlov’s dogs: situations, sounds and taste experiences make smokers reach automatically for a cigarette. So if a replacement cigarette is going to work, it is important that it both looks like and tastes like the real thing. And so does our ’Souls’, which will be the name of the considaret.”

http://www.considaret.dk