Is there an alternative to cigarettes that doesn't contain nicotine?

Have a few questions about e-cigarettes and nicotine gum and smoking. please answer if you can?

• i've been researching them for a little while, just out of curiousity. i don't really need them or anything, but i really wanna try them to see what they're like compared to an actual cigarette. anyway, they've (ap has been reporting about the fda's concers) been saying that e-cigarettes have carcenigens in them, which cause cancer, but all nicotine has carcenigens in it, so why haven't there been any concerns for use of nicotine gum or patches? a lot of the videos i've been watching are about a year old, so i don't know if they've fixed the problems with certain ingredients, so if you know whether they have or not, could you tell me. also, everyone keeps saying that these aren't proven to help you quit cigarettes, but they're essentially the same thing; the nicotine, the method of ingestion, and i've heard the taste is similar too, but they don't have the harmful smoke, so why wouldn't you believe that they would help you quit? can minors buy these, since they don't produce smoke? i know they have nicotine in the, and i think there's a law against minors possesing anything with nicotine in it, but i haven't looked into it. would you happen to know if there is or not?

• Answer:

  There is a lot of money behind the disinformation you have read concerning the e-cigarette. The tobacco industry does not want these things around and the pharmaceutical industry is certainly not happy about them taking people away from their patch and nicotrol gum. The FDA receives the vast majority of their funding in the form of taxes from Big Pharma and Big Tobacco, so they are hardly impartial observers in this fight. In the laboratory study that they claim to have done on only two brands of e-cigarettes, they say they found a "immeasurable trace amount" of a carcinogen - the same carcinogen that is in the patch and nicorette gum - in exactly one of the 17 cartridges that they say they tested. The fact is, a tomato has more carcinogens in it. The FDA is receiving over $100 million from the tobacco industry right now and by the year 2014, that amount is supposed to increase to nearly 3/4 of a billion dollars. When asked by major health organizations to provide the documentation of their laboratory tests and the test's methodology, the FDA refused to provide it. Because there are no laws governing the use or sale of electronic cigarettes in most states, technically there is no law preventing someone under the age of 18 from buying one. No e-cigarette company that I know of, however, will sell to minor. They don't want to give the political lobbyist groups any more ammunition.