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Comment by VLM | Hacker News Reader

"folks using e-cigarettes are still inhaling dangerous chemicals."

They might be, or might not. It never fails to amaze me that a pill is hyper regulated, food is somewhat regulated, and at least where I live vape juice is completely unregulated for a couple more years. Whats in there, THC, benzene, used engine oil, who knows.

Obviously its trivial to make a substance that when vaporized is harmless; consider pure distilled filtered water. Its a hair trickier to supply nicotine with the vapor. But when they go all ochem crazy with flavors and smells, who knows whats in there and how long the users will live.

The FDA is moving extremely slowly on regulating vape juice. In a couple years it'll at least be licensed and documented. Until recently it was complete wild west.

I've never seen the FDA move on anything so slowly. There must be a lot of political money involved.

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>I've never seen the FDA move on anything so slowly. There must be a lot of political money involved.

Quite the opposite, it’s lack of money. The FDA moves fast in fields and products where they already have budget and staff allocated to doing it. They’re slow about moving to regulate new things because, unless there is a concomitant increase in budget, they have to move people off of work on one thing and on towards another. This, of course, has all sorts of inter-departmental politics involved as branch managers measure the sizes of the peens by how much budget and staff they have under them.

Incidentally, a lot of the money about FDA’s regs in this area are actually coming from the cigar industry which fears, more than anything, being subjected to the same regulatory nightmare that the cigarettes manufacturers are mired in.

> Whats in there, THC, benzene, used engine oil, who knows.

The manufacturers know. Acting as if it is a complete mystery is disingenuous.

But the manufacturer doesn't have to disclose that information if there's no regulation compelling them to, or they can downright lie if nobody's there watching them. Or just put random shit in there that hasn't been tested for safety.

http://www.webmd.com/smoking-cessation/news/20150218/e-cigar...

>The results of one FDA review of 18 different e-cigarette cartridges found toxic and carcinogenic chemicals in some but not others. All but one of the cartridges labeled “no nicotine” did, in fact, contain nicotine. The authors suggest that “quality control processes used to manufacture these products are inconsistent or non-existent.”

> Flavorings: Goniewicz says hundreds of flavors exist, including cherry, cheesecake, cinnamon, and tobacco. Many of those flavoring chemicals, he says, are also used to flavor food.

>“These are the big unknowns,” he says. “When we eat them, they are safe, but we don’t know what’s going on when we inhale them.”

> Or just put random shit in there that hasn't been tested for safety.

a) Do you honestly think companies would do this?

b) The same silly "risk" applies to most any manufacturer - having a "regulation" in no way guarantees your cereal manufacturer isn't putting poison in your cereal, because why wouldn't he, right? (To use similar logic).

> The results of one FDA review of 18 different e-cigarette cartridges found toxic and carcinogenic chemicals in some but not others.

And the source manufacturer (country) of these? Zero details, as usual. Shall we stop selling infant formula in the US because infant formula contains melamine which can and does kill people? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chinese_milk_scandal

If these agencies weren't deliberately so opaque, I'd perhaps be less distrustful.

Perfectly fair final point on inhalation of flavors, and good luck finding anyone in the industry that is opposed to further testing. Everyone very much wants a safe product.

Here's the FDA summary report - https://www.fda.gov/newsevents/publichealthfocus/ucm173146.h... - and the actual report - https://www.fda.gov/downloads/drugs/scienceresearch/ucm17325... it's not "deliberately opaque"

And um, yes, the supplement industry is essentially unregulated and is notorious for doing exactly that - putting random shit in there that hasn't been tested for safety and isn't listed on the label. That's up to and including controlled prescription medications.

https://www.livescience.com/40357-herbal-products-unlisted-i...

https://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/10/21/dangerous-dietary-...

Nor did I ever say, or even imply, we should stop selling e-cigs or any other product for that matter.

The supplement industry is very different, in many different ways, a gigantic one being source of ingredients.

The point is, we have uncertainty being printed as confirmed danger, in a billion dollar industry (with a very well documented history of deceit) selling a product known to kill, at risk of being completely disrupted. Pardon me if I'm a little skeptical of misleading claims.

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