Vaping news....old considering vaping thread.

[Jeff V]

I'm considering napping....any opinions?

Don't do it! Although eavesdropping on the conversations about how to dispose of your presumed-dead carcass the cheapest way available could be amusing. Hopefully, you are a light sleeper.

[Isgrimnur]

NPR

Scientists don't know much yet about the long-term effects of "vape juice," the liquid used in e-cigarettes and vaporizers. But researchers analyzing the liquid and the vapor produced when it's heated say some kinds of e-liquids are reacting to form irritating chemicals called acetals while they're sitting on shelves.
...
Acetals are formed from alcohol and aldehydes, chemicals used to flavor and perfume foods and other commercial products. While some aldehydes are considered harmful, many are generally recognized as safe to eat and touch, says Hanno Erythropel, the study's lead author and an associate research scientist at Yale's chemical and environmental engineering department.

Still, little is known about the effects of aldehydes and acetals when inhaled this way, Erythropel adds, although some research has shown that the acetals can irritate airways more strongly than the aldehydes from which they were formed. And that irritation can prompt an inflammatory response in the respiratory system.

Unlike small amounts of acetals you get through food, Erythropel says, with vaping, "you are breathing this in. We didn't imagine people would be inhaling flavor compounds at the level they are now. We have very little information."

At this point, the FDA does not require e-liquid manufacturers to list all the ingredients in their products. So the Yale chemists had to "reverse-engineer" the e-liquids by separating and quantifying their chemical ingredients.

Via this process, the researchers detected the presence of acetals in one of the eight Juul flavors they tested: crème brûlée. This flavor, which uses vanillin for a vanilla-like smell, contains relatively high levels of vanillin acetals, the scientists say. Other flavors might also contain acetals and aldehydes, they say, but they didn't test in this study for all the possible aldehydes.

[Isgrimnur]

Illinois

The Illinois Department of Public Health (IDPH) learned of the death of an individual who had recently vaped and was hospitalized with severe respiratory illness. The number of cases of people reported to IDPH who have used e-cigarettes or vaped and have been hospitalized with respiratory symptoms has doubled in the past week. A total of 22 people, ranging in age from 17-38 years, have experienced respiratory illness after using e-cigarettes or vaping. IDPH is working with local health departments to investigate another 12 individuals.

[Holman]

So it's starting to look like old-fashioned cigarettes are healthier for you?

I mean, you'll get cancer, but you'll have a few decades of funding Philip Morris before you go.

[LawBeefaroni]

I was just talking to a friend of mine. He's smoked pot forever and used to even deal the stuff back in the 80s (like serious weight, did 3 years in Joliet).

So he was recently in Nantucket. He had a good amount of weed but ran out. Someone game him some vape thc/cvd (no idea specifically). He said he smoked it for like one day and has never felt worse in his lungs. He also got some weird eye infection which may or may not be related. He was like, "Do you think it's chemicals or something?"

[em2nought]

William Shatner will probably stop hawking the SoClean for CPAP masks, and start hawking the SmoClean for vaping devices.

[Smoove_B]

I know initial reports are saying they've run down brands and manufacturers and nothing has been linked as a common cause, but I'm going to bet over the coming weeks and months they're going to discover all these users were using products sourced from the same batch or with ingredients (flavoring, etc...) from a common source. I'm not saying vaping is harmless, but for this many random people all over the United States to suddenly develop lung complications...there's a connection. Similar to how they found out about the levamisole in cocaine back in the early 2000s, eventually the investigators will figure it out.

[Daehawk]

That quoted post leaves out a couple facts in that the products were THC laced type and street purchased or fake brand. I mean doesn't matter as I dont vape but the news should print the entire thing instead of simply saying vape. Its like saying a movie scared an audience without saying it was a horror movie and then trying to get all movies banned.

[noxiousdog]

So it's starting to look like old-fashioned cigarettes are healthier for you?

I mean, you'll get cancer, but you'll have a few decades of funding Philip Morris before you go.

No. That's 22 people who got ill out of 11 million people who vape. There are 200,000 people hospitalized per year for food allergies.

Also, I agree with Smoove. This sounds like a bad batch to me.

[Alefroth]

That quoted post leaves out a couple facts in that the products were THC laced type and street purchased or fake brand.

I don't think those are facts. It seems pretty clear not much of anything is known about the products.

[Smoove_B]

Probably way more detailed than many want to read about, but this NYT piece gives some excellent insight as to how these types of things eventually come to light:

On Aug. 6, Dr. Harris was working in a Salt Lake City-area hospital — she declined to provide more detail in order to protect patient privacy rights — when she was called to the intensive care unit to consult on a patient with the severe lung ailment.

The patient was in his 20s and a heavy e-cigarette user who also vaped THC.

She later consulted with two dozen hospitals around the state on patients with difficult pulmonary or critical care issues. “I saw a second case,” she said. “I’m like, ‘Wait a second, this is weird — two hospitals, two young people, almost identical story.’”

The next morning, she called Dr. Joseph Miner, the chief medical officer for the Utah state health department, who told her he would try to figure out what was going on.

In the ensuing weeks, Dr. Harris saw two other patients firsthand and reviewed nine other cases for the hospital group where she works, Intermountain Healthcare, which has 24 hospitals in Utah and Idaho. She said the first 10 cases were from eight different hospitals; over all, the state of Utah reported 21 cases.

Working theories:

Dr. Harris said that the four patients she had been directly involved with “have been doing e-cigarettes with nicotine constantly, like round the clock. Maybe there’s some sort of accelerant effect causing inflammation in the lung caused by the THC oil.” She added that her interviews with patients suggested they were getting the marijuana liquid from friends in states with legal supplies of the drug, like California and Colorado.

Some patients are suffering from another condition known as lipoid pneumonia, doctors said. When vaped oils get into the lungs, the lungs treat them as a foreign object and mount an immune response, resulting in inflammation and the buildup of liquids, which can cause lipoid pneumonia.

Dr. Scott Gottlieb, the former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, said he suspected a link to illicit products — perhaps related to ingredients including THC — because the main manufacturers of e-cigarettes had not suddenly altered their ingredients on a wide scale. “It’s probably something new that has been introduced into the market by an illegal manufacturer, either a new flavor or a new way to emulsify THC that is causing these injuries,” he said.

[Daehawk]

Ive always wondered about the oil in them. Ciggs are dry at least but oil vapor constantly inhaled cant be good. Its made of Propylene glycol...antifreeze really.

I try to not even give my dog snacks with Propylene glycol in it . They use it as a softener to make the snacks moist. I prefer the ones with some type of vegetable oil.

[Isgrimnur]

Propylene glycol is also used in various edible items such as coffee-based drinks, liquid sweeteners, ice cream, whipped dairy products and soda.
...
Water-propylene glycol mixtures dyed pink to indicate the mixture is relatively nontoxic are sold under the name of RV or marine antifreeze. Propylene glycol is frequently used as a substitute for ethylene glycol in low toxicity, environmentally friendly automotive antifreeze.

[Blackhawk]

. Its made of Propylene glycol...antifreeze really.

That would be ethylene glycol.

[Z-Corn]

The message for the kids is...make your own THC distillate and then make your own vape juice using food-grade terpenes!

[LawBeefaroni]

Whatever happened to just smoking weed? Also, aren't edibles all the rage anyway?

[Alefroth]

Whatever happened to just smoking weed? Also, aren't edibles all the rage anyway?

At least in WA, just about everything is the rage.

[Jaymon]

Dude did you ever think about rage? I mean really think about it? its just like Age, ya know, except with an R in front of it. And R rated movies are all about the sex and violence, so like, old people should't watch them, because they cause rage.

[LawBeefaroni]

Whatever happened to just smoking weed? Also, aren't edibles all the rage anyway?

At least in WA, just about everything is the rage.

Will there come a day when I catch one of my kids vaping and have to lecture them on the dangers and then take them to Walgreens and get some joints and THC gummies as a bonding moment?

[Alefroth]

More than likely.

Here's the menu from my neighborhood shop.

Check out some of the flower strain names. It's almost like they are marketing to kids already.

[Isgrimnur]

WaPo

Michigan on Wednesday became the first state in the nation to ban flavored e-cigarettes, a step the governor said was needed to protect young people from the potentially harmful effects of vaping.

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) said in an interview Tuesday that she ordered the ban after the state health department found youth vaping constituted a public health emergency. The action was officially announced Wednesday.
...
Whitmer complained that e-cigarette companies are using sweet flavors, such as bubble gum and “fruit loops,” to hook young people on nicotine, with potentially adverse consequences. Besides sweet flavors, the prohibition will also apply to vaping products that use mint and menthol flavors. It does not cover tobacco-flavored e-cigarettes, the governor’s aides said.
...
The ban, which covers both retail and online sales, will go into effect as soon as the health department issues rules, sometime in the next 30 days. It will last for six months, and can be renewed for another six months, according to the governor’s aides. In the meantime, they said, the health department will develop permanent regulations banning flavored e-cigarettes. The legislature could try to block those rules, but would face a veto, they added.

Whitmer also barred what she called misleading descriptions of vapor products as “clear,” “safe” and “healthy” and ordered the enforcement of an existing ban on billboard advertising for e-cigarettes.

While Michigan is the first state to prohibit sales of flavored e-cigarettes, several cities and communities have moved to restrict or ban sales of e-cigarettes. In late June, San Francisco became the first major city in the United States to ban the sale and distribution of all e-cigarettes; the ban goes into effect early next year.

[McNutt]

Holy crap, I just looked up some vaping liquid crap and saw the marketing for flavors that are 100% targeted at kids. What adult goes looking for bubble gum flavored e-cigs?

Can you imagine coming home at night knowing that you work in marketing and are tasked with making e-cigs more appealing to kids?

[The Meal]

I last worked in the HDD industry in 2017. There has been a big purge in the R&D sector of that business (especially in the mobile drive world, which was my last role). The last manager I reported to was one of my favorites. He was an industry vet and had worn many hats, including at one point having roughly 500 factory workers report directly to him (requiring him to spend many months of the year in Malaysia and China). He was a really good manager while also being a good person. He was conscientious, thoughtful, a good teacher, and patient with folks who had unique troubles.

He reached out to me via linkedIn last month just to see how things were going for me (which is a topic for a different day in a different thread). I was FLOORED to see that he's now working at JUUL. A) Big purge in the industry, folks needed to find new work. B) He's a pretty senior guy which likely limited his ability to wash up on the high tech shores which absorbed many of my other coworkers (Amazon Labs and Apple being two of the big ones). C) He probably didn't want to move from his San Jose home. D) He's got a ton of Asian manufacturing experience. It all adds up, but I was still absolutely gobsmacked to see it in print. I didn't want to portray any negativity in our communication, but I did mention that I was looking to get back into engineering. He said that if they opened any Colorado-based facilities, he'd let me know for sure.

Ummmmm, thanks but no thanks.

[Smoove_B]

More bad news about vaping:

A study published today in the Journal of Clinical Investigation may add one piece to the puzzle. Researchers at Baylor showed that while mice exposed to e-cigarette vapor didn’t develop the same diseases as cigarette-smoking mice, they did develop another worrying set of problems.

The study found that inhaling just e-cigarette vapor, without any nicotine, fundamentally altered important cells that defend the mice’s lungs against infections. Farrah Kheradmand, a pulmonologist at Baylor who conducted the study, says those changes mean the lungs’ defenses against bacteria and viruses are “compromised,” leaving the mice with a dysfunctional lung immune system.

Immune problems have been connected to vaping anecdotally for years. But Ilona Jaspers, a professor at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, who was not involved in the Baylor study, says these findings are basically the first time that researchers are getting a look at how e-cigarettes alter lung function.

The working theory:

Lungs regulate the exchange of gases. Oxygen comes in, carbon dioxide goes out. But almost no one breathes in perfect, untainted air. Pollution, bacteria, and viruses can all hitch a ride. Lungs—and subsequently the rest of the body—are protected from these contaminants by a thin layer of lipids that coat the lungs and some very important cells called macrophages.

The lipid layer collects those invaders and toxins, binding to them and preventing them from reaching the air sacs. Macrophages, meanwhile, have two important jobs. First, they gobble up any invaders they encounter. They also recycle the lungs’ lipid lining, helping to renew that layer several times a day. As this mouse study shows, the solvents in vape cartridges appear to upset this crucial dynamic by damaging the lipids and sabotaging the macrophages’ cleanup work. Kheradmand isn’t exactly sure what’s happening to the lipids—they need more research to figure out what is changing—but whatever is happening is knocking the system out of whack.

Not only do the macrophages become less effective lipid recyclers, they also get diverted from their other task of screening out toxins and invaders. “Your immune system is out of balance,” says Jaspers, whose own work has found vaping causes similar immune problems in cells in the nose. “Because your system is not prepared, you’re getting sick.”

However, remember:

The study does have its limitations. “Mice are not humans. They are not a perfect model,” says Laura Crotty Alexander, a pulmonologist at UC San Diego. Human lungs are much larger than mouse lungs, which might change how much vapor they absorb. And while the lung immune systems are similar, they aren’t identical. Mice have some different cells that could change how they respond to infection.

But mice have already proven themselves to be useful in lung research. Some of the initial work on tar and tobacco was conducted on mice and turned out to be relevant to humans as well. And mouse studies can produce insights at a speedy clip. “Exposing a mouse in this study for four months is sort of the equivalent of 25 to 35 years in a human,” Alexander says. “It’s our only tool to really tell us what the effects are in a mammalian system.”

In the meantime, the CDC urges people to stop vaping.

[Isgrimnur]

Back when I was an impressionable young adult and people would ask if I smoked, I would tell them that I did not, as I had enough problems with my lungs and didn’t need to create more.

[Alefroth]

I just recently realized not all vaping is for nicotine delivery. A narrowboat Youtuber I watch was visiting someone and he showed his display of about 20 different kinds of juice and it turns out he doesn't even use nicotine, he just likes the taste. I really had no idea.

[LawBeefaroni]

I just recently realized not all vaping is for nicotine delivery. A narrowboat Youtuber I watch was visiting someone and he showed his display of about 20 different kinds of juice and it turns out he doesn't even use nicotine, he just likes the taste. I really had no idea.

Juice: all of the long term health effects, none of the nicotine. Why?

[Alefroth]

When you just can't get that salted caramel boysenberry crabcake lemonade flavor blast anywhere else I guess.

[Blackhawk]

I get enjoying the taste. I still have several pipes (traditional ones, that is), and will get one out a couple of times a year just for the flavor and smell of the tobacco.

[McNutt]

Yeah, I also smoke a pipe a couple times a year more for the smoke and taste and most definitely not for the nicotine. That's the part I hate the most, so I get vaping just to vape. I mean I would NEVER do that, but I get it.

[noxiousdog]

Can someone smarter than me look at the research report and tell me what the dosage and increase risk is?

[noxiousdog]

Can someone smarter than me look at the research report and tell me what the dosage and increase risk is?

It looks like the dosage was "We used this number of cigarettes to approximate moderate to heavy smoking habits (e.g., greater than 20 pack-year smoke exposure) in humans." and an equivalent vaping.

[Enough]

Holy crap, I just looked up some vaping liquid crap and saw the marketing for flavors that are 100% targeted at kids. What adult goes looking for bubble gum flavored e-cigs?

Can you imagine coming home at night knowing that you work in marketing and are tasked with making e-cigs more appealing to kids?

I am not proud to admit it, but I vape. I was a fairly heavy cig user and vaping definitely got me back to smelling, tasting and breathing better but I have not kicked the habit. When I first started I went with the tobacco flavors but quickly discovered the litany of tasty, tasty flavors. In my case it mirrors my love of fruity beverages and sweets and so it I fear has indeed opened a whole new pathway to being hooked. But trust me, there are many, many of us vaping adults who go for the "kiddie" flavors, just like lots of men still order foo-foo drinks if they can handle the social pressure that only women are supposed to like those flavors. At my local vape shop those flavors are by far the best-selling for adults, so mr. evil marketer might actually be targeting me and not your kid.

[Isgrimnur]

Por que no los dos?

[Enough]

Por que no los dos?

As in both combustibles and non, or? And the tobacco flavors are just not as much fun as the tasty "kiddie" ones.

[Isgrimnur]

Marketing to kids and adults.

[Enough]

Marketing to kids and adults.

Well duh, just pointing out that everyone's assumption that "no adult would ever want that crap" is a line of crap itself.

[McNutt]

I was mistaken and didn't mean it as a condemnation of your choice.

I've seen lots of flavors of tobacco, but I've never seen a bubble gum flavored one or a package of tobacco that looks like a box of cereal. That's why I was thinking that it was intentionally targeting kids.

Every adult vaper I personally know used it as a substitute for their smoking habit. There is no shame in being a vaper, even if it is just because you want to vape, just as there is no shame in jumping with a wingsuit.

[Isgrimnur]

WaPo

State and federal health officials investigating mysterious lung illnesses linked to vaping have found the same chemical in samples of marijuana products used by people sickened in different parts of the country and who used different brands of products in recent weeks.

The chemical is an oil derived from vitamin E. Investigators at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration found the oil in cannabis products in samples collected from patients who fell ill across the United States. FDA officials shared that information with state health officials during a telephone briefing this week, according to several officials who took part in the call.

That same chemical was also found in nearly all cannabis samples from patients who fell ill in New York in recent weeks, a state health department spokeswoman said.

Vitamin E is found naturally in certain foods, such as canola oil, olive oil and almonds. The oil derived from the vitamin, known as vitamin E acetate, is commonly available as a nutritional supplement and is used in topical skin treatments. It is not known to cause harm when ingested as a vitamin supplement or applied to the skin. Its name sounds harmless, experts said, but its molecular structure could make it hazardous when inhaled. Its oil-like properties could be associated with the kinds of respiratory symptoms that many patients have reported: cough, shortness of breath and chest pain, officials said.
...
Although the discovery of a common chemical in lab tests from the FDA and New York’s highly regarded Wadsworth Center lab offers a potential lead, officials cautioned that they are a long way from understanding what exactly is making so many people sick.

[Z-Corn]

I think everybody who vapes should post a pic of their vaping rig!