Safer to Puff, E-Cigarettes Can’t Shake Their Reputation as a Menace

It was easy because of how gradual it was and that I was still able to satisfy the oral habit of smoking while kicking the chemical dependency. Smoking while driving was a huge hangup.

As a side note - if you buy good hardware and good quality liquid, the whole experiene is better than smoking as well. Forget the vape "culture". IMO ecigs are more convenient, taste better, feel better, and so on.

These anti-vape ads infuriate me. I don't even use one anymore, haven't for over a year, and every time I see one of those ads I think there might go another person who had a real chance to quit smoking cigarettes.

She had an infarctus (not myocard it seems though) last month, obviously cardio told her no more cigarettes. She was worried about nicotine addiction, I mentioned e-cig, I got angry eyes, borderline saying it was worth than cigs.

I understand their concerns about untested liquids turning into other kinds of carcinogens, but I'm still surprised about the reaction. I expected that some doctors would be able to either mention calmly "no vaporized liquids is free of dangerous particles" or redirect to well tested brand and suppliers. I guess it's just hurried scare tactics.

In the mean time, it's nicotine gums diet.

In any case, I followed much the same road once I switched; I stepped down from 18mg (headaches!) to 12mg, and now I'm at 6mg or 3mg depending on the liquid I have. I can't describe just how much my health has improved over that span as a result.

Also, devices and liquids have _vastly_ improved in the past 4 years, to the point where when I give recommendations to others looking to transition, I don't get cold stares back from failed attempts and cheap devices that kept them from ditching cigarettes.

The nicotine delivery is less immediate and not as strong so for someone used to the immediate dose delivered by smoking, it sort of left me wanting more but at the same time, it was a much less intense "craving" than a smoker would feel when forced to abstain.

A big part of it for me was adjusting to this. Smoking delivers a large, immediate dose of nicotine which then drops off in your bloodstream over the course of the next half hour or hour, when (predictably) you sort of want another cig. With the vaporized nicotine solution, I had to get used to just having a puff every so often throughout the day (more like hookah I guess) and maintaining a more constant but lower blood level.

Anyway, maybe I'm overanalyzing it. The results were the same though. It was as much getting off the roller coaster of "dose, levels drop, crave, redose" and onto a more sustained but lower level. It made it much easier to go without and it made it easier to lower the nicotine in the liquid to the point where I keep some 3mg/ml stuff around for the occasional desire for a mild stimulant but otherwise, it was practically effortless to wean off.

Aside from just lowering my nicotine intake and habituation to something more along the lines of how I really could go for a coffee some mornings, stopping the constant deposit of tars and particulates into my respiratory system has made a huge impact on my general health. No more lingering colds and honestly I haven't had a major cold or other respiratory infection in years now. I used to get them all the time thanks to the constant irritation and level of crap I was inhaling.

And another cool thing is that I know exactly what's in the stuff I'm inhaling occasionally now. I can get MSDS sheets for the flavorings and the rest is just nicotine and a couple types of glycerine (like you'd use in a fog machine or asthma inhaler). The levels of anything potentially harmful are a miniscule fraction of what they'd be if I was smoking cigs still and I'm no longer getting the vast majority of harmful compounds or carbon monoxide at all.

I really hate to come off as a "booster" and I try not to be the guy who just has to tell you about "his vape" but I think this sort of anecdotal experience is appropriate and on-topic in threads like this. I think it's a real shame that something with maybe 1-2% of the risk of smoking has been so demonized and lobbied against when it's a bigger improvement than methadone for heroin addicts or AA for alcoholics.

I acknowledge that not everyone will agree with me, but this is my opinion on the matter.

Tobacco levies being disproportionately a "tax on the poor" is true, but health problems also are suffered more by the poor and one of the side effects of high tobacco levies in an era where e-cigarettes are a widely-available commercial product is nicotine replacement becoming much more affordable than tobacco

I saw this on Reddit a while back, someone pointed out that "we get it, you vape" was probably introduced by tobacco companies to create a stigma around the practice.

I'm a quitting smoker, on vape (RBA) and it bloody works. If only there were such great tools for quitting other addictions.

Not to go too far off track. The real tax on the poor isn't cigarettes, for the poor and stupid its lottery tickets. The real tax on the poor are the vast amount of licensing and related fees that they cannot escape. It is distressing how many lower income jobs have ridiculous fees attached let alone the costs of doing business with every day government interaction. Then throw in all the fees of everyday life and boom, your hurting.

The government can replace its tobacco tax with a carbon tax.

Lottery games are an example of this - the people who play are overwhelmingly poor. This article argues that lottery spending may even be the single largest tax poor families pay [1].

With regard to what you say about there being no replacement income for governments if people stopped smoking cigarettes - I'd say this is only the case if consumption was banned. If it was slowly phased out the pain wouldn't be noticeable. It's like autonomous vehicles - what really matters is the speed of creative destruction.

[1] http://metrocosm.com/could-the-lottery-be-the-largest-tax/

They see the future is ecigs but realize it's a race to the bottom in profits.

I think that's hugely simplified. There are plenty of drugs which are exceedingly difficult to use recreationally:

- Crack

- Meth

- Nicotine

- Heroin

People who use those at all are very likely to use them a whole hell of a lot, and they have terrible health effects. I don't think it's Puritanism to recommend staying away from highly addictive substances.

Now, getting someone who doesn't already smoke to vape is bad, but I haven't seen any significant evidence that vaping leads them to smoking, so there's that.

According to HHS (http://www.hhs.gov/ash/oah/adolescent-health-topics/substanc...):

"Eighth grade students who use e-cigarettes are 10 times more likely than their peers who do not use e-cigarettes to eventually smoke tobacco cigarettes. This trend continues to a slightly lesser degree for older adolescents. Tenth and 12th grade students who use e-cigarettes are eight and six times more likely, respectively, than their peers to smoke tobacco cigarettes. This suggests that youth who use e-cigarettes are likely to become tobacco cigarette smokers as they age."

Also, the mechanical mod crowd is a rather small part of the e-cig community overall. Vocal, but small.

I was pretty scared of ecigs before, seeing so many exploding.

A) they are unproven. Many people believe that something that isn't proven safe or unsafe is not better than something unsafe that has been heavily scrutinized and studied. What if there's a much worse effect that we dont' know about yet?

B) They are unstandardized. Each producer can be putting who-knows-what in the oils.

C) It's still smoke. When they first came out, a lot of people got e-cigs with the idea that they could get around smoking bans, such as on planes or in bars (in places that banned that). This has resulted in a massive backlash, because it really wasn't health problems that caused those bans, it was the fact that nobody wants to sit in someone elses smoke cloud. This is causing a big social stigma against e-cig users.

I see so many people use e-cigarettes as an excuse to smoke indoors, even in light of public smoking bans, and get upset when I complain that they make me feel sick. Indoor air quality isn't just about carcinogens or aerosolized tobacco, but allergens and respect for common spaces that we all have to share.

If you can't tell, I'm agreeing with you. I pray something is done about vaping before the horse has bolted like it did with cigarettes. Just because it could be less dangerous doesn't mean it should be encouraged or indeed allowed at all. Every vaping liquid being sold should have to be tested thoroughly for safety IMO, and really I'm amazed that it doesn't have to be.

Vaping is too new for long-term studies to have been performed, and also with the zillions of different kinds of vaping juices, each one with a different formulation, how can we know that they are all safe?

It's an absolute joke how much secondhand smoke a non-smoker is forced to inhale nowadays with what we know about how dangerous it is, and I live in Australia, with relatively progressive smoking laws. I don't want to be subjected to secondhand smoke in public places, and I don't want to be subjected to secondhand vapor either, regardless of whether or not the inhaler considers it "safe enough".

Actually it is illegal here to sell nicotene-containing liquid. I do think that nicotene-containing liquid is being sold however, as I do see people vaping around the place, and just quietly, they don't seem like the kind of people who could get their stuff together enough to make their own ecig juice.

Then there's people like me and the person who replied to your comment earlier who just make our own. It's surprisingly simple and pretty inexpensive. The other commenter eschews flavoring altogether whereas I only use a small amount of it and only buy stuff from companies that list the compounds included so I can make sure there are no particularly nasty components that would make them dangrous to inhale in typical concentrations.

I agree that there are no long term studies on the effects of inhaling this stuff for years on end but a lot of the things that stick out as hazardous are easy to identify and even when they exist, it's typically at a level that's a small fraction of what you'd run into when talking about combustible tobacco.

Basically it's harm reduction. Like how you read about the dangers of eating char-grilled meat because it has some of the same things as cig smoke. That may be the case but you're not getting nearly as much of it so you won't likely get cancer from eating a seared steak a few times a year like you would from smoking cigs daily.

For example; some flavorings contain diacetyl which, if inhaling too much, will lead to Bronchiolitis Obliterans or "popcorn lung", but the amount actually inhaled in e-cigarettes is 750 times less than cigarettes and vastly less than the amount inhaled by people that have developed popcorn lung.

Yes, there are some chemicals in the flavoring, but the amount is fractions of that in cigarettes (flavorings usually account for less than 10% in my liquid, and much of the flavoring is more base liquid; VG and PG). I've taken the risk assessment and decided that e-cigs are much safer. Each person must do that for themselves.

But yes, you are correct. A lot of the flavors are not regulated. I recall there was an issue with a carmel like flavor recently.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/sifting-the-evidence/201...

https://www.gwern.net/Nicotine

Personally I think it's mainly to do with the optics of it. As a society we've spent all kinds of money and effort to stop smoking, and it's now heavily stigmatized. So to see something come around that appears similar to smoking seems to drive a lot of people nuts.

In any case, I doubt there's a very significant amount of people who've started ecigs who wouldn't have started cigarettes, and cigarettes are well known to cause lung damage.

At the end of the day though, if you're a smoker, the choice is pretty straightforward, and you should use a "vape". You should however, be considerate of others, and unfortunately also accept that for a while you're going to be lumped in with the more anti-social element of society.

I'd imagine alot of reasons you don't see more vaping is age. Younger folks don't care as much(and smoke less in general) but some dude smoking malboro at 50 is far less likely to roll up with an ecig at a casual BBQ. Its a hard enough battle getting old people using email... Let alone vaping.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_additives_in_cigarette...

I used to date a girl who used an ecig and would exhale a cloud of vanilla cookie aroma everywhere we went. I thought that was pretty cool to be honest.