Every generation has some product/ingredient that they didn’t know was dangerous at the time: tobacco, lead, asbestos, etc. What is that item for this generation?
Vapes. The less regulated and underground production, which is easily finding its way to the high street, is building to be a repeat of the tobacco issues with cigarettes.
My mom switched from chain smoking regular cigs to vaping. While I'm glad she's significantly reduced her lung cancer risk, who knows what it's really doing?
It's better than smoking but definitely still unhealthy, especially chain vaping like many do. You should talk to her, let her know you're worried about her health, and see if she might try reducing intake. I quit smoking cold turkey three years ago. It wasn't easy, I was extremely irritable for a month, but the cravings became bearable after that. An easy trade for higher quality of life and longer life expectancy with less wasted money.
the smoking/cancer connection was noticed long before peak cigarette smoking in the population. Prior to WWII, lung cancer was considered a rare disease. That changed with the mass marketing of cigarettes.
It was specifically caused by black-market THC vape cartridges containing vitamin E acetate as a filler. This chemical was marketed to black-market vape makers as "Honey Cut", intended to dilute or "cut" cannabis extracts while keeping the mixture thick so it looked good to customers.
Legit cannabis vapes don't include fillers; a typical California dispensary vape cartridge contains ~90% cannabinoids by weight. Nicotine vapes are water-based rather than oil-based, so vitamin E acetate would not mix with them.
Vitamin E acetate sounds like a healthy thing — it's a vitamin, right? — but it's not. When it's heated in a vape, it produces a variety of chemicals that would be entertaining to the organic chemist — but no good for your lungs. You don't need to be inhaling alkenes or ketenes, to say nothing of carcinogenic benzene.
(Hey stoners! Don't use black-market carts, just like you wouldn't smoke "synthetic cannabis" aka "spice". If you want to vape instead of smoking, and you're not in a place with good dispensaries with lab-tested vape products, use a dry-herb vape and plain ol' herb.)
Yep. the whole vaping industry got ruined because of this, and it wasn't even related to said industry. I guess it's just another example of what lobbying is capble of.
I've never used a nicotine vape product in my life.
I tried cigarettes once as a teenager and didn't like them; tried a cigar once and threw it away.
I don't like nicotine. I like beer and weed.
But the whole scare about nicotine vaping is utterly bogus.
Almost all of the harm of smoking is from the smoke — soot, tar, and carbon monoxide — and not the nicotine. Inhaling smoke is bad for you. It doesn't matter if that smoke is from tobacco, or cannabis, or a forest fire. Inhaling smoke is bad for you.
If all the cigarette smokers could be switched to vaping overnight, keeping their nicotine doses the same but using vape juice rather than burning plants to get it, that would be a huge public health win.
The fact that regulatory agencies have gotten in the way of converting all the smokers to vaping, instead of gleefully endorsing such a change, is utter madness.
I said this in the other comment, but vaping is the one thing that helped me successfully quit smoking.
Is it healthy? No, at the absolute best it would be neutral. You shouldn't be breathing anything other than clean air. However, I have little doubt that it is better than smoking. My lungs are in great shape now, and I feel just generally much better. If people want to continue to do research on longterm effects of vaping, great!
Are there issues about underage vaping? Sure, but that is a regulation/enforcement issue and shouldn't be used to punish adults with. I have friends that went back to smoking because of vaping being made illegal where they lived, and you cannot convince me that is better for their health.
A lot of the issues we have had about vaping are regulatory issues with stuff like the Vitamin E incident, not a problem with the underlying concept.