Vaping 'can damage vital immune system cells'
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
"Any smoker considering e-cigarettes should switch completely without delay."
So vaping should continue to be banned everywhere that smoking is banned. Most people do not consent to breathing other peoples second-hand drugs.
I'm not a vaper, never have been never will but I'd rather deal with the faint smell of strawberry than cigarette smoke any day.
> The review concluded there was "overwhelming evidence" they were far safer than smoking and "of negligible risk to bystanders"
And isn't this just a strawman? Are people proposing indoor vaping laws?
1) Find a flavor of e-liquid that you like well enough to use regularly.
2) Start off at the nicotine concentration that most closely replicates your smoking habit (for me 18mg ~ 1.5 packs/day)
3) Continue vaping at each concentration for a minimum of 2-3 months to ensure you are fully acclimated to one level before proceeding to the next.
4) Slowly reduce the nicotine level over time by buying liquid with less nicotine in it. (I went 18, 12, 9, 6, 3, 0. I mixed a 50/50 concentration of 12 and 6 to make 9.)
5) The transition from 3mg to 0 will be difficult, as this is the step where you're really leaving the nicotine. It's ok if you're sucking on the vaporizer nearly constantly.
6) Once fully accustomed to 0mg, putting the vape down altogether will be the hardest part. I replaced it with sugarfree chewing gum. I was very angry for the first couple of weeks, but it got better.
For me the ability to separate the nicotine from the smoking and conquer each addiction separately was the key to success.
I like the chewing gum idea. I'm not necessarily an anxious person, but I always need to be doing something. E.g. if I don't have my vape in my hand, I'm chewing my nails. Really sucks.
Everyone is different. The strategy that's ideal for me may be wholly unworkable for somebody else, but we seem to be in the same ballpark.
Martin Dockrell, tobacco control lead at Public Health England, said: "E-cigarettes are not 100% risk-free but they are clearly much less harmful than smoking."
You could just survive 24 hours without smoking, after which physical challenge is over. From there on it is just a fight against your brain, and also being aware of the root issue that made you pickup smoking.
- ex-smoker
I think ecigs and nicotine gum/lozenges should be encouraged if someone wants to quit. Many people have found them useful bridging the gap between smoking and cessation. Going even a few hours without anything is enough to cause some people give up. Having help might give them confidence to eventually follow through.
Trading addiction to cigarettes for addiction to vapes or gum is a step in the right direction, but I agree eventually you have to pay the piper.
* High lasts the shortest duration (a few seconds after the last inhale)
* High has a high physical factor (relaxation) but a low psychotropic factor (mood-altering effect like alcohol or mj), which is the opposite of something like psychedelics (which can be useful in curing addiction)
* High requires a physical adaptation (smoker's hack) to be felt most fully
* That physical adaptation is challenging to undo and takes at least 1 month (in my case 2) before cravings are replaced by disinterest or dislike
So the last 2 points were key for me. If anyone reading this is struggling, I highly recommend intermittent intense physical activity as a way to hack the physical adaptation process.
For me, squats work best. Go to the gym and try to get 15-20 reps of a weight you can manage, for at least 2 power sets. Something like: 95x10, 135x20, 135x15. I find if I do those at night and come home, my body rejects the thought of smoking because I'm already high on life. It also rejects alcohol to some degree which is nice for weight loss.
Once you've felt that lifter's high (not sure what to call it), you start feeling in control of your body's repair process. Then you notice it on the fun days too, like chest day. After 2-6 weeks, you'll likely find that cigarettes don't do much unless you smoke a couple in a row, but then they mostly make you sick, and you might find yourself going a day or two and forgetting to smoke.
Hope this helps someone.
I stopped smoking after a long pack a day habit with almost no difficulty. No serious physical withdrawal, no serious sustained cravings that persisted past a day or two.
I've had issues with other substances, so it wasn't my amazing willpower that made it easy
If you have spoken about quitting with other people who have quit or are still quitting, you would have found out that it is much harder for them than what you are proposing. That, or some vanishingly small chance was hit and you have only people around you who found quitting easy but somehow still smoked a lot before doing so.
So it's not great for lung function, but sounds orders of magnitude less bad for you than smoking cigarettes.
Anecdotally, I quit vaping recently, as I'd grown frustrated with the 'chasing the dragon' aspect (I was using its stimulant properties to help manage my ADHD). I now find I get winded much less easily and generally have a little more energy, which I've attributed to slightly improved lung function.
When I stopped (because I had my wisdom teeth extracted), I used a nicotine patch for a few weeks; however, I eventually found that simply being a little more physically active helped enough that I no longer feel the need for that extra cognitive "push".
These days I use 6mg/ml juice, and use ~5ml per day on average. I've not found any real negative effects after about a year. I go increase and decrease my intake periodically, and the worst effect I've had is a "stuffy" feeling in the morning when I hadn't vaped anything the evening before. Even that doesn't seem to happen when I'm in a period of decreased usage; I've stopped for a day or two before and didn't really notice.
FWIW, nicotine does work as a cognitive stimulant, at least for me. It's nowhere near as powerful as Vyvanse, but it's effective enough that it helps me "get back in the flow" when I'm not interested in something but need to get it done.
Noopept helped with thinking, while adrafinil helped with energy.
I still take them every once in a while. No ADHD meds for us anymore. YMMV
That being said, I'm personally curious above the health implications of dry herb being vaporized at a controlled temperature, that prevents any combustion, and controls the release of carcinogenic materials like Benzene/ammonia.(produced at around 400 degrees by marijuana vaporization)
Think of a scenario like this: what if one uses a Volcano Vaporizer with dry herb (marijuana). What are the negative health implications there at certain, controlled temperatures? What about the beneficial implications? Do they cancel out?
Or are the negative health implications on par with the sensationalized articles about eating cured meat giving you a whopping 2% overall increased risk of cancer? Basically, I'm very curious if there is a way to drastically reduce the risk of vaporizing with the controlled vaping of dry herbs vs. these e-liquids containing nicotine/other nasty things.
I use mmj for an autoimmune disease, so it feels pretty ironic to read vaping damages immune system cells; will have to go back to the Volcano.
Pure MMJ extracts are a different beast. This is almost definitely related to PG/VG base used in electronic cigarettes. PG is used to kill airborne bacteria in hospitals for instance.
> "I don't believe e-cigarettes are more harmful than ordinary cigarettes - but we should have a cautious scepticism that they are as safe as we are being led to believe."
I don't believe that crossing the street is more dangerous than cliff-diving, but we should be cautiously skeptical that it's safe.
Also it's pretty crazy to put a battery that close to your face regularly. I know only a few have exploded, but the risk of that alone would deter me.
Well... Do you ever answer the phone?
If that's your version of "negative", then yes, we should look negatively on it.
But more correctly, we should look skeptically on it. Just like all other studies that haven't been replicated scientifically.
This is quite preliminary work, using cell cultures instead of actual organisms. It's quite common for effects seen in cell cultures to be very different from what is observed in whole, living tissue. But it can still be very useful for research: it can identify key diagnostic metrics, suggest mechanisms, and otherwise guide future research.
One issue here is that we already look at general lung function quite well: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-14043-2
This study examines the general lung function of non smokers who began vaping, with metrics taken from the start of vaporizer usage. This is about as direct as you can get, though is still an observational study (i.e. they did not randomly assign people to start vaping, for obvious ethical and adherence issues).
The synthesis of these studies would be to include more analysis of lung immune function. The results already suggest that inflammation is not an issue as suggested by the cell culture.
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.
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.
TL;dr- Vaping is better than smoking, but that still doesn't mean it's harmless or "good".
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.
Glad to see it's not as bad as smoking (a low bar) but will still kill you.
I think inhaling anything into your lungs will probably affect them negatively. But it wouldn't surprise me if vaping was healthier than LA (or Beijing) air. Everything in moderation.
This does not say that 'vaping will still kill you'. It doesn't say anything close.
What it says is that in a laboratory over a 48 hour period lung samples exposed to vapour caused inflammation and 'impaired activity'.
Glad to see it's not as bad as (frequent) smoking, but will still kill you.
It's hard to fully grasp the mind-fuck of being reliant on your own self destruction.
Vaping and marijuana are two hot topics these days. They're less costly than tobacco and alcohol, but are certainly not free.
In the end, we all decide how to spend our lives. Some pleasures are worth the cost, others are not.
What is the law that requires them to tell customers they are at risk but not have to disclose which items put them at risk?
What makes you think that? Juul didn't get it's crazy valuation because of old smokers. People that care more about money than lives are putting money into it because they are hooking teens.
> However, Public Health England advises they are much less harmful than smoking and people should not hesitate to use them as an aid to giving up cigarettes.
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What annoys me, though, is that while cigarettes are banned on most public places here (in France), people tend to use e-cigarette anywhere from work (open space) to transports, restaurants, bars, etc.
If they can't stop smoking, it seems to be better for them to be "vaping", but they should stop forcing us to endure their chemicals (although I'm not sure if this can be toxic for people around - but that's more or less the point too: we don't really know what it does to our body, so it shouldn't be allowed everywhere).
We've already fought cigarettes (well, I'm an ex smoker so I shouldn't really say "we" here), we shouldn't have to start over again for another form of smoking.
Overall it's a great improvement. I just hope this improvement doesn't come with regressions (more [e-]smokers, especially in public areas and maybe in newer generations) precisely because it is so great an improvement.
At the same time i saw small electronic cigarettes that people use discretely and I think that's a big win to the old nasty and stinky analog cigarettes.
I don't think people have the right to harm others in the work place, so a ban is still appropriate.
Those are orders of magnitude worse than second-hand “chemicals” (VOCs?) from someone vaping.
While we are at it, let’s get rid of perfumes, deodorants, and body sprays. Also air fresheners and scented candles, pesticides, furniture flame retardants, dry-cleaned suits, many cleaning products, white-board markers, permanent markers, and everything else that off-gasses “chemicals”.