They look like cigarettes and are smoked like cigarettes, but makers of herbal tobacco-free cigarettes tout their products as aids for smokers seeking to kick the habit.
Anti-smoking advocates and doctors, on the other hand, have condemned them, but public officials say there is no legal basis for pulling them from the shelves.
Herbal cigarettes are considered neither a food nor a drug and so are not directly under the control of the Department of Health (DOH), said Yu Po-tswen (游伯村), an official at the Bureau of Health Promotion.
"There's no evidence that herbal cigarettes work [to help people give up smoking] and they might in fact cause harm," Yu said. "But there's not much we can do beyond fining companies NT$100,000 for unsubstantiated advertising."
Fines have not deterred one company, Ever Bright Hitech Corp, Yu said. At NT$2000 per carton, the fine amounts to only 50 cartons of product, he said.
"From this we can see that they must be making massive profits," he said.
The company Web site claims smokers can gradually replace cigarettes with their product until they are no longer addicted to nicotine.
The site claims that the product is "100 percent herbal" but does not detail the composition.
Ever Bright Hitech refused to answer questions from the Taipei Times. However, their Web site shows documents from the DOH stating that that the product is neither a drug or a food.
"We have received many calls to our hotline from people trying to quit smoking, complaining that they have spent their money on herbal cigarettes and that they don't work," said Lin Ching-lee (林清麗), director of the tobacco control division at the John Tung Foundation, a health promotion organization.
"Although they don't contain tobacco, nobody really knows what these herbal cigarettes are made of," Lin said. "Smoking herbal cigarettes might still put harmful substances into your body."
"More importantly, they don't work. This saps both the consumer's wallet and their will to quit," she said.
Lin recommends tobacco replacement products containing nicotine delivered through patches or gum for those who want to quit smoking.
Lin said herbal cigarette-replacement products are usually imported from China.
"The government needs to figure out how this product entered Taiwan. Is it a medicine? Is it a food? We cannot let it go unregulated," she said.
Yang Chen-chang (楊振昌), a toxicologist at Taipei Veterans General Hospital, said that he could not comment specifically on the product without knowing more about its composition, but pointed out that being tobacco-free does not mean that herbal cigarettes are safe.
"It's very possible that the herbal cigarettes will still produce tar and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons," Yang said. "And any smoke inhaled into the lungs will almost certainly contain harmful fine particulate matter and carbon monoxide."
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching