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Comment by henryw | Hacker News Reader

It seems like a lot of my younger friends are using a "juul", which has a ton of nicotine in it. I'm kind of scared for them.

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Nicotine by itself is not dangerous. There's a VERY common misconception that nicotine itself is carcinogenic, while there is actually insufficient evidence for that. It's the tobacco, tar, and carbon monoxide that are responsible for most of the adverse effects of nicotine products.

The only concern with vapes like the juul is that while their base components are safe to vape, sometimes they use flavors which are not very well studied (and which, when heated, may degrade into carcinogenic chemicals).

While nicotine itself may not be a carcinogen, there's evidence it encourages the growth/spread of cancer and and increases the likelihood of recurrence. It might be inhibiting antitumor immune responses. [0]

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4553893/

Also, I believe, with vapes that some carcinogenic compounds are created when the liquid is vaporized. That is to say some small part of it burns on contact with the heating element in the vaporizer and some of those combustion byproducts are cancer causing.

The problem is the food flavouring which has been extensively tested... as food flavouring and not when vaporized and inhaled (and there's the whole thing about to which temperature it's heated).

Personally I believe (and afaik current science supports that) vaping to be far safer, but it's probably not safe and there are a lot of unknowns left.

E-cigarettes are not really vaporizers. What they do is heat and aerosolize the e-liquid. Small particles of certain substances can be harmful.

> There's a VERY common misconception that nicotine itself is carcinogenic, while there is actually insufficient evidence for that

It's because of the obnoxious metonymy "nicotine -> cigarette smoke" that appears even in research paper titles.

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