I've heard that you can get a "0%" vape that has no nicotine in it, but the vape shops I've asked have no idea what I'm talking about or why I'd want it. Any idea if that's real?
Yes this is and has always been an option. Find any real vape shop at any point in the past... _checks calendar_ 15 years at least, and they will sell you nearly any of their "e-juice" products with no nicotine.
Trick is, the companies making disposables vapes/pods/etc generally don't offer them because those are generally large tobacco and other companies and ... well, why would they manufacturer and sell a non-addictive cigarette when an addictive version exists.
0% nicotine was an option almost 20 years ago when I started vaping and is still available. The tobacco companies getting involved and polluting the streets with single use lithium ion batteries and shit have done nothing but made everything worse.
Worked well for me, might not work so well for others.
Personally I thought that was the whole deal with vapes, use them as a tool to beat the addiction to 'real' tobacco products, but it looks like the world proved me wrong on that one.
Also, vaping is fucking obnoxious for non smokers, clouds of awful smelling residue, and plastic shit everywhere. I'd rather people smoked, ideally those e-cigs that burn tobacco but cut out most of the toxins.
As a former smoker and non-smoker for a long time now, I disagree.
> ...clouds of awful smelling residue...
IME, most of the time it smells far better than cigarette smoke.
> ...and plastic shit everywhere.
Litterbugs are gonna litter, man. I know this because I live in a place with a very high concentration of them. Is the litterbug done with his drink, takeout, or other item that came in some disposable packaging? Is the trash can that's clearly visible from his current location more than two feet away? Then that packaging ends up directly on the sidewalk or tossed into the street.
Worse than that are litterbugs who are also dog owners. Their creed is "Pick up my dog's dogshit and put it in a trashcan? Hell no, fuck that, and fuck you!".
Unless you have an incredibly defective vaporizer, that "smoke" you're talking about is as much smoke as the "steam" in a hot shower is. If your vaporizer is producing smoke, you need to dispose of it and get one that doesn't set things on fire.
> Our lungs are extremely sensitive receptors and are pretty much supposed to interact with absolutely nothing else other than the air we breathe.
You might be astounded at how much junk is in the air we breathe, even in "clean" natural locations. Because the natural environment is so incredibly filthy and because the natural environment contains so many things that want to eat us (because -as it turns out- we're made of food!) our bodies are built to interact with and neutralize all sorts of contaminants.
Breathing air with more than ~12ug/m^3 of small particles is considered less than ideally healthy. (This is where PM2.5 comes from.)
Go check out the mass of fine particles per puff:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK507187/#_sec_000047_
This is so many orders of magnitude above the “good” AQI threshold that it’s almost comical.
Now, sure, different particles have different health characteristics, but the stuff coming out of a vape isn’t water, and you’d better hope that it is many orders of magnitude less damaging than the fine particles that are found in the environment if you actually want to believe that your lungs are prepared to handle it.
(Okay, it’s obviously orders of magnitude less damaging than, say, wildfire smoke or brake dust or restaurant kitchen exhaust on a per-microgram basis, but the question is how many orders of magnitude less dangerous.)
P.S. I strongly suspect that there is one common dry aerosol that is genuinely harmless in moderate amounts: sodium chloride from sea spray. It’s highly soluble and found all over inside your body. I’m not sure to what extent air quality impact studies try to separate out the AQI impact from sea spray from everything else.
[0]: https://tryfum.com