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Comment by johnbustram | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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Unpublished anonymous illegal drug research isn't exactly in short supply.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)

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.

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".

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