Well it isn't harmless, and transitioning from a traditional tobacco cigarette to an e-cigarette doesn't mean you can just start smoking everywhere.
People that fixate on the small but technically true fact that it is "harmful" are doing much more harm to people's health than e-cigs, because each comment to that effect potentially dissuades another smoker from making the switch.
Of course, everything can be taken to extremes. Even drinking water can kill you, after all, and the dose is probably easier to get than in e-cigs.
I'm sure stage smoke isn't also a viable insecticide.
Growing up around people in the tobacco industry I know nicotine is lethal and easily absorbed through the skin, and not something you want to be around if you don't have to -- and especially not if someone has breathing problems.
The long term consumption data will take a while to build up about all the health effects. It's not a good idea to be a guinea pig for that.
I'm saying I don't want to breathe any of it I don't have to second hand, and the argument that I breathe liquid smoke at concerts or Christmas festivals is beside the point.
Forget addiction in users who decide to smoke it, nictotine a neurotoxin and exhaling it to people who don't want it in public places is inconsiderate.
It's not, it's about magnitude of danger and pointing out it's not a kind of danger that's worth worrying about. This is the rational approach; contrast with media fear-mongering that likes to point out "a connection" between X and some illness, without mentioning how insignificant the connection is. Or, in this case, without noticing that you ingest the exact same thing in similar amounts from different sources, and those sources somehow aren't considered bad for you.
> Forget addiction in users who decide to smoke it, nictotine a neurotoxin
So is water, when overdosed.
> and exhaling it to people who don't want it in public places is inconsiderate.
I totally agree with that! But let's call a spade a spade - it's inconsiderate, not dangerous.
So, it's not that bad is simply not a defense. If you want nicotine ware a patch, chew gum etc. If you want some other crap in your lungs, do it somewhere that does not impact me.
There are countless things that are "not that bad" and yet shown to be linked to various diseases. We don't care about them because that's the very definition of danger being not in any way significant.
In the course of this discussion thread, we've jumped from the danger of e-cig vapor (which is nil) to the danger of pure nicotine (which is also nil) and now we're talking about pollution. Can't we just agree that those are three separate issues (two of which are non-issues, and third isn't really discussed by people right now)? So far everything is showing that e-cigs are a neglible hazard to smokers and their surroundings. We should be happy we've found a good alternative for the decades-old problem, instead of trying to destroy it by overblowing its negative effects by orders of magnitude.
[0] - Googling just now, I found that there are reasons for considering cigarette smoke an air pollution - http://epi.yale.edu/the-metric/considering-smoking-air-pollu...
[1] - I haven't seen any analysis about potential of e-cigarette smoke becoming a significant pollutant; it most likely won't be in terms of particulate matter, but maybe the smoke itself is bad for atmosphere. I don't know. But even if, that's a discussion about environmental impact (and a one that no one is having right now), not about direct health effects.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicotine_poisoning#cite_note-L...
"An accidental ingestion of only 6 mg may be lethal to children. [16]"
So, safe as long as you ignore the dead people?
[0] - http://www.electroniccigaretteconsumerreviews.com/how-much-n...
aka second hand smoke is not limited to other people.
It's only the right thing to do.
That's just obnoxious.
"the default is not dump whatever you want into the air."
Lol. Pass the news to industry. And seriously, with your attitude, you should be living a 100 miles away from the nearest car.
but if the Sun had less UV, you would see its texture map all tessellated.
> So, it's not that bad is simply not a defense. If you want nicotine ware a patch, chew gum etc. If you want some other crap in your lungs, do it somewhere that does not impact me.
Dude, the health-impact of getting worked up about this is already magnitudes more than the health-impact of the thing you are worried about.
It's one thing that there are studies showing nicotine is a harmful substance (which isn't even quite as straightforward as it seems), it's an entirely other thing to quantify the risk of exposure to an occasional whiff of e-cig exhaust, in the context of traffic pollution, fireplaces, incense, air fresheners, people farting, or investigating where a burning smell comes from.
The latter 9 times out of 10 involves burning plastic, which going near to instead of away from, for a minute, just to check, is way super more stupid harmful to your health than actually taking a full drag of an e-cig. I owe my life to people that weren't afraid to do that (still insignificant) damage to their health, which is a million times worse than the perceived harm you are whining about.
Hell your presence on my planet is already more damaging to my health than you catching a whiff of e-cig. So nothing personal but kindly maybe get off it. That, or learn how to rationally deal with very very tiny probabilities (it's not intuitive, but also not that hard).
Your anti-nicotine crusade is attacking people who aren't using nicotine, without making the distinction.
They say "this is safe", while ingesting a particularly evil toxin that is lethal in very small quantities (like a drop or two will make you violently sick). Yes, there are other toxins, but ... again, this is perfectly avoidable and nobody has any business making others who do not choose to be exposed to it.
People should have the right to not come in contact with that.
can we please stick to the facts?
a drop of nicotine will kill you. it's easily more than the above stated lethal dose of 6mg.
and before you think that proves your point, it actually just proves that you can't properly keep orders of magnitude apart.
if you consider "a drop or two" as "very small quantities" then I have some news for you: there's essential nutrients your body needs to survive, that would be lethal if you ingested "a drop or two".
how much mg nicotine is there in a whiff of second-hand e-cig smoke?
how much whiffs are there in "a drop or two" of nicotine?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicotine_poisoning#cite_note-L...
Please read the rest of that article, including the paragraph you quote from, to see why you generally can't get nicotine poisoning from even hardcore smoking.
Also, this doesn't answer GP's question about nicotine causing breathing problems - besides the pedantic observation that your lungs will shut down with the rest of your body when you get lethally poisoned.
Is it bad to jump to conclusions that it's safe and everybody else should be happy inhaling your exhaust believing so?
What someone does in their own homes is fine, though this thread was discussing vaping-exhaust being fine in public, and I don't believe people have that right.
Smoking was predominent in restaurants and public areas a while back and we thought it would be impossible to go away, and now that it has, it's been absolutely fantastic.
This is basically just a "safer", not "safe" method that still affects people in a given area.
I'd rather people just use patches or something else rather than vaping down the street, in malls, or sidewalks. This would be completely fine - mind you - that it is likely to have very negative health consequences to those people.
Why?
Vaping e-cigs in your own home is merely a bunch of orders of magnitude less harmful than doing it in your face.
And according to your reasoning so far, several orders of magnitude less harmful, means you should only be mildly less concerned about that.
Quickly, I hear someone's burning plastic in China.
Are you sure you replied to the right comment? I don't see how any of this relates to what I said. Also, by all means, please show me studies linking nicotine (outside of cigarette smoke) to serious health problems.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240527487037495045761723...
Then tell me how much nicotine one would ingest from second-hand vaping in public places. Harm by homeopathy?
For me it is just an inconvenience, but I do feel a bit sick in department stores because in so many of them, you have to enter via the 1st floor fragrance department. But apparently that makes commercial sense, i.e. the additional sales to impulsive perfume-buyers (profiled mostly to be women) is more important than the non-sales of anything to me.
Nicotine, flavorings, everything else, goes in your lungs and plenty of it comes right back out.
"Smoking excessive amounts of tobacco has also led to poisoning; a case was reported where two brothers smoked 17 and 18 pipes of tobacco in succession and were both fatally poisoned."
"The estimated lower limit of a lethal dose of nicotine has been reported as between 500 and 1000 mg.". To get directly hurt by nicotine available in consumer products, you'd have to either drink up 20 bottles of high-nicotine-concentration e-cig liquid or be an infant.
That case you quote (surrounded by the context which says that you can't get serious nicotine poisoning from smoking in any reasonable way) is equivalent to drinking up 10+ liters of water in succession, at which point you also die.
But, Death is not the only harm. Kids have gotten series nicotine poising from smoking less than a pack. It's only fatal poisonings that are rare. "The initial symptoms are mainly due to stimulatory effects and include nausea and vomiting, excessive salivation, abdominal pain, pallor, sweating, hypertension, tachycardia, ataxia, tremor, headache, dizziness, muscle fasciculations, and seizures.[4]"
Sure, being stuck near an e-sig users may only cause a massive headache, nausea, and a case of the shakes, but that's still not OK.
Let me illustrate what I mean:
> "The estimated lower limit of a lethal dose of nicotine has been reported as between 500 and 1000 mg."
The highest commercially-available concentration of nicotine in ready-to-vape e-juice is 36mg nic/ml. This is considered extremely high nic, and is rarely purchased anymore. So, if you drank 14-28ml of this juice straight from the bottle, that might be a lethal dose (typical bottles are 15-30ml). I can think of several substances you likely have in your house today that have similar levels of toxicity.
My e-cig is loaded with 1.5mg/ml or 0mg/ml juice depending. I vape ~3ml/hour at full-bore. If I absorb only 50% of the vaporized nic, I am releasing 2.25mg of nic into the air over an hour. At 2 puffs per minute that's 0.02mg per puff, distributed over the volume of the vapor cloud.
If you walk through my vapor cloud on a sidewalk, your nic exposure is truly insignificant.
I -- and all friends I have who also vape -- make it a point to not subject others to our habit, out of simple human decency. But let's be real: you're far worse off walking by an idling car than you are walking through a single vapor cloud.
However, your friends are not the only smokers. A doorman may be slightly down wind of a 'smokers area' which get's a long swath of people over the day. Sure, he might get 0.1mg per smoker but multiply that by 200 people who go out twice a day and that's 40mg which is probably not lethal but still plenty to cause issues. Not to mention withdrawal issues on his days off.
In terms of e-sigs, the second hand dose is likely lower. Assuming the unregulated doses are as described. But, if people assume a poorly ventilated break room is ok then people who work next to it may also get a fairly high dose.
This volume increases by the third power of distance--give or take a factor of 3 depending on wind strength and direction, it'll roughly be a cone of sorts.
So start with the quoted-above 2.25mg per hour of "in your face" nicotine, which we'll assume you could ingest if you keep breathing within a cubic foot (0.028 cubic metre) of a single smoker's mouth for the entire hour.
Say the doorman is standing 25m (~80ft) away. (if he lets a crowd of smokers gather much closer to his door, he's not really doing his job properly)
So that's distance times 80, meaning volume times 512,000. But it's a wispy wind-blown cone gushing in the specific direction of our poor doorman, so divide by 3, is 170,000 times the volume.
THEN, you multiply by the busy number of 200 people that are there all the time (very busy smoker's spot, this).
I get 2.6µg per hour. But only on the days when the wind has it in specifically for him. Standing within 25 metres from a crowd of 200 people constantly smoking e-cigs all day.
Case two, people thinking e-sigs are 100% safe and smoking inside.
In both cases each persion thinks there harm is meaningless but they add up.
You do not know this, no one does. At most, there is some evidence that some flavors might possibly be harmful - at what concentrations and for what duration of exposure, no one knows.
Some comments from a 2007 article about Salvia: http://host.madison.com/news/opinion/mailbag/salvia-harmless...
Before the drug crusaders wheel out the usual hysterical lies in their attempts to outlaw salvia divinorum, it is worthwhile to notice that no serious problems have been associated with salvia divinorum to date. There are no deaths, no desperate addictions and no robberies, assaults or murders connected to salvia.
here is an herb whose effects last a matter of minutes. It doesn't produce a rush or euphoria. It's not addictive, and it makes users feel anti-social, so it's hardly going to become a fad among teenagers (unless, of course, you heighten its intrigue by making it illegal).
So why are legislators considering banning this plant? Do we even need reasons anymore to be reactionary and ban everything we don't understand?
Sound familiar?
Here's a random sample:
"Second-hand smoke from electronic cigarettes may be less harmful than their tobacco-laden cousins, but they still release toxins into the air, according to a new study.
For the study, published in the Journal of Environmental Science, Processes and Impacts, researchers at the University of Southern California analyzed second-hand smoke from e-cigarettes and found an overall 10-fold decrease in exposure to harmful particles compared to traditional cigarette smoke. However, they did find a significant increase in exposure to some harmful metals coming from e-cigarette smoke.
Second-hand smoke from e-cigarettes also yielded exposure to almost no polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons — cancer-causing compounds known as organic carcinogens — that are released into the air as tobacco cigarettes burn. But despite having less harmful organic compounds and an overall decrease in toxic metal emissions, e-cigarette smoke did contain chromium and nickel at levels four times higher than tobacco cigarettes. Lead and zinc were also found in the smoke, but they occurred at levels lower than regular cigarettes."
I walked down the street a couple of weeks ago and saw massive smoke coming from around the corner. And when I smelled it I thought "Someone's really hitting that BBQ!". It was a guy standing on his balcony vaping. Releasing giant clouds of vapor.
I'm all for vaping, but I imagine that the people who take it to the limits are gonna find out eventually that it can be unhealthy too (as anything done in excess)
I'm one of the "thick clouds" crowd - because my first attempt to switch from "traditional" cigarettes failed because the feel of smoking was missing. I'm now on nicotine-free oils, and plan on stopping outright over the next few months, as the physiological need is now beaten - just the psychological "what to do with my hands" end of things to treat.
As to why I think it's a good idea - don't know if I do, but I think it's a better idea than smoking. I'm no longer constantly phlegmatic, I don't wake up in the morning out of breath, I can taste things again, I've stopped wheezing. Those all seem like good things to me.
Finally, I've never seen someone going "cough cough urgh" at a fog machine at an event or disco - and it's the same damned stuff.
That's precisely why I don't go to discos or theaters that say they are using fog machines.
Whut. I'm a smoker, and standing next to such a machine, definitely makes me go "cough cough urgh", if I happen to breathe a lungful when it goes off in my face. Even while smoking :) (back in the times when you could smoke inside clubs) (not that I want those times back, mind you, it was a good change and it's making it easier for me to try and quit)
Yes, I don't like winter either.
> And when I smelled it I thought "Someone's really hitting that BBQ!"
This implies that there is some serious crap in the vapor, so that you can smell it from the distance (and it smells like BBQ).
if you need nicotine, get the patch. if you need to quit cigarettes or even e-cig the patch is probably good too and in most cases free from your health plan
Your assumption that I'm doing something wrong is silly. I'm must a human "smoke" machine.
The thing is, after 30 years of puritans campaigns against smokers, they have managed to teach you that anyone who produces white clouds is somehow dirty.
http://www.jpeds.com/article/S0022-3476%2842%2980046-3/abstr...
That's psychological issue of yours. You think that, so you "feel" that.
"Smoking everywhere" didn't bother people until others suggested it should. Its just interesting...