Fuck, how difficult could it be to create a system that heats water above evaporation temperature without releasing toxic metals in the process. Incredible.
PLEASE stop using disposable vapes.
I quit cigarettes 10 yrs ago and had been exclusively using the old school refillable box mods. The kinds with big clouds, not the nic salts like disposables. I was doing fine, great even, for the last ten.
But this past year, after picking up those disposables, I kept having breathing problems. I would stop using them for like two weeks before I picked them up again. The cycle finally led to me going into atrial fibrillation, a cardiac emergency. Had to have my heart shocked. in my 30s!
I ended up quitting nicotine entirely now. it was surprisingly easy to quit! once you wanna do it, it’s already done. as long as you don’t mope about it and celebrate it instead. it’s easier than the whiners would have you believe!
My grandfather wakes up in the hospital after his third heart attack. The Doc comes over and says “you’ll need to stop smoking or else” and my grandad asked “or else what?” The Doc leaned forward and stared him dead in the eyes “Sudden death”
Apparently it worked. He said he never smoked after that
After i read “sudden death” in the smash announcer voice, i thought your grandpa was going to smack his doctor
Wow, congratulations for quitting. And thank you for spreading the message.
Can I ask: What caused you to go from refillable box to disposable? And what is the draw to them?Great question. I used both concurrently. The reason for the disposable: accessibility.
The old school vapes are just getting harder and harder to find. I had to order parts online. The juice companies were getting shut down. I didn’t want to give up my addiction, and I felt so much better on vapes than i had on cigarettes, so I figured it was fine. (Nicotine alone is a bitch to your heart, though…)
I started trying out the disposables because they were readily available. I could pick one up anywhere, I didn’t have to bring juice around with me, no giant batteries or kits to maintain on the go… and in exchange a much harsher hit.
this also led to me doubling my nicotine strength. I had been using 3mg juice for ovet a year by then, but all the disposables measure out to 6mg. Nothing weaker was available. had to switch to stronger stuff on the box mod.
it pisses me off how much they enshittified vaping. it was a really cool and helpful tool that got me off of tobacco. but they started targeting it at minors. instead of rich savory flavors you get all this fruity menthol crap that middle schoolers like. you get tiny vapes with flashy blinking light and fixed high potency. you get bans on it, and regulations/fees so strict that indie vape companies that started this shit for people like me now have to shut down.
oh well. it was all a facade anyway. nicotine itself is the problem. it pushes your systems into overdrive and then wears you out on seconds, until you cant even be at homeostasis without nicotine in your system. the joy of smoking is just the temporary relief of withdrawal. it’s like wearing a pair of tight shoes just so you can enjoy taking them off for 5 minutes. I’m done living my life in withdrawals. so happy to be free! (and it was honestly fucking easy, you all can do it too)
I’ve been vaping type 2 cannabis for several years with a dry herb vaporizer. It’s great, I have these small cartridges that I fill with herb and that’s good for me for a session. It’s a relatively low THC hit but it’s perfect for me.
A few months ago I went to a dispensary in a neighboring state and picked up a disposable THC vape pen. It is really cool and convenient, but it can fuck. you. up. With the dry herb you’ve gotta pull on it very hard, especially the first hit… and that’s how I hit the disposable the first time. Ruined my night.
They’re worse in one particular way, which isn’t the most significant way that cigarettes cause harm. They’re not worse overall. Vaping has been a major public-health success story, and it’s odd to see people trying to discourage it with misleading headlines. The perfect is the enemy of the good here.
Yeah, i agree with you.
Just, tell me if i understand this correctly, please:
- The part of cigarettes that makes you addicted is nicotine, and the psychological habit of “smoking one” as a social ritual.
- However, nicotine is not really dangerous to your health. The smoke is what’s damaging your lungs. Smoke contains half-burnt chemicals, that are acidic and corrosive, and that damages your lungs.
- Vaping uses (water) vapor instead of smoke, and since vapor is not as acidic or corrosive, it’s less dangerous for your health.
- Vapes still make you addicted though, because they contain nicotine, and that’s why you have to buy them over-and-over again, which means you still have the economic disadvantage of spending significant money on them.
That is my current understanding as well, except that I would add that cigarettes are so expensive because of sin taxes, not because they’re inherently that expensive to produce. In NYC (admittedly a place with particularly high taxes on cigarettes) the total tax on a single pack is $7.86. Therefore I don’t have a lot of sympathy for arguments that the government ought to discourage smoking specifically because it costs poor people a lot of money. (With that said, public health arguments for discouraging the burning of tobacco are valid.) My guess is that a nicotine habit doesn’t have to be much more expensive than a caffeine habit.
From what I understand your spot on except for the nicotine part. Nicotine on its own right from what I understand isn’t all too terrible for you, however having nicotine in ur airways keep ur lungs and throat from expelling contaminants from lungs via the cilia (hairs that push contaminants out of airways). So by the very nature of vaping or smoking, the nicotine in ur airways stops ur airways from clearing out the crap that’s bad for ur lungs (for example if u smoke weed and vape, the weed smoke that’s bad for u can’t get out and will cause more damage than if u didn’t vape). This is why when u stop vaping or smoking, after a few days to a week you tend to have coughing fits. This is ur Celia finally getting back to business and pushing nasty shit out of ur lungs after being suppressed for so long. This discovery is also why I finally quit vaping, as I quit smoking cigs for a healthier life but I was not achieving what I wanted by replacing it with vaping. Yes it’s better for you, but better is relative. It’s still bad for you and there’s no arguing that.
Vaping has been a major public-health success story
WHO disapproves of electronic nicotine delivery systems.
https://www.who.int/news-room/questions-and-answers/item/tobacco-e-cigarettes
Oh really, guess I’ll go back to cigarettes then.
WHO also disapproves of conventional cigarettes.
It’s best, if you stay away from both.
Given the findings of the study in this post, I’m not sure whether we can even still say whether one is better or worse than the other.
Yeah except smoking rates have increased since the invention of vapes. It if was strickly people smoking cigarettes swapping to vapes then maybe we could call it a success
I admit I don’t see people vaping as a major problem. The harm is not so severe that it overcomes my inclination to let people make their own choices. This is especially so when the harm is not intrinsic to the act but rather the result of contamination.
I think people might smoke more in total because people are stressed out more?
I don’t have a study on this, but from my personal environment, i can attest that people seem to be more stressed-out, and more worried, about work and wages than 20 years ago. But i could be wrong here. Maybe it’s just that i’m getting older and paying more attention to these things now.
Anyways, “more stress” would explain why people smoke more. To many, it seems to have a stress-relieving functionality, at the cost of long-term health disadvantages.
I suspect it’s hopelessness. The people I saw start smoking young didn’t expect to hit 80 in any way that was desirable. Cancer, lung disease, heart attacks… those are future problems, and those who don’t believe themselves to have a future don’t care at best and are happy to go at worst.
The thing a lot of them didn’t get was that the years it takes are the ones coming soon, not the ones far off into the future.
