Would you spray spray-on cooking oil into your lungs?
Would you spray anti-freeze (ethylene glycol) into your mouth?
If you would, then vape!
Of late, in the media, there has been a considerable amount of uninformed opinion repeating “vaping is safer than smoking.”
Without any direct evidence at all, this line was extensively pushed by one of the makers of vaping products.
In Canada, quite a few principals and school districts, desperate to stem a rising tide of teenage smoking addiction, also offered that advice, particularly in First Nations’ areas.
Health Canada has now issued statements rescinding that advice. Instead of vaping being “safer than smoking,” one manufacturer, Juul, was issued a warning notice by the US FDA on 09/09/2019 that directed it, in part, to stop claiming “nicotine vape products as safer than traditional cigarettes without proof.”
So far, there has been no proof and indeed, some of the other claims also go unsupported, such as “vaping helps smokers switch/ quit.”
It doesn’t according to actual research. People end up both smoking and vaping.
The other claim, that “vaping doesn’t lead to teens taking up smoking” is also unsupported, because the research shows that the nicotine addiction and peer pressure and approval drive teens into smoking after initially vaping.
That teen vapers switch to becoming smokers is what the research actually shows.
How did the claim that “vaping is safer than smoking” come about?
One way was by the comparison of cigarette smoke with the ingredients of unheated vape liquid.
It was some time later that independent researchers compared the pyrolized (heated) vape smoke with cigarette smoke and found that many of the cancer-causing chemicals in cigarette smoke were present in vape smoke, together with some new ones.
A far more sinister consequence is that vapers will mostly become smokers; any cancers that they get some years down the track will be blamed on the smoking rather than the initial vaping, thus hiding vaping’s true contribution to death by cancer.
Most researchers state that vaping hasn’t been going on for long enough for its long-term effects to be known.
If only all of society’s ills could be cured by ignorance and lack of research.
Death and serious illness in teenagers and young adults who vape appears to be caused by chemical destruction of the lungs.
Reporting of deaths and serious illness through vaping has only been recently required of health authorities in Canada and the USA, so there is actually no comparison possible with deaths and illnesses caused by smoking, yet.
Indeed, if one compares the deaths and serious illness of vapers with smokers during the first five years of the activity, vaping is more dangerous.
During 2019 in the USA there were five deaths and 450 cases of vapers requiring hospitalisation. How many teen smokers went to hospital or died from smoking during the first five years?
Many ICU admissions of teens and young adults have occurred within the first year of vaping.
The symptoms are like a mixture of drowning and pneumonia, so please, for the sake of our children, I beg that if you haven’t personally done first-hand, lengthy, longitudinal peer-reviewed research into vaping, stop repeating the industry claim that “vaping is safer than smoking.”
It isn’t.
It’s bad.
It’s different to smoking.
Peter Woof, Narrabri
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