Vague lung disease warnings are set to hurt far more people than they help

I know from this blog's traffic reports that this subject is not high interest. A few hundred pairs of eyes might read this through. But when I see our government geniuses about to make a costly mistake, and I kinda sorta know a little about the subject, I am compelled to blog about it. It might save a life (like vaping has saved mine).

Chances are good that you know a smoker. Chances are also good that your smoker wants to quit and has tried almost everything from patches to (nasty) gum to maybe even psychoactive prescription drugs. And nothing worked.

Regardless of whether you are know a smoker, you'd have to be a hermit to not know about CDC and FDA and their scary drumbeat on vaping. I'm here to tell you that the feds and the media are being irresponsible and what they're doing is deadly dangerous.

From Reason Magazine:

When there's an outbreak of food poisoning, the federal government does not issue general advisories about the hazards of eating. It tells people which products have been implicated so they can adjust their behavior to reduce the risks they face.

Yet for months now, even as evidence mounted that vaping-related lung diseases overwhelmingly involved black-market cannabis products, state and federal officials have been vaguely and unhelpfully warning us about the hazards of "vaping" and "e-cigarettes." That approach has endangered public health by failing to give consumers a clear heads-up and by implying that legal, nicotine-delivering e-cigarettes, which can save smokers' lives by dramatically reducing their exposure to toxins and carcinogens, might instead kill them.

A recent study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), based on interviews with 86 vapers treated for respiratory symptoms in Wisconsin and Illinois, found that 87 percent "reported using e-cigarette products containing THC." Since people may be reluctant to admit illegal drug use, the researchers noted, the actual prevalence of THC vaping among patients may be even higher.

"It seems there's too much conflating these tragic lung injuries with store-bought brands of regulated, legal e-cigs like Juul and NJOY," said former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb.  "There's far too little blaming THC, CBD, and bootleg nicotine vapes where the only available hard evidence points."

E-cigarettes don't contain any tobacco and there is no combustion. They are far less dangerous than the conventional cigarettes, cigars and pipes.

The message being sent is that all vaping products are deadly because a small number of adventurous idiots are using the devices for illicit purposes. Cars are dangerous when misused. So are firearms. Sharp knives. Scissors, even. A No. 2 pencil can be deadly.

Yet people are being convinced that trying e-cig technology to quit smoking may be worse than actually smoking. Your smoker is scared to death and for no good reason. This isn't just bad policy. It's negligent.

"There's no question public health would benefit dramatically if everybody switched completely to e-cigarettes," Abrams said. "If we lose this opportunity, I think we will have blown the single biggest public health opportunity we've ever had in 120 years."

But wait... there's more.

If you ban or tax something very heavily, guess what happens in an exchange economy?

Minnesota is poised to join the panic-driven crusade against vaping, a move that's guaranteed to drive even more business through well-established smuggling channels.

In Minnesota, as elsewhere, cigarette smuggling is well established. In a 2012 article, Tax Foundation economist Patrick Fleenor traced the black market import of smokes right back to the imposition of a tax in 1947.

"By the mid-1950s, official figures show, the sale of legal, tax-paid cigarettes had plunged 20 percent below the national level," Fleenor wrote. "Frustrated by the inability to collect the taxes due, the state's chief cigarette tax administrator quipped that 'even the attorneys who come into my office are smoking untaxed cigarettes.'"

Folks, the primary cause of this alleged "epidemic" is a proliferation of black market street juice. The black market in this stuff exists because of state and local bans on legit juice and devices. If you tighten the bans or raise the taxes, all you do is create more black marketeers.

Have we learned nothing from Prohibition and the War on Drugs?

People are dying because they're stupid. Not because they're vaping flavored nic juice

Vaping is a smart, cost-effective and relatively safe way to quit smoking tobacco. But it's not idiot proof.

Vaping is not new. Vapers in the U.K and the U.S. have been reducing tobacco harm through the use of electronic cigarettes since 2007. By early 2009 the technology had gone global. 

It's a technology that has been helping tobacco smokers quit polluting their bodies and shortening their lives. Vaping is a zero pharmaceutical and combustion-free tobacco harm reduction technology.  

The fact that a small number of people are now doing stupid stuff with it should not surprise you and it shouldn't stop smokers from considering it.

I started using e-cigs in June 2013. I quit burning tobacco completely in August 2017. No expensive psychosomatic drugs necessary. No sticky, itchy patches. No nasty tasting gum that fouls dental work. Just deliciously flavored and very satisfying clouds of vapor.

For about the cost of a carton of premium cigarettes, I can buy a very powerful electronic device and enough juice to last me the same week that the smokes did. At the end of the week, all I need to replace is the juice and maybe the small heating element. This coil is the small part that uses heat (not burning) to convert the water soluble liquid into a gaseous cloud. The cloud contains only USP grade nicotine, USP grade glycerin, USP grade glycol and FDA approved flavoring. That's it.

Vaping is not new, but idiots have been around since forever. Given enough time, idiots always find a way to take something useful to the rest of us and turn it into something that becomes a threat to themselves and others around them. 

These people aren't getting sick or dying because they're vaping. This is happening to them because they're stupid.

In those studies, officials in Illinois and Wisconsin detailed 53 cases they've investigated, 28 in Wisconsin and 25 in Illinois. They described the vaping history of 41 patients where complete information was available. 

About 80% of those patients had used products containing THC, the active ingredient in marijuana, and 61% used nicotine products. Some 7% used cannabidiol, or CBD, products. 

Most of the patients were male, with an average age of 19, and all were previously healthy. They were sick for several days prior to being hospitalized, with respiratory symptoms being most common, followed by fever, fatigue, weight loss and gastrointestinal symptoms. 

In some of these cases, officials said, patients either used only THC products or only nicotine. Patients reported using 14 different brands of THC products and 13 brands of nicotine products in a wide range of flavors. It's possible patients did not accurately report which kinds of products they had vaped.

So... there are less than 100 cases of severe reactions to vaping, 80% of which were vaping the active ingredient in marijuana and another 7% using CBD. To top it all off, it's possible that the people who got sick had no idea what they were inhaling.

There are tens of millions of vapers in the U.S. There are hundreds of millions globally. Yet a tiny portion of people have tried to use this life-saving technology to do something stupid.

Charles Darwin had a theory about such organisms, didn't he?

Please feel free to share this royalty free meme wherever you want. Scroll below it to read a few other ways people are being stupid with e-cigs.

Super low resistance atomizers represent a threat to the user and the people around him. People who insist on build resistances below 0.25Ω are asking for trouble. Today's high tech batteries are capable of delivering a fearsome amount of electrical current. That current can result in a fire that destroys the device and often results in the battery going into a rapid thermal event and possible explosion. Ultra low resistance requires high electrical current that may exceed the battery's ability to deliver it. When that happens, BOOM.

Mistreatment or misuse of Lithium chemistry batteries is a cause for concern. The batteries are found in cell phones, tablets, laptop computers, power tools, children's toys and e-cigs. They're not dangerous if they're used properly. They create a safety hazard if they're removed from the device they're meant to be used in and handled carelessly or ignorantly.

Almost all of the human injuries and property damage caused by the dreaded "exploding vape pen" were caused by idiots failing to use or charge the batteries in a safe manner. I would be willing to bet that the frequency of these "explosions" is statistically no greater than the frequency of similar events with other devices such as cell phones and power tools.

Electronic devices with lithium type batteries that simply explode or catch fire all by themselves are exceedingly rare. There are billions of such devices in use today and chances are near 100% that you're reading this text on a device powered by a Lithium battery.

If 1/100th of 1% of those devices are just plain faulty, that makes 100 out of every million of them a handheld time bomb. Don't you know it, 100 exploding e-cigs will make the evening news because the TV station is running ads for Chantix.

It’s working! Vaping among would-be teen smokers is on the rise

Vaping is freedom, but there are people very unhappy over the rise of vaping, especially among teenagers that probably would have smoked a cigarette if they didn’t have that JUUL.

Ask almost any adult smoker if he or she regrets picking up the deadly dangerous habit of smoking tobacco, and the answer is an emphatic “Yes!” Ask that same adult smoker when they started smoking and most will say that they started as a teenager or young adult.

The advent and rapid growth of electronic cigarettes promises to be one of the most important developments in promoting public health since the invention of the polio vaccine.

People who would have started smoking when I did are choosing a different path:

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The latest results from the Monitoring the Future Study, released today, show a jump in vaping by teenagers similar to the one indicated by the National Youth Tobacco Survey numbers published last month. They also show that cigarette smoking by high school seniors, which hit a record low last year, continues to decline.

Since e-cigarettes are far less dangerous than the conventional, combustible kind, the relationship between these two trends is vitally important in evaluating the public health impact of the underage vaping "epidemic." Yet the head of the Food and Drug Administration says his agency, because it is obligated to reduce e-cigarette use by minors at all costs, cannot weigh the possibility that its interventions, which so far include flavor restrictions and anti-vaping propaganda, may result in more smoking-related disease and death.

In the 2018 Monitoring the Future Study, 7.6 percent of 12th-graders reported that they had smoked cigarettes during the previous month. That is the lowest rate ever recorded by the survey, which began in 1975. It is 80 percent lower than the peak rate of 38.8 percent recorded in 1976.

A recent analysis in the journal Tobacco Control, based on data from five national surveys, found that downward trends in smoking by teenagers and young adults accelerated as e-cigarette use in those groups took off. That correlation strongly suggests that young people who would otherwise be smoking are vaping instead, which represents a huge improvement in terms of health risks.

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But a local news station media is treating this as bad news.  And they think it needs “combatting.”

Let’s get some facts established.

• Smoking kills. Vaping doesn't.
• Tobacco smoke contains at least 3,000 dangerous chemicals, including many known to cause cancer. Vaping doesn’t.
• Smoking is addictive. Vaping isn't.
• User controls whether and how much nicotine is added. Not so with smoking.
• Smoking leads to high blood pressure, heart attacks and strokes. Vaping doesn't.
• Smoking stinks. Vaping doesn't.
• Smoking stains your teeth, your clothes, your car and your house. Vaping doesn't.
• Big tobacco and big pharma want vaping banned because the more people smoke, the more money they make.
• State and local governments want vaping banned because they can't tax it like they can tobacco.
• Caffeine is more dangerous than nicotine, but you can buy a coke or a double espresso with no ID.

Why are people “in authority” trying to stop people from vaping? Because it costs them money, and a lot of it.

As of this post date, 17 December 2018, I am 501 days tobacco free. After including the costs of everything I’ve spent on vaping gear and supplies I have saved $4,435.63. At least 1/5th of that would have been taxes, or about $887.00.  On average, I’ve saved about $206.00 every month, which is about the same as the monthly payment for a nice, 5-7 year old used car. Or about a quarter of the rent on a decent 2 bedroom pad in west Mobile or midtown.

That $4,435.63 I’ve saved would also cover most of the down payment on a house costing around $100,000.

Many of you who know me well know that I am a small “L” libertarian. I much prefer a society where I get to make my own decisions and act in my own best interest. Quitting smoking by vaping was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. I breathe better, smell, better, sleep better and spend better. I will probably live longer, too.

But there are powerful forces who would like nothing more than to take my decision away. It’s either keep smoking or quit smoking their way.  And there way costs as much (or more) than smoking. The people who make the drug Chantix and the nicotine gum hate vaping because they can’t patent my Butterscotch Caramel Cake flavored juice. Or my Peanut Butter & Chocolate, or my Strawberries n’ Cream. Or my Banana Cream Pie, or…

Both teen and adult smoking rates have been declining, but the most dramatic decline has been among teenagers.

The powers aligned against vaping don’t like this chart very much. It shows that in the roughly 10 years since e-cigs were introduced, teen smoking has declined by more than half. Adult smoking rates have also fallen, but not as drastically as it has for teens. This is money being put back in the pockets of people who know best how to spend their money.