Survey finds teens unaware they are vaping nicotine | Hacker News Reader

Survey finds teens unaware they are vaping nicotine

upi.com

14 pointsytNumbers14 comments

I don't have a huge problem with this, mainly because it's my understanding that there are like 700 toxins in traditional smoking and that nicotine itself is actually not considered very unhealthy.

Nicotine use supposedly causes "altered development of cerebral cortex and hippocampus in adolescents." That seems very unhealthy. [1]

Also, the liquid refills can contain an acutely toxic concentration of nicotine. Enough to kill a small child with as little as half a teaspoon ingested or absorbed through the skin. [2]

1. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=25794473

2. https://www.aappublications.org/content/early/2014/12/12/aap...

This is one of the major downsides of the (overall good) transition to cannabis use in young people.

Nicotine is the addictive part. The other 699 toxins are only unhealthy contamination.

(Anyway, I'd like to see a similar survey about traditional cigarettes.)

Tobacco also contains some fairly addictive, antidepressant-like compounds called Monoamine oxidase inhibitors (MAOI).

Not really, nicotine isn't very addicting, its similar to caffeine in a lot of ways

Unlike caffeine, nicotine and cocaine both cause vasoconstriction. Anti-drug propaganda aside, none of the 3 substances are particularly addictive and all three have they exact same withdrawal symptoms.

Note that this article doesn’t say what percentage of teens claim to believe they’re vaping only non-nicotine products. With n = 500, and with about 20% of the sample vaping, if you assume that 20% of those kids are claiming to vape nicotine-free pods and 40% of those are misinformed or lying, you end up with... 8 kids out of 500 who said they avoid nicotine but actually don’t. Which is a non-story.

Your scenario sounds horrific. If 1.5% of all teens are getting nicotine unknowingly, that's a huge story.

Agreed, but that seems less likely to me than a handful of teenagers misunderstanding the question and/or deciding it would be funny to fuck with the researchers.

I don't like E-cigarettes. Every vape liquid i've tried, even low nicotine ones, make me feel like I just took a big haul on a fat cigar or something. I break into a cold sweat, my lip starts twitching. I can't stand them and the sweet candy flavours are nauseating. Even the tobacco flavoured ones have that candy flavour to them.

You might have a propylene glycol allergy. Have you tried 100% VG juices? Also there are a lot of excellent mint/menthol flavors out, especially when mixed with some kind of fruit flavoring.

The sweet candy flavour is mainly a crap load of sweeteners and ethyl maltol.

You can make your own liquid at home which uses far less EM/sweetener. It's also remarkably cheap, I pay about £10/month for the equivalent of 20 cigarettes a day. You can also reduce the nicotine concentration to lower than over the counter eliquid.

If you're looking to quit smoking I definitely recommend it. There are a lot of good guides on /r/diy_ecig for starting out.

That site doesn't like my ad blocker.

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