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buttercraft

Option A: nicotine.

Option B: nicotine plus a lot of really bad stuff.

You're seriously questioning which is better?

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Dose makes the poison and ecigs enable giving it's users 10x the nicotine you'd get from a single cigarette.

I think you are right that cigs are less healthy, but I have to wonder if megadosing nicotine isn't also a pretty big problem.

That's true, ecigs introduce different types of risks:

Wikipedia: "The recent rise in the use of electronic cigarettes, many forms of which are designed to be refilled with nicotine-containing "e-liquid" supplied in small plastic bottles, has renewed interest in nicotine overdoses, especially the possibility of young children ingesting the liquids."

And not just ingesting, but absorbing it through the skin.

Also: "Serious nicotine poisoning seems normally prevented by the fact that relatively low doses of nicotine cause nausea and vomiting, which stops users from further intake."

> Serious nicotine poisoning seems normally prevented by the fact that relatively low doses of nicotine cause nausea and vomiting, which stops users from further intake.

This is true, but this is also about short term poisoning. I'm more thinking about the long term problems. Alcohol will also stop many cases of acute poisoning through similar nausea and vomiting. However, prolonged use is still bad for your health.

To me that seems to mostly have been an excuse to ban refillable vapes to juice vap manufacturers profits. Refilling your own costs 10-100x less than nonrefillables or cigarettes, disosables give massive profit margins.

Kids can die from getting into all sorts of chemicals, nicotine isn't something especially poisonous or dangerous. They just need proper containers and handling like many other common chemicals and drugs and solvents.

> nicotine isn't something especially poisonous or dangerous.

It's not immediately dangerous, that's for sure.

My concern is more about long-term effects which I don't think we have good data on. Most of our data on the health effects of nicotine are centered on smoking or chewing.

What we do know about nicotine is it's addictive and it can generate a pretty high tolerance. And I think there are studies linking it to an increased risk of stroke.

I'm not trying to take away nicotine. I think it's reasonable to ban the sale of nicotine products to kids but otherwise I don't really care about people accessing it. I also think it's reasonable to research and understand the risks of taking it, even if such research is ultimately just informative.

Consuming excess nicotine is a pretty horrible experience. You just feel super ill and nauseous. But you don't have to use an ecig to do it, just buy a stronger cigarette and smoke 2 or 3 quickly. Or you can eat part of a cigarette. Or just smoke a big cigar and inhale it like a cigarette.

Anyone who smokes has experienced feeling sick from nicotine and quickly learn to avoid it because it sucks.

You build a tolerance and ecigs make it easy to climb up that ramp where regular cigarettes are harder. People get to the "10 packs a day" of smoking and to the point where there's just limits to how fast you can smoke.

Vapes make it a lot easier to blow past that amount of consumption.

Why do you think that? A cigarette contains 10-20 mg of nicotine depending on the tobacco blend used. The strongest e-liquid is 50-60 g/l so to get 10x nicotine of a mild cigarette you'd need to atomize 2ml of the strongest e-liquid. Coincidently, 2ml is the legal limit of disposable vapes in EU. So, to get nicotine of one pack (20) light cigarettes you'd need to empty two European vapes (provided they are filled with the strongest liquid and at the capacity cap). To get 10x nicotine of a pack-a-day smoker you need to vape 20 disposables a day, which seems like quite a feat to me both physically and financially.

A cigarette contains 10-20mg, but it's not readily available. On average, of those 10-20mg, you absorb only 1mg. [1]

My assumption, which could be faulty, is a lot more of the nicotine in the vape gets absorbed vs a cigarette.

[1] https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/how-much-nicotine-...

Yes, neither is nicotine from a vape is all absorbed. Seeing they both have the same delivery mechanism (aerosol into lungs) it's quite a leap to assume one of these delivers an order of magnitude more nicotine, IMHO.

Here's my reasoning.

The nicotine in smoke is bound to plant matter which you are likely to exhale. The dose you get is basically entirely from whatever gets stuck on the lungs, but even then it's still bound to the plant matter, so there will be some that just even if attached to the lung won't cross over.

Contrast that to the vape juice, which is water, glycol, nicotine (and flavors). In that case, the nicotine isn't bound to anything and as the water/glycol evaporates you are left with just the nicotine on the lung.

It's true that a large portion of the vape smoke doesn't attach to the lung at all. But my presumption is that a hit from a vape carries more nicotine and that nicotine also more readily gets absorbed by the lungs.

I don't know if it's exactly 10x. I presume it's higher.

Vape juice is nicotine, glycol (PG) and glycerin (VG), the "V" in "VG" stands for "vegetable", which is a type of plant so if having a plant matter is a decisive factor in absorption then both delivery methods have it. It, however, depends on what you mean by "bound", from my limited knowledge nicotine is not bound chemically to anything in tobacco leaf either but perhaps water from plant cells has some properties which makes it very different from water from atomizing glycol and glycerin. And the concentration of nicotine in vape smoke is lower as I already shown with the numbers.

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