Popcorn Lung: A Dangerous Risk of Flavored E-Cigarettes (2016)
lung.org
lung.org
Note that the linked Harvard study is from 2015(!); the vast majority of vape juices no longer contain diacetyl. Acetylpropionyl is the replacement and I guess we're not sure if that has similar problems.
In any case, vaping is UNQUESTIONABLY better than smoking cigarettes.
Edit: note that DIY e-liquid recipes often disclose relatively responsibly. See for example, this recipe for "strawberry fog", which I mixed up a couple of times: https://e-liquid-recipes.com/recipe/226322/strawberry%20fog
(My "house" recipe was this strawberry lemonade, which doesn't contain anything even similar to diacetyl: https://e-liquid-recipes.com/recipe/3832603/Strawberry%20Lem...)
> Some studies have suggested that e-cigarette use can be modestly helpful for smokers trying to quit. For example, an analysis of 61 studies found that e-cigarette use was more effective than other approaches to quitting smoking. The study authors estimated that out of every 100 people who tried to quit smoking by vaping, nine to 14 might be successful. When only using other methods, such as nicotine patches or behavioral counselling, only four to seven smokers out of 100 might quit. A separate study suggests vaping may help smokers who aren’t able to quit reduce the number of cigarettes smoked per day — at least for six months, the duration of the study.
Doubling the chances people can effectively stop smoking is no good for profits.
Source: https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/can-vaping-help-you-quit...
Anyway, do you have a better explanation for the inconsistent positions tobacco regulators take in the US?
Meanwhile, they own the biggest vape companies.
And I don't see what inconsistent positions are taken. If you tell me them, I'll gladly tell you why.
Philip Morris, for example, is the pinnace of "Big Tobacco" and is currently all in on "transforming" themselves into a "smoke-free" company[1].
[1]: https://www.pmi.com/
Also, their VEEV vapes are only available in tobacco and menthol flavors, and those flavors have been shown to be less effective for tobacco cessation. (They also tried to push through laws banning other flavors, if I remember right.)
Pre-empting the "think of the childeren" responses; tobacco marketed to kids continues to be widely available:
https://shipfest.org/vaping-for-kids-the-top-10-vape-brands-...
Check out the Pod Juice Freeze "Strawberry Kiwi Pomberry", for example. If not for the big nicotine warning on the bottom half of the label, I wouldn't be surprised if parents confused it with kids' Pedialyte, or some sort of DIY popsicle mix:
they try offering in tobacco flavors: "that's not effective for cessation!"
wtf are they supposed to sell then?!
Also, law enforcement could enforce existing laws against marketing tobacco to kids.
The most effective cessation flavor is supposedly "unflavored". I believe it's been banned (in the same way that strawberry lime pomegranate is "banned" -- not very effectively).
Anyone who tries to tell me vaping might be worse I send them to this YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Pwj6BuS8Ds
Huh? Is anyone significant actually saying vaping is so harmful that you should smoke cigarettes instead?
IIRC, the actual health issue with vaping was that it had been presented as so "harmless" that, after significant long-term declines, nonsmoking teens started taking up nicotine use again in large numbers.
Keep up the good work, you're doing the reading, thinking for yourself, and questioning the lies so many people here spew uncontrollably.
That's not really an answer. Do you have an actual example?
> It's unclear when Holman had recused himself, but it appears to have been less than four months ago. On March 18, Holman signed off on the third generation of PMI's heated, smokeless tobacco product, IQOS.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/07/fdas-top-tobacco-sci...
The article mentions a second recent incident like this.
It's pretty common practice to "passively" wait for a regulator to take a questionable action on your behalf, wait the minimal recusal period, and then hire them to "work" for you for some large multiple of typical market compensation.
That's just Phillip Morris hiring a guy, it's not Phillip Morris saying vaping is safer than cigarettes so it's healthier to smoke.
Selection bias, though, and one of them claimed to be a 2-3 pack a day, for decades.
You can buy an supply of nicotine and glycol for a few hundred bucks and make your own vape juice for several years. It's healthier (So you pay less on medical bills), you pay thousands a less in taxes, and it devastates profits for cigarette companies. A lot of vested interests stand to lose a lot of money, so it's no surprise they have rolled out the anti-vaping propaganda on all fronts.
They want you to not smoke or vape.
It's not like you have to choose one or the other.
Speaking of beer brewing: diacetyl is actually generated during the brewing process and, although considered an off-flavor[1], is important for the characteristic aroma of some beers, one famous example is Pilsner Urquell.
[0] https://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/acs.chemrestox.8b00400 (figure 5)
From my perspective it would be the least harmful to stick with just nicotine + PG/glycerol.
I still do, but I used to too.
Why does this matter though? Both are still bad for your body and we shouldn't be encouraging them.
Vaping nicotine has some negative health effects, but there's no evidence it leads to lung cancer, because it doesn't generate those PAHs.
Profiting off of driving an addiction with health side effect is abhorrent - to me at least.
It helped me quit my decade-plus long smoking habit, and I'm now 3+ years off of vaping as well. I hate to see vaping demonized, but I also don't particularly care to see kids take it up. It's just as, if not more addictive than cigarettes.
We could use even stricter rules (such as making vapes prescription products) to tilt it even more towards the "quitting" market.
Good thing we don't have to worry about it because it's a situation we have data on. You've created a hypothetical that is incorrect. Before vaping cigarette use from people who had never smoked before had plummeted to almost nothing. Meanwhile, 1 in 4 kids from 6-12 grade vapes.
Vaping does not generate dangerous particles in the form of second hand smoke — on the contrary, second hand tobacco smoke is around 95% as dangerous as smoking yourself.
The older generation, those who were adults in 2010 or thereabouts, all used to smoke. We rapidly adopted vaping for QoL improvements: No more smelling like an ashtray, massively less costs, improved lung capacity, and as a side affect, quitting became massively easier.
Every cigarette user I know that switched to vaping has in turn found it easy to taper nicotine and quit. Vaping doesn't have the same addictive power as cigarettes. I was a 10 year smoker with multiple failed attempts at quitting, vaped for two years, then just stopped.
As for popcorn lung, this was widely known and discussed within the vaping community at the time, basically within a year you could not even purchase the affected flavorings without being very intentional.
I think, (barring dangerous additives like the buttered popcorn flavorings), that vaping is probably 3-10% as harmful as smoking. Not harmless, but less harmful, if that makes sense.
I don't know of a single person using it as a cessation device. Anecdotal, of course, but still, didn't expect such big of a difference compared to your post.
You can replace vaping with “any vice that can replace a similar vice but have less detrimental effects”. You can’t stop free will; you can only reduce the harm.
This isn't sex. There isn't a biological imperative to vape. Abstinence absolutely works with some things. Abstaining from ever trying heroin, for example, is a great way to never become a heroin addict.
True, but we tried "abstinence only" with The Prohibition, too, and that didn't work, either.
I would guess all this is propaganda to try to ban vapes but keep cigarettes legal. UK's NHS actually promotes vaping as a smoking cessation as policy.
Here's the NHS page on e-cigarettes. You don't see the constant fear mongering you get from the US. I wonder why.
https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/quit-smoking/using-e-cigarettes...
There is a financial incentive in the US for the government to do this based on the tobacco master settlement agreement in which the tobacco companies give the states money based on smoking rates. Lower smoking rates, less money in the budgets. Ban the most successful smoking cessation tool, get more money when people go back to smoking.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobacco_Master_Settlement_Agre...
Edit: Source: 19% of people who used vapes to quit smoking still weren't smoking after a year. This compares to 9% for other cessation products. It's the most successful cessation product by more than double.
https://www.webmd.com/connect-to-care/vaping/vaping-smoking-...
In 2019, there were approximately 50.6 million smokers, so it would be pretty easy to say at least a million people quit smoking using vapes with a 19% success rate.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33211681/
In 2022, there are nearly 40 million smokers, so in 3 years, over 10 million people quit. If just 10% of those who quit used vapes, that's a million.
https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/index.htm
Unfortunately for me, I'm one of the people who quit smoking using Juul. As soon as they are banned, I will most likely go back to smoking. I wish that wasn't the case, but it probably will be. Bad for me, bad for you, great for state budgets.
You don't quote any source, so I'll feel free to use anecdata liberally as well.
I know very few people who have successfully quit smoking for more than 6 months by start vaping; on the other hand, until 5 years ago it had become exceedingly rare to see people under 20 smoking; now I see a whole lot of youth with vapes and e-cigs.
I believe the tobacco industry saw the writing on the wall and found a knew way to peddle habit forming poison to kids.
None of the things you need to DIY a vape can be controlled because its all common of the shelf stuff used for many things.
The only thing you can control is nicotine. And i can also order it from china, and the chinese always forget to label the concentration correctly or mention it at all.
So, i think this wont stop kids, but might stop adults from switching to vaping. Because nicotine free vaping is impossible to effectively ban, trivial to DIY. And the nicotine part that you can try to control (e.g. india does) is only really interesting to existing smokers, but also: chinese labeling.
Last but not least, i'm not sure i would have ever went and gotten a prescription. Probably not. The extremely low barrier of entry and ~100x cheaper were important factors for me.
I don’t think kids would ever DIY non-nicotine vapes enough to cause a public health crisis. Kids could have huffed Halloween fog machines in the 90s but they didn’t.
Of course that's not the objective. The objective is to ban it. That's why you won't hear any sensible dialog about it.
Also mint Nicorette taste pretty good.
And smoking is a lot like coffee, some people do enjoy the taste/smell.
And others like the effects more than they dislike the taste.
So the fact that vaping tastes better than both Nicorette and cigarettes makes it an easier sell. No one is doing it because it tastes good, but because it tastes good, it's easier to start.
Is vaping safer than alcohol?
Slippery slope. Just because everything is some degree of bad, it doesn't mean there are very large differences in the degree of bad. Reasonable people are able to draw lines between those degrees and be roughly in sync with each other. The philosophical exercise of saying everything is bad is not very interesting to me.
Says the guy that said:
>Both are still bad for your body and we shouldn't be encouraging them
Have you stopped to use your own logic for a second, and maybe conclude that encouraging smokers to quit via vaping (if they cannot otherwise) would be a good thing? Because they have very large differences in the degree of bad?
I tend to avoid reading usernames when replying, so I possibly read them but did not realize that they were also written by you. If you've refined your viewpoint based on other comments here, specifically in regards to vaping as a smoking cessation, my reply was not necessary.
That is why I, explicitly, pointed out alcohol, which is something that's currently legal and is known bad for people in, basically, any quantity.
Usually the flavors containing diacetyl were the ones making the flavor more 'buttery' or freshly baked-like, so avoiding them altogether was something a lot of people were doing.
As a former vaper, if you're a vaper, please try using unflavored eliquid. Pretty much PG + VG + nicotine. You get used to it real quick, it's not that bad, you can easily tell when the coil goes bad (and the coil lasts way WAY longer) and you don't have to deal with any 'mistery' flavor ingredient. This is what ultimately got me off vaping, as I stopped being excited about the flavor and about the vice which ended up becoming a hobby. Unflavored vaping demoted vaping to what smoking used to be for me. A mundane bland meh habit which I eventually stopped. Not to say it's worse than cigarettes. It's better than cigarettes but nothing beats not inhaling foreign substances.
Lungs just aren't a very good means of drug delivery, no matter what the drug is.
Juul's patent on this: https://patents.google.com/patent/US20150020824A1/en
* Considering only the mass of the nicotine portion.
Quickly checks ingredients of my vaping liquid
So the main ingredients are Propylene Glycol, Glycerol, Nicotine (Obviously), and Flavorings.
But what exactly are the 'Flavorings'? I would hope it doesn't include diacetyl.
I’ve used nicotine in various forms for quite a while, and find that I tend to mindlessly and very heavily vape when I’m working on something that requires intense thought. I made it a point to have a second device with a much lower nicotine level - or no nicotine at all - for that purpose. Otherwise I’d develop cravings far beyond what I’d ever experienced before.
This move made sense before they owned major players in the E-juice/E-cig business (juuls) - but now seems weird to push again.
edit: with all this said. let us not have that chemical in e-cigarettes going forward in the future (which I'm pretty sure most companies moved away from it in 2014 during the original popcorn lung ad campaign - so I doubt it's as much as an issue as it was previously).
https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/basic_information/e-cigarettes/s...
And yeah people will go overboard, it's part of it being a vice. It's a vice, regulate it like a vice. Accept some people will kill themselves for no matter how marginal the high they're chasing is. Tax it accordingly. If you're helping people, make sure your help helps.
This is a better drug than cigarettes. There's different vaping formats, the kind I used to reduce cigarette smoking (which I successfully quit years ago) involved good economics and reasonable refills, buying e-liquid in bulk, being responsible with the wick and battery, and treating it with respect. Not like disposable minimal fuck-the-future Juul shit, the HP printer of vaping.
It really tells you more about the credibility of the ALA and associated organizations. They're in parts a symptom of a profit-oriented healthcare system, where harm reduction perturbs vested interests.