Electronic cigarettes pros and cons.

[D.P.]

Nicotine isn't a carcinogen either you tool, it's the tar, carbon monoxide and 400 plus other chemicals in fags that give you cancer, the nicotine is merely the addictive agent.

But I see you avoided my question so I'll ask again. Why, if nicotine is as toxic and cancer-inducing as you claimed, is it licensed and prescribed by nearly every major Western healthcare system on Earth?

Now, to rebut your 'facts' one by one.

"Nicotine is at least 1000-2000x more toxic than caffine"

Wrong, the median lethal dosage of caffeine for a human is around 4-5 grammes, the lethal does of nicotine is around 40-60 milligrams. So taking both in their purest form (which no one would do) the difference is 100 at most, a whole order of magnitude lower than you stated.

Furthermore when you look at how both are used in reality the difference becomes even lower. A smoker absorbs around 1.2mg of nicotine in each cigarette, someone drinking a 100 ml cup of coffee will consume 40mg of caffeine. So whilst it would take around 42 cigarettes smoked in one go to create the possibility of death, it would 'only' take someone downing 125 cups of coffee in the same time frame to be at the same risk of mortality.

So in real terms, and putting in the context of how each is used, at best caffeine is only 3 times less toxic than nicotine. I haven't even mentioned e-cigs yet which aren't as efficient as cigarettes at delivering nicotine.

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"is far less addictive (although shows limited addictive side effects)"

If we define an addiction as something you do several times every day and feel negative side-affects with withdrawal then 80% of the Western world are addicted to caffeine (most of home will never realise they are until they try and go 'cold turkey' and start getting headaches and nausea.)



So whilst pound for pound nicotine is more addictive, caffeine is far more addicted to and , like above, more addictive as a consumable unit in the context of how it is taken.

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"and is not carcinogenic"

Like nicotine then. Whilst you can cite 'studies that link it to cancer' there is no known or accepted scientific notion that nicotine causes cancer and imply it is (as you have) is a downright lie. In terms of finding studies that link anything with cancer, this is pretty easy and you only have to read the Daily Mail headlines to see how many things get 'linked' with it.

Until you can prove and convince the rest of the medical and scientific world that nicotine is a carcinogen, I'd suggest you are making yourself look foolish at worst, and dishonest at best by keep posting that it is one.

For the most part, utter garbage. Even taking your hand picked numbers it is still patently obvious how much more toxic nicotine is than caffeine, even under everyday use age. It is is physically impossible to drink 125 cups of coffee, you would die from the water alone long before you got to that stage.

You can ignore all the science you want on the carcinogenic properties of nicotine but the facts are there for others to read. Giving nicotine to lab animals has been shown to directly cause cancer, that is a plain fact. That evidence is sufficient to ban many chemicals for being carcinogenic.

As for addiction, yes of course caffeine is addictive, no one has said otherwise. The point is if someone is addicted to caffeine then it is far simpler to quit with more mild withdrawal symptoms than nicotine. People can break a caffeine addiction with minor detrimental effects at a high success rate. Nicotine addiction is very similar to cocaine or heroine and often requires medical intervention and at best is a difficult process with a much lower success rate.

 

[Mournblade]

Far less, somewhere around 30mg is sufficient.

i was right http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00204-013-1127-0/fulltext.html

 

[estebanrey]

For the most part, utter garbage. Even taking your hand picked numbers it is still patently obvious how much more toxic nicotine is than caffeine, even under everyday use age. It is is physically impossible to drink 125 cups of coffee, you would die from the water alone long before you got to that stage.

You can ignore all the science you want on the carcinogenic properties of nicotine but the facts are there for others to read. Giving nicotine to lab animals has been shown to directly cause cancer, that is a plain fact. That evidence is sufficient to ban many chemicals for being carcinogenic.

Hand picked numbers, LOL. Do you really want me to back them up one by one? Pretty much every number you have stated has been wildly exaggerated and goes against every study going.

As I said, gram for gram nicotine is more toxic than caffeine, I've already conceded that. What you keep seem to be missing is the practically reality of how each is taken which has a huge contextual impact on the overlying fact mentioned above.

As well as caffeine products containing far more caffeine than nicotine products containing nicotine, there is also a much bigger scale of products that have caffeine in. Outside tomatoes which contain trace amounts of nicotine (Have you stopped eating them too?), someone only really gets it from smoking/vaping. Caffeine however can be found in Coffee, Tea, Carbonated Drinks, chocolate, pain killers, breath fresheners,..the list is endless.

So in terms of real life exposure and physical amounts added, you are far more exposed to 'toxicity' through caffeine than you are with nicotine.

As for addiction, yes of course caffeine is addictive, no one has said otherwise. The point is if someone is addicted to caffeine then it is far simpler to quit with more mild withdrawal symptoms than nicotine. People can break a caffeine addiction with minor detrimental effects at a high success rate. Nicotine addiction is very similar to cocaine or heroine and often requires medical intervention and at best is a difficult process with a much lower success rate.

I'm really beginning to think you are just trolling now. Do you know what the following list of symptoms can be attributed to a withdrawal of....

headaches, muscle pain and stiffness, lethargy, nausea, vomiting, depressed mood, and marked irritability.

Nicotine? No, that list are symptoms of withdrawal of caffeine. I know someone who went caffeine free and they were pretty ill after a couple of days.

 

[D.P.]

i was right http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00204-013-1127-0/fulltext.html

That is an interesting article and very recent, will read it in detail later tonight.
I last looked into this maybe a year ago and the 30-40mg figure was the accepted value across multiple systematic reviews encompassing hundreds of studies. One should also be careful that the LD50 values don't indicate the standard deviation which can be quite high. From the definition alone up to half a population sample would die from less intake. It has been known that values well under 10mg have been fetal in humans.

LD50 also excludes long term health effects like cancer to which nicotine is linked.

But again, thanks for the interesting article.

 

[D.P.]

Hand picked numbers, LOL. Do you really want me to back them up one by one? Pretty much every number you have stated has been wildly exaggerated and goes against every study going.

As I said, gram for gram nicotine is more toxic than caffeine, I've already conceded that. What you keep seem to be missing is the practically reality of how each is taken which has a huge contextual impact on the overlying fact mentioned above.

As well as caffeine products containing far more caffeine than nicotine products containing nicotine, there is also a much bigger scale of products that have caffeine in. Outside tomatoes which contain trace amounts of nicotine (Have you stopped eating them too?), someone only really gets it from smoking/vaping. Caffeine however can be found in Coffee, Tea, Carbonated Drinks, chocolate, pain killers, breath fresheners,..the list is endless.

So in terms of real life exposure and physical amounts added, you are far more exposed to 'toxicity' through caffeine than you are with nicotine.



I'm really beginning to think you are just trolling now. Do you know what the following list of symptoms can be attributed to a withdrawal of....



Nicotine? No, that list are symptoms of withdrawal of caffeine. I know someone who went caffeine free and they were pretty ill after a couple of days.

OK, we can agree to not go trolling through the internet to find different figures.

As I said, even if we use your figures then it is physically impossible to die from caffeine even if you were strapped to a chair and force fed coffee. You would die from the water consumption long before caffeine would be a serious contender. The same isn't true for nicotine.


As for addiction that is laughable, a few days, oh no the horror. I've known people suffer nicotine withdrawal symptoms years after they last smoked!

 

[Mournblade]

yes it is interesting and very new so who know what the real ld50 is its not 60mg its a lot more

 

[estebanrey]

As I said, even if we use your figures then it is physically impossible to die from caffeine even if you were strapped to a chair and force fed coffee. You would die from the water consumption long before caffeine would be a serious contender. The same isn't true for nicotine.

The same can be said for nicotine unless you think it is possible to smoke 40 cigarettes in one go.

Furthermore, there are 13 deaths in the US that the FDA have linked to mass energy drink consumption.

Here's one in Australia

The bottom line is, if either caffeine or nicotine are used sensibly then neither will kill you and as such a sense of perspective has to be realised when condemning either as a product.

 

[Boomstick777]

I smoked 20 a day for 25 years. I switched to vaping last year and haven't touched a ciggie since.
I make my own fluids so I know EXACTLY what's in it (aqueous glycerine, clinical grade nicotine, flavourings).

There appears to be no cons to it other than having to charge batteries etc.

My view of vaping is, harmful or not, it's LESS harmful than smoking and so if it gets smokers to quit tobacco then it's a good thing.

Smoking or Vaping? Give me Vaping any day.

Totally agree, absolutely loving vaping. Enjoying it way more than I did cigarettes, the taste and amount of vape, very nice to smoke. None of the stink etc from normal cigarettes. Vaping for me is the best bits of smoking with none of the negatives. Can't beat a nice cup o tea or coffee and a nice vape when relaxing in the evenings

I'm sure the nay sayers here, have their own habits that are probably far more disgusting than vaping Those who live in glass houses etc..

 

[Sin_Chase]

'e-cigs' have NO Pros.

They may have pros compared to regular smoking however

 

[something daft already!!]

You are swapping a dangerous habit with a safe one.

Also your entire post is statistically against the grain. NRT patches have a success rate of around 12%, e-cigs have a success rate over over 70% so to say they do not work is demonstrably false.

But then that's probably because you think someone who vapes is "still smoking" when they aren't.

The problem as I see it with vaping, is you are simply replacing one habit with another. You are not actually giving up and you are still making your body go through the highs and lows of nicotine addiction. What I found personally, was that the patches helped me become a non smoker right away. No longer did I crave the hit of nicotine which vaping and ciggies gave me. I was able to gradually reduce the amount of the drug, by reducing the patches until one day I just stopped the patches as well.

The vaping method was attempted by me and my partner but we both were unable to quit and went back to ciggies. With the patch method, we were both able to quit and have not gone back. I not saying it's easy but it was much easier with NRT patches. Even now, one year on, I still get the odd urge to smoke but the massive amounts of money I am saving, is more than an incentive to stay stopped.

 

[Ripshod]

The same can be said for nicotine unless you think it is possible to smoke 40 cigarettes in one go.

or to take that a little further, you'd pass out from smoking the 40 in one shot long before you can even get near the lethal dose.

I was told that the condensing glycerine can actually help shift all that crud in the lungs, speeding up the recovery process. I've been vaping 3weeks now. My problem was not having that cig in my hand and not getting any 'smoke' from the old cigarettes. I started on the 11mg and haven't looked back.

Is it right that 10ml of the 11mg liquid contains the same nicotine as a pack of 10? Cos if that's true I've only been having the same as ~3 fags daily. So how could that possibly be worse than drinking tea or coffee all day?

I was smoking 25g of bacci a day before.

 

[Hamster]

It's not just a case of how much nicotine is contained in an e-cigarette; it's how much nicotine gets absorbed during vaping. There will be research published very soon by an eminent scientifist, showing that vaping even very high strength e-liquid, concentration of blood plasma nicotine doesn't increase nearly as much as when a cigarette is smoked. The difference will come as a shock!

Let me ask vapers; that hit you got (or still get if smoking too) from the morning cigarette. You know the one that makes you go all light-headed and makes your head buzz a bit. Do you get the same from your first vape of the day? I know I don't, far from it. I can quite happily wake up, have a shower and get on with other things before I vape. Why do I vape? Because I want to. I enjoy it.

As for nicotine being a carcinogen....really? Nicotine itself would be widely known as a carcinogen if there were more studies than the odd one desperately googled for and plucked from Hong Kong. Surely someone with half a brain would cotton onto that.

 

[estebanrey]

The problem as I see it with vaping, is you are simply replacing one habit with another. You are not actually giving up and you are still making your body go through the highs and lows of nicotine addiction. What I found personally, was that the patches helped me become a non smoker right away. No longer did I crave the hit of nicotine which vaping and ciggies gave me. I was able to gradually reduce the amount of the drug, by reducing the patches until one day I just stopped the patches as well.

The vaping method was attempted by me and my partner but we both were unable to quit and went back to ciggies. With the patch method, we were both able to quit and have not gone back. I not saying it's easy but it was much easier with NRT patches. Even now, one year on, I still get the odd urge to smoke but the massive amounts of money I am saving, is more than an incentive to stay stopped.

I'll say it again, you are not just swapping one habit for another, you are swapping a known dangerous habit with a pretty well-understood to be safe one. You simply can't equate the two as if they are as bad as each other.

Your problem is one of bad priorities, you seem to be seeing having a 'habit' as the worst aspect instead of the impacts to your health and the costs.

I have given up smoking, I am no longer endangering my health to anywhere near the same levels as when I smoked and that is the aspect that should be celebrated.

The attitude some people have towards vaping that there is no point because the person is still an 'addict' and implying they may as well continue smoking is an extremely misplaced and moreover dangerous one that if predicated enough through society will kill people.

I'm glad you managed to quit smoking via patches, but as I've said statistically you are in a minority and you should be supporting any method of quitting the fags, including e-cigs.

 

[Rilot]

Let me ask vapers; that hit you got (or still get if smoking too) from the morning cigarette. You know the one that makes you go all light-headed and makes your head buzz a bit. Do you get the same from your first vape of the day?

No, but I can if I chain vape a tank of fluid.
I tend to take a few puffs every now and then, and then leave it. These days I don't vape at work at all and so can go most of the day without it.

 

[Pestilence]

It's not just a case of how much nicotine is contained in an e-cigarette; it's how much nicotine gets absorbed during vaping. There will be research published very soon by an eminent scientifist, showing that vaping even very high strength e-liquid, concentration of blood plasma nicotine doesn't increase nearly as much as when a cigarette is smoked. The difference will come as a shock!

Let me ask vapers; that hit you got (or still get if smoking too) from the morning cigarette. You know the one that makes you go all light-headed and makes your head buzz a bit. Do you get the same from your first vape of the day? I know I don't, far from it. I can quite happily wake up, have a shower and get on with other things before I vape. Why do I vape? Because I want to. I enjoy it.

As for nicotine being a carcinogen....really? Nicotine itself would be widely known as a carcinogen if there were more studies than the odd one desperately googled for and plucked from Hong Kong. Surely someone with half a brain would cotton onto that.

Yep, blood plasma concentration of nicotine is much less with vaping than it is with smoking. That's already been demonstrated in some studies so far, and mostly attributed to the plethora of other, harmful additives in tobacco cigarettes designed to get the nicotine into the bloodstream as quickly as possible.

As to the morning nic hit... yeah, I still get it, but only after puffing for a few minutes whereas with a cigarette it would be pretty much instant. Since I now actually enjoy the flavour of what I'm puffing on, I don't mind that one bit.

D.P. mentioned earlier in the thread about Nicotine being almost as toxic as Cyanide, and that's a fallacy I'm afraid. D.P.: I hope you do read the recent findings with some interest -- the one study that was performed that came to that extremely low human LD50 is seriously outdated and bordering on grossly incompetent due to a heavy basis on assumption. We now know that the potential LD50 for an adult human female is likely to be over one hundred times that assumed. Nicotine isn't near as bad as the rep it gets -- yes, it does have proven effects on the gastric system, especially aggravation of existing orders such as IBS, but we're all humans capable (I'd hope) of listening when our bodies tell us not to do something. Nicotine messing with your guts? Stop it. Allergic to peanuts? Don't eat them. If you're having a reaction, then don't do it. What we don't do, is start recommending that everyone avoid something entirely because some people might have a poor response.

howiepoohs -- With regards to your comments on patches vs. vaping, you can also ramp down the nicotine concentration of your e-liquid, just as you did with the patches, until you're vaping nothing but flavoured glycerin. At that point, you can't possibly be addicted to nicotine, and it will be out of your system rather quickly. The only issue then is the physical habit... but then why should anyone decry that? The user isn't putting anything untoward into their body in that case. Many people use that method to quit with e-cigs -- the exact same one you used with patches. I wouldn't write it off so easily.

 

[Tuppy_Glossop]

Can they handle an EMP attack ?

 

[Gregster]

The problem as I see it with vaping, is you are simply replacing one habit with another. You are not actually giving up and you are still making your body go through the highs and lows of nicotine addiction. What I found personally, was that the patches helped me become a non smoker right away. No longer did I crave the hit of nicotine which vaping and ciggies gave me. I was able to gradually reduce the amount of the drug, by reducing the patches until one day I just stopped the patches as well.

The vaping method was attempted by me and my partner but we both were unable to quit and went back to ciggies. With the patch method, we were both able to quit and have not gone back. I not saying it's easy but it was much easier with NRT patches. Even now, one year on, I still get the odd urge to smoke but the massive amounts of money I am saving, is more than an incentive to stay stopped.

So you gave up smoking because you wanted to. I have used patches and never lasted more than a few months, simply because I don't feel I want to give up. I have smoked for 31 years and enjoy a ciggie but I know the harmful effects and since seeing how vaping can be a substitute, I will happily take that as a replacement.

What worked for you will not work for everyone and some people just don't want to give up.

 

[something daft already!!]

I see vaping as a method for tobacco companies (and others) to continue to keep smokers(ex) addicted to nicotine so they can continue to profit off you. Why would you want to have to keep using ecigs when a much cleaner and cheaper way is to stop? Of course the health benefits of vaping are really good. I am not saying vaping is bad, it's just a poor alternative to actually stopping nicotine addiction. Everyone I know who uses ecigs ether ends up smoking again or still has the "odd fag" now and again to supplement. I am fully aware that nicotine is not the carcinogen and that combustion is the cause. It's the aromatic hydrocarbons that cause cancer, not tobacco. If vaping has worked for you then great! At least you are not polluting my air any more but I still see it more like giving a heroine addict methadone rather than getting them to go cold turkey.

 

[estebanrey]

I see vaping as a method for tobacco companies (and others) to continue to keep smokers(ex) addicted to nicotine so they can continue to profit off you. Why would you want to have to keep using ecigs when a much cleaner and cheaper way is to stop? Of course the health benefits of vaping are really good. I am not saying vaping is bad, it's just a poor alternative to actually stopping nicotine addiction. Everyone I know who uses ecigs ether ends up smoking again or still has the "odd fag" now and again to supplement. I am fully aware that nicotine is not the carcinogen and that combustion is the cause. It's the aromatic hydrocarbons that cause cancer, not tobacco. If vaping has worked for you then great! At least you are not polluting my air any more but I still see it more like giving a heroine addict methadone rather than getting them to go cold turkey.

You don't help yourself when you compare e-cig users to heroin addicts. It really is a ridiculous comparison especially given methadone is still pretty bad for you.

With e-cig you are swapping a known killer or something that is fairly well understood to be safe, not swapping something really bad for something that is slightly better.

Your first point about tobacco companies doesn't really compute, apart from the fact that only one so far has made a serious effort to get into the market (BAT) and that at this point in time they are making nothing from e-cigs and losing a lot, if they do release e-cigs and people buy them why is that a bad thing? Why is any business making a profit from a safe product bad in your eyes?

If anything, shouldn't we be encouraging them to make more e-cigs and less cigarettes?

 

[Rilot]

I see vaping as a method for tobacco companies (and others) to continue to keep smokers(ex) addicted to nicotine so they can continue to profit off you.

Except none of the tobacco companies produce e-cigs.
Nothing I use has been anywhere near a large tobacco company.