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I've been wondering about the safety of vaping.

Glad to see it's not as bad as smoking (a low bar) but will still kill you.

>Glad to see it's not as bad as smoking (a low bar) but will still kill you.

I think inhaling anything into your lungs will probably affect them negatively. But it wouldn't surprise me if vaping was healthier than LA (or Beijing) air. Everything in moderation.

Crack cocaine, in moderation. Snorting detergent, in moderation. Inhaling strawberry-scented RCs because it's "probably" healthier than LA air - okay, in moderation.
> but will still kill you

This does not say that 'vaping will still kill you'. It doesn't say anything close.

What it says is that in a laboratory over a 48 hour period lung samples exposed to vapour caused inflammation and 'impaired activity'.

I've been wondering about the safety of all these cars in a city with a million people.

Glad to see it's not as bad as (frequent) smoking, but will still kill you.

"They caution the results are only in laboratory conditions and advise further research is needed to better understand the long-term health impact - the changes recorded took place only over 48 hours."
Are we supposed to look negatively upon this study because they say "more research is needed"? Sounds like good science to me.
We're supposed to realize that it isn't a "fact". It's a study that has produced interesting results that point to something, but until more research is done, it doesn't mean anything yet.

If that's your version of "negative", then yes, we should look negatively on it.

But more correctly, we should look skeptically on it. Just like all other studies that haven't been replicated scientifically.

In the right context, it's good science. The issue with this, and most science reporting, is that the context is missing or otherwise difficult to understand.

This is quite preliminary work, using cell cultures instead of actual organisms. It's quite common for effects seen in cell cultures to be very different from what is observed in whole, living tissue. But it can still be very useful for research: it can identify key diagnostic metrics, suggest mechanisms, and otherwise guide future research.

One issue here is that we already look at general lung function quite well: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-14043-2

This study examines the general lung function of non smokers who began vaping, with metrics taken from the start of vaporizer usage. This is about as direct as you can get, though is still an observational study (i.e. they did not randomly assign people to start vaping, for obvious ethical and adherence issues).

The synthesis of these studies would be to include more analysis of lung immune function. The results already suggest that inflammation is not an issue as suggested by the cell culture.

More than smoking damages it?
No, according to TFA, but I don't see how that's relevant.
From what I understand, some people have switched from smoking to vaping. Harm reduction and whatnot. Seems bit relevant no?
It's a good phenomenon, but it has nothing to do with the health effects of vaping. Bringing it up just muddles the waters. If a bunch of people switched from crack cocaine to cigarettes, would that warrant bringing it up every time a study came out about tobacco-related cancer?
A bit different, in that the primary use of e-cigarettes is for giving up proper cigarettes. So the fact that they're still considered preferable to real cigarettes is relevant.
The primary use of e-cigarettes/vapes is ingesting nicotine. Some people used e-cigarettes as a cessation aid. There are tons of young people who are growing up having never smoked cigarettes and who went directly to vaping. Their choice wasn't exactly "cigarettes or vape" it was "vape or not vape".
Not among my age cohort, many of whom have never encountered cigarettes.
> the primary use of e-cigarettes is for giving up proper cigarettes

What makes you think that? Juul didn't get it's crazy valuation because of old smokers. People that care more about money than lives are putting money into it because they are hooking teens.

I think your age might go into how relevant you think it is. I grew up with and around a lot of smokers. My teenaged kids are surrounded by people vaping. To me the relative harm seems relevant, to them it probably isn't.
They don't mention immune system cells specifically, but they do say vaping is still much less harmful

> However, Public Health England advises they are much less harmful than smoking and people should not hesitate to use them as an aid to giving up cigarettes.

-

What annoys me, though, is that while cigarettes are banned on most public places here (in France), people tend to use e-cigarette anywhere from work (open space) to transports, restaurants, bars, etc.

If they can't stop smoking, it seems to be better for them to be "vaping", but they should stop forcing us to endure their chemicals (although I'm not sure if this can be toxic for people around - but that's more or less the point too: we don't really know what it does to our body, so it shouldn't be allowed everywhere).

We've already fought cigarettes (well, I'm an ex smoker so I shouldn't really say "we" here), we shouldn't have to start over again for another form of smoking.

>The review concluded there was "overwhelming evidence" they were far safer than smoking and "of negligible risk to bystanders"
Remember the days when people were smoking in offices, univs, hospitals, etc? Vaping is 100x less disgusting, less harmful. I see people vaping and it doesn't smell, they don't leave ashes and butts everywhere and it doesn't bother me at all. The second hand nicotine vapor is not "a thing" unless you go to a room where a visible cloud of e-cigs vapor is present. I think we are much better off with people vaping than smoking. The only problem is that kids might start vaping because a lot of these juices are fruit flavored.
There are e-cigs that do smell, the one in my previous company "vaping" in the open space used some kind of flavor that had a strong [unpleasant] smell, even over 5 meters away.

Overall it's a great improvement. I just hope this improvement doesn't come with regressions (more [e-]smokers, especially in public areas and maybe in newer generations) precisely because it is so great an improvement.

You're absolutely right and those are somewhat bothersome. Also there are some units, the bigger ones I've noticed, that have the ability to create a thick dense cloud of vapor as if an invoked spirit is about to materialize into Alladin. These are not cool at all.

At the same time i saw small electronic cigarettes that people use discretely and I think that's a big win to the old nasty and stinky analog cigarettes.

negligible != to zero.

I don't think people have the right to harm others in the work place, so a ban is still appropriate.

Can we get automobiles to stop driving in our public spaces too?

Those are orders of magnitude worse than second-hand “chemicals” (VOCs?) from someone vaping.

While we are at it, let’s get rid of perfumes, deodorants, and body sprays. Also air fresheners and scented candles, pesticides, furniture flame retardants, dry-cleaned suits, many cleaning products, white-board markers, permanent markers, and everything else that off-gasses “chemicals”.

Key point from the article:

"Any smoker considering e-cigarettes should switch completely without delay."

Yeah, this really strikes me as the difference between "breathing car exhaust without a catalytic converter is toxic" and "breathing car exhaust can still be toxic" - yeah, both are bad, but one of them is orders of magnitude worse.
yeah, both are bad

So vaping should continue to be banned everywhere that smoking is banned. Most people do not consent to breathing other peoples second-hand drugs.

is it even possible to get a perceptible amount of nicotine through second hand smoke? isn't it mostly water vapor and annoying smells?
Lung damage too, according to this research. How does anyone even think it's OK to do that to other people?
You do a lot more lung damage by driving by them in car.

I'm not a vaper, never have been never will but I'd rather deal with the faint smell of strawberry than cigarette smoke any day.

Did you read the article?

> The review concluded there was "overwhelming evidence" they were far safer than smoking and "of negligible risk to bystanders"

And isn't this just a strawman? Are people proposing indoor vaping laws?

Proposing? They're all over the place. Vaping was quite quickly lumped in with smoking in my area. None indoors or within 10 feet of the doors etc.
Yeah, ban anxious, depressed, hungry, loud and sick people while at it. They affect other people's mental health and can infect them with weird stuff like rhinoviruses and influenza.

Shit, why stop there, why not round them up and put them in some temporary camps, there was an European guy who tried that and it worked pretty well.

Godwin's law in the wild. Nice.
Almost bot-like response.
Lol, I wonder if it would've been received better if I didn't hint at Mr. Hilter. I'd rather have someone smoke on the street than someone with the flu coughing my way.
The strategy that worked for me:

1) Find a flavor of e-liquid that you like well enough to use regularly.

2) Start off at the nicotine concentration that most closely replicates your smoking habit (for me 18mg ~ 1.5 packs/day)

3) Continue vaping at each concentration for a minimum of 2-3 months to ensure you are fully acclimated to one level before proceeding to the next.

4) Slowly reduce the nicotine level over time by buying liquid with less nicotine in it. (I went 18, 12, 9, 6, 3, 0. I mixed a 50/50 concentration of 12 and 6 to make 9.)

5) The transition from 3mg to 0 will be difficult, as this is the step where you're really leaving the nicotine. It's ok if you're sucking on the vaporizer nearly constantly.

6) Once fully accustomed to 0mg, putting the vape down altogether will be the hardest part. I replaced it with sugarfree chewing gum. I was very angry for the first couple of weeks, but it got better.

For me the ability to separate the nicotine from the smoking and conquer each addiction separately was the key to success.

I'm currently stuck on 3mg, and have been for over a year. I followed almost the exact same steps as you, but found as soon as I switched to 0mg I hated it and quit vaping all together.... then went back to smoking a month later.

I like the chewing gum idea. I'm not necessarily an anxious person, but I always need to be doing something. E.g. if I don't have my vape in my hand, I'm chewing my nails. Really sucks.

Yep, any less than 6mg and I'll buy a pack of cigarettes within the week. If I could take off 2-3 months, I'd go cold turkey, but the withdrawal effects are insane for me (anxiety, insomnia, massive depression, heavily impaired thinking, I can't do anything, literally.) I reckon it would take 2-3 weeks at most, but haven't had the time to try it.
Mixing various concentrations with 0 mg juice can help you move down even more gradually at the tail end. If the drop causes problems bump it back up for a few weeks and then try again. Even at 6 you are doing far less damage to yourself than that pack of smokes...
It may be worth a shot to mix up some 1.5 mg (assuming you're not already mixing to make 3). If you can get accustomed to an even smaller dose of nicotine first, it could possibly ease the transition to 0.

Everyone is different. The strategy that's ideal for me may be wholly unworkable for somebody else, but we seem to be in the same ballpark.

To be clear: switch to e-cigarettes from traditional smoking, because per the speaker of the above quote:

Martin Dockrell, tobacco control lead at Public Health England, said: "E-cigarettes are not 100% risk-free but they are clearly much less harmful than smoking."

Or:

You could just survive 24 hours without smoking, after which physical challenge is over. From there on it is just a fight against your brain, and also being aware of the root issue that made you pickup smoking.

- ex-smoker

Quitting smoking is one of the hardest things I've ever done. Just reading this thread has brought up some nostalgia.

I think ecigs and nicotine gum/lozenges should be encouraged if someone wants to quit. Many people have found them useful bridging the gap between smoking and cessation. Going even a few hours without anything is enough to cause some people give up. Having help might give them confidence to eventually follow through.

Trading addiction to cigarettes for addiction to vapes or gum is a step in the right direction, but I agree eventually you have to pay the piper.

Same here. Nicotine is perhaps the very worst drug known to humankind in terms of addictiveness:

* High lasts the shortest duration (a few seconds after the last inhale)

* High has a high physical factor (relaxation) but a low psychotropic factor (mood-altering effect like alcohol or mj), which is the opposite of something like psychedelics (which can be useful in curing addiction)

* High requires a physical adaptation (smoker's hack) to be felt most fully

* That physical adaptation is challenging to undo and takes at least 1 month (in my case 2) before cravings are replaced by disinterest or dislike

So the last 2 points were key for me. If anyone reading this is struggling, I highly recommend intermittent intense physical activity as a way to hack the physical adaptation process.

For me, squats work best. Go to the gym and try to get 15-20 reps of a weight you can manage, for at least 2 power sets. Something like: 95x10, 135x20, 135x15. I find if I do those at night and come home, my body rejects the thought of smoking because I'm already high on life. It also rejects alcohol to some degree which is nice for weight loss.

Once you've felt that lifter's high (not sure what to call it), you start feeling in control of your body's repair process. Then you notice it on the fun days too, like chest day. After 2-6 weeks, you'll likely find that cigarettes don't do much unless you smoke a couple in a row, but then they mostly make you sick, and you might find yourself going a day or two and forgetting to smoke.

Hope this helps someone.

I suspect there's a lot of variability in how hard it is quit nicotine.

I stopped smoking after a long pack a day habit with almost no difficulty. No serious physical withdrawal, no serious sustained cravings that persisted past a day or two.

I've had issues with other substances, so it wasn't my amazing willpower that made it easy

Why the downvotes? I was a smoker for twenty years, this is exactly how I quit smoking.
If you have not spoken about this with other people who have quit/are quitting, you should.

If you have spoken about quitting with other people who have quit or are still quitting, you would have found out that it is much harder for them than what you are proposing. That, or some vanishingly small chance was hit and you have only people around you who found quitting easy but somehow still smoked a lot before doing so.

I never claimed it was easy. I clearly stated you have to be aware of the root issue that caused picking up smoking.
Because your post posits that what works for you works for everyone and seems to ignore the experience of others that have quit
In this experiment, vapor "caused inflammation" and "impaired the activity of alveolar macrophages, cells that remove potentially damaging dust particles, bacteria and allergens."

So it's not great for lung function, but sounds orders of magnitude less bad for you than smoking cigarettes.

Anecdotally, I quit vaping recently, as I'd grown frustrated with the 'chasing the dragon' aspect (I was using its stimulant properties to help manage my ADHD). I now find I get winded much less easily and generally have a little more energy, which I've attributed to slightly improved lung function.

Off-topic: What did you end up replacing vaping for to help manage your ADHD? Or have you not found/(considered looking for) a replacement?
Firstly, I'm prescribed Vyvanse, which I find helps a lot— it's certainly my primary treatment method. I viewed the nicotine as a smaller, as-needed aid in persevering through long projects.

When I stopped (because I had my wisdom teeth extracted), I used a nicotine patch for a few weeks; however, I eventually found that simply being a little more physically active helped enough that I no longer feel the need for that extra cognitive "push".

Your story sounds much like mine - I took up vaping when I didn't have access to Vyvanse (between jobs). It helps, but I found I liked it enough to continue.

These days I use 6mg/ml juice, and use ~5ml per day on average. I've not found any real negative effects after about a year. I go increase and decrease my intake periodically, and the worst effect I've had is a "stuffy" feeling in the morning when I hadn't vaped anything the evening before. Even that doesn't seem to happen when I'm in a period of decreased usage; I've stopped for a day or two before and didn't really notice.

FWIW, nicotine does work as a cognitive stimulant, at least for me. It's nowhere near as powerful as Vyvanse, but it's effective enough that it helps me "get back in the flow" when I'm not interested in something but need to get it done.

Not OP, but myself and one other person has had some success with noopept and adrafinil (both in fairly small doses).

Noopept helped with thinking, while adrafinil helped with energy.

I still take them every once in a while. No ADHD meds for us anymore. YMMV

I applaud that they state it's still safer than regular cigarettes. I gifted a friend who is a smoker with an e-cig package. A couple of months later he is still smoking cigarettes as he thinks these may be more dangerous..
What does he base that conclusion on?
Silly headlines like e-cigarettes not as harmless as thought, etc..
Even this expert phrases it in a way that gives an impression that is completely contrary to reality:

> "I don't believe e-cigarettes are more harmful than ordinary cigarettes - but we should have a cautious scepticism that they are as safe as we are being led to believe."

I don't believe that crossing the street is more dangerous than cliff-diving, but we should be cautiously skeptical that it's safe.

resolution of cognitive dissonance?
Fear of the unknown. We still don't know the long term effects, so he may be on to something.

Also it's pretty crazy to put a battery that close to your face regularly. I know only a few have exploded, but the risk of that alone would deter me.

>it's pretty crazy to put a battery that close to your face regularly

Well... Do you ever answer the phone?

One thing I'm confused about with vaping:

There is plenty of information about vaping w/ e-cigarettes. The negative effects and what not.

However this information is not extended to vaping marijuana. I understand that e-cigs use oil/liquid of some sort. In the marijuana world there is dry herb vaping (heating the plant until it vaporizes), oil, wax, etc. I imagine some of the e-cig issues extends to marijuana for oil and wax perhaps but does dry herb suffer the same consequences.

I've tried researching this information but usually all the comes up are "e-cigs are bad" or "vaping vs smoking marijuana" articles. It would seem marijuana is relatively hush hush in this category.

Part of the reason you see less research on marijuana is because there are more obstacles to doing such research. Here is a 2017 National Academy of Sciences report on the topic:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK425757/

> [...] the federal government has not legalized cannabis and continues to enforce restrictive policies and regulations on research into the health harms or benefits of cannabis products that are available to consumers in a majority of states

FFS, if I would want to invest into something that has barriers to conduct a research, I'd give zero fucks about the law. Zero. These governments drive me nuts.

This is not a position that can be taken by people who intend to publish research under their own names. It'd be akin to signing a confession.
Correct. This is exactly what I wouldn't care about. You first create it and then you let it evolve on its own. Like Bitcoin. Anonymously.
Unpublished anonymous illegal drug research isn't exactly in short supply. Credibility is.
Go research it in other countries then (Canada, Holland, et al)
Think about how vaporizing dry plant material works: you're using low, sustained heat to vaporize the oils without igniting anything. You're still inhaling a viscus substance, and there are going to be negative consequences to that. You're also going to vaporize things other substances in the plant matter that may not exist in the oil/wax forms depending on extraction method.

TL;dr- Vaping is better than smoking, but that still doesn't mean it's harmless or "good".

The issue with nicotine vaping is that the nicotine needs a carrier, which is usually (always?) propylene glycol. Glycol is fine to ingest, but not inhale. In addition, oil/glycol vapes produce some combustion, and glycol can produce some pretty toxic stuff when burned.

If you get unflavored oil/wax that was extracted using superfluid CO2 as a solvent, there is nothing that wasn't originally in the plant. It should be strictly no worse, and probably much better than smoking. However, the cheaper and/or flavored vape cartridges often were extracted using glycol, and thus have the same problems as nicotine vapes.

These comments make me sad.

People here are mostly saying "its better than smoking", but vaping is becoming extremely popular among kids who would never think of smoking.

We need to get rid of nicotine.

I think it could be safely assumed that vaporizing nicotine and propylene glycol would lead to some negative health implications. Still, great job by the researchers in building precident.

That being said, I'm personally curious above the health implications of dry herb being vaporized at a controlled temperature, that prevents any combustion, and controls the release of carcinogenic materials like Benzene/ammonia.(produced at around 400 degrees by marijuana vaporization)

Think of a scenario like this: what if one uses a Volcano Vaporizer with dry herb (marijuana). What are the negative health implications there at certain, controlled temperatures? What about the beneficial implications? Do they cancel out?

Or are the negative health implications on par with the sensationalized articles about eating cured meat giving you a whopping 2% overall increased risk of cancer? Basically, I'm very curious if there is a way to drastically reduce the risk of vaporizing with the controlled vaping of dry herbs vs. these e-liquids containing nicotine/other nasty things.

With marijuana cartridges, I have been wondering what kind of temperature something like a 1100mAh c-cell battery maxes out at; because they can get hot.

I use mmj for an autoimmune disease, so it feels pretty ironic to read vaping damages immune system cells; will have to go back to the Volcano.

> I use mmj for an autoimmune disease, so it feels pretty ironic to read vaping damages immune system cells; will have to go back to the Volcano.

Pure MMJ extracts are a different beast. This is almost definitely related to PG/VG base used in electronic cigarettes. PG is used to kill airborne bacteria in hospitals for instance.

Though I've grown up surrounded by drug use, I still find it shocking and fascinating to read people's comments about their addiction.

It's hard to fully grasp the mind-fuck of being reliant on your own self destruction.

And it is known by the state of California to give cancer to rats - just like anything else in California
Seems intuitive to me-- anything you ingest into your body has potential for harm. We pay a price every time we take something in.

Vaping and marijuana are two hot topics these days. They're less costly than tobacco and alcohol, but are certainly not free.

In the end, we all decide how to spend our lives. Some pleasures are worth the cost, others are not.

for a second I was worried that this refers to vaping weed - my little VapCap M can't do no harm ...