By Kennedy Shelley
A rash of lung injuries has regulators blaming vaping for nearly 400 people going to the hospital in recent weeks.
The serious pulmonary issues have spread to several states, but most notably New York.
Since vaping also known as e-cigarettes have been used for 16 years without this problem, regulators should be looking at a more elicit cause.
Most of the people affected have been young and healthy before having to go to intensive care.
What was surprising to many of the doctors involved is that the lung function was diminished with no underlying infection.
The Center for Disease Control has confirmed 53 cases where young people reported using some form of electronic vaping in the last 90 days, most of which was using THC e-liquids.
If you don’t vape, you may not know how these systems work.
Basically, an e-liquid (Propylene Glycol, food-grade flavoring, Vegetable Glycerin, and Nicotine FDA approved chemicals) is heated to its vapor.
Because these are heated to a vapor point and not to combustion, they don’t change into new substances like when they are smoked the chemicals are stable.
In short, vaping is dramatically different from smoking.
Because there is no combustion there is no carbon monoxide, no tar nor the chemical changes that occur when you burn vegetable matter.
Tobacco smoke contains over 7000 chemical compounds, 70 of which are known to cause cancer.
It also contains formaldehyde, cyanide, ammonia, nitrogen oxide and arsenic.
Vaping clouds only have the original four chemicals.
In an editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine, a professor from Harvard urged people not to vape because of the 5 deaths they think may be associated with vaping.
To put this in perspective, during the same period over 60,000 Americans died.
But according to the CDC, approximately 1300 Americans die each day from smoking.
That’s 13,000 people who died while this alleged vaping “death epidemic” is taking place.
The reason why this is so important is vaping has been shown to be the number one-way people have used to quit smoking.
According to an unpublished study that Freedom Health News has acquired, half of Oklahoma’s former smokers have quit thanks to vaping between 2006 and 2013.
If that trend is constant in the US, that means that vaping would save 650 people per day.
Great Britain has embraced vaping as a means of getting people to quit. They believe that while vaping can’t be considered harmless, they estimate it is at least 95% safer than continuing to smoke.
But this latest scare might have nothing to do with regular vapers who are using it for nicotine replacement, but instead a THC problem.
There seems to be a mixture of THC and vitamin E that may be the cause of this particular problem.
Because the federal government officially won’t recognize marijuana sales it doesn’t really investigate these products and relies on state regulation.
It looks more and more like there was a contaminate batch of THC oil sold illegally in some states that is causing most of this problem.
Basically, this is a problem with street drugs and not the vaping industry.
But it seems that government regulators are trying to expand their war on illegal drugs to a war on legal vaping.
It makes sense that people really watch the sources of their vaping liquids.
