Vaping Satire

And so it begins......

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration said Wednesday it plans to ban the sale of non-tobacco-flavored electronic cigarettes amid a vaping crisis.

“The Trump Administration is making it clear that we intend to clear the market of flavored e-cigarettes to reverse the deeply concerning epidemic of youth e-cigarette use that is impacting children, families, schools and communities,” Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said in a statement. “We will not stand idly by as these products become an on-ramp to combustible cigarettes or nicotine addiction for a generation of youth.”

Michigan became the first state to prohibit sales of most flavored e-cigarettes last week in a bold move to curb the underage vaping epidemic. The ban, which will take effect in a few weeks, will cover both online and in-store sales of all e-cigarette flavors except tobacco.

Trump administration plans to ban sale of flavored electronic cigarettes  

Thought you guys would be interested in this - top UK public health scientists analyze the US data and come to completely different conclusions.

Epidemic of youth nicotine addiction? What does the National Youth Tobacco Survey reveal about high school e-cigarette use in the USA? (Preprint) - Article | Qeios

I'm sure the press will publish it far and wide, not.  

“I’ll NOT be doing THAT again!” - the famous Taurus War Cry was heard in our house this morning!

As happens to the aged, O500 hrs this morning found me suddenly wide awake for no good reason. As usual when this happens I got up, sat in my recliner office chair, drank a pot of tea, read for a bit, and visited forums until the rest of the world came awake accompanying all that with a vape.

However that vaping ( OK chain vaping for 2-3 hours ) was done with my new Feedlink Squonk, inadvertently loaded with 18 strength liquid, fired at 4.2 volts to begin with, through a 0.6 ohm coil.

Not good. Not good at all.

Having smoked since I was very young, inhaled even pipe tobacco etc I never reckoned I could get nic sic at this late stage … but OMG suddenly I got hit with the full repertoire, the sweats, the feeling of nausea, dizziness the restlessness where I couldn’t settle but had to prowl, the racing heart etc etc.

How did I manage to do it? Carelessness coupled with the old “it’ll never happen to me” routine basically.

I had grabbed a bottle of my old 18 strength Menthol Liquid, filled the squonk bottle without looking at the juice bottle’s label and chain vaped using what is in essence a protected mech mod with a new battery on a sub ohm coil.

I’m normally a tootle puffer with 1,6 ohm coils but OMG initially at least with the squonk I enjoyed trying DTL and blowing clouds … initially!

I’m sure the rest of you reading this will have more sense than to do anything like I did this morning, but trust me - I’ll NOT be doing THAT again!  

Juul threw millions of dollars at Washington. It hasn’t bought much.

Juul Labs has spent millions of dollars on lobbying, hired high-profile Trump administration officials, and blanketed Washington with ads touting its efforts against underage vaping.

None of that was enough to keep President Donald Trump from moving to ban flavored e-cigarettes on Wednesday, delivering a blow to the dominant vaping company and its rivals.

“Vaping has become a very big business as I understand it, a giant business in a very short period of time,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office, sitting alongside Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar. “But we can't allow people to get sick and we can't have our youth be so affected.”

Neither Trump nor Azar mentioned Juul in their remarks. But Scott Gottlieb, who pressed for greater regulation of vaping as Trump’s Food and Drug Administration commissioner before stepping down earlier this year, said the move would have an outsize impact on the San Francisco-based company.

“This problem was largely created by the cartridge-based Juul products in my opinion,” Gottlieb said in a statement to POLITICO.​
 

Posting a picture of my set up for today got me thinking as it featured my oldest original well used, worn, scratched and faded iStick 30w which has served me so well and has far outlived its projected lifespan.


A lot changed for me back in October 2015 - my grown up daughter and her husband had switched to vaping as they couldn’t smoke even in the grounds at work and had taken to vaping.

They liked it and gave me an e-pipe, tobacco flavoured vape liquids, a couple of 18350 batteries for it and a Nitecore Charger.


I thanked them, said I’d give it a try - with my fingers crossed and the thought in my mind, “Aye that’ll be right, I’ll stick it in the drawer and phone you in a few weeks saying it broke and I’m really sad about it.”


A week later my conscience got the better of me and I tried it on a Friday morning ( the 17th of October ), was amazed that I got through a day on it without a craving, thought I’d try it over the weekend, did, and have never smoked in the four years plus since. Amazing since I had smoked for more than 50 years previous to that.


I took the e-pipe to Spain with me for the Winter and while there bought a couple of the old style Ego batteries and plastic tanks with their trailing glass fiber wicks “just in case.”


The 18350s need constant charging, the juice soon destroyed the threads of the pipe’s plastic tank and the back up devices gurgled badly and so I went down to Fuengirola where there was a big vape shop and asked could they recommend a better tank - they suggested a Nautilus Mini and when I asked about a battery for it ( I didn’t know they were actually called “Mods” then) they gave me an iStick 30w … and the rest is history.


I joined this Forum about five weeks after I switched to vaping. In those days MTL was THE thing, the setup I’d bought was “flavour of the month” along with the GS Air Tank and one by Kanger. I learned a lot on ECF in a very short time, and I’ll always be grateful for that.


I tend to be a bit of a stick in the mud when I find something I like and my motto tends to be “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it!” I’ve experimented with mechs, squonkers, drippers, and coil building over the years but always come back to my old faithful Nautis and iSticks - simply because for me they work and they work well.


Having found kits that worked, I dropped out of the Forum for a few years until in Spain over the Winter gone I thought my Nautis were failing me or giving up the ghost ( in actual fact as I discovered when I got back to the UK I had had a batch of really really bad coils ) and started reading ECF again and found that the new best thing for MTL was the Zenith, so I gave it a whirl.


I was slow to take to the Zenith I have to admit - while it made my batteries last longer for some reason and was super easy to refill on the go, at first it vaped too dry for me, seemed too airy and the drip tip didn’t initially suit me at all but I persevered with it ( them) and now keep a set of seven for use outdoors or for when travelling or for when I simply feel like a change.


Here’s the Old Soldier!


Anyone else still using old kit?


 

Concerns about dripping

Newer-generation e-cigs allow users to choose — and change — what flavorings they heat up in their devices. Most vapers choose a liquid with nicotine (that addictive, stimulant found in tobacco). To get the biggest nicotine hit from each puff, some vapers take the outside cover off of their e-cigarette and use an eyedropper to “drip” the liquid directly onto the device’s coil.

This is an atomizer used for dripping. A couple drops of e-liquids are dripped directly onto the hot coils to create a vapor cloud.



E-liquids reach higher temperatures when dripped directly onto the coil. This also creates a bigger vapor cloud and provides a bigger throat hit. A new study now raises special concerns for teens who drip.

Allowing the liquid to get superhot can transform harmless chemicals in the e-liquid into toxic ones. (Note: At least one recent study showed that the hotter the vaped liquid became, the more likely it was to undergo such a toxic transformation.) And dripping makes this super-heating likely. Some people even use attachments, called atomizers, to do this more effectively.

Vaping hobbyists that do smoke tricks may have popularized dripping, says Suchitra Krishnan-Sarin. A psychiatrist at Yale University in New Haven, Conn., she’s been studying vaping behaviors in teens. Many now drip, she and her colleagues report.

This team surveyed 1,080 Connecticut high schoolers who said they vaped. One in every four teen vapers said he or she had tried dripping.

This is the first time any study has reported on the popularity of dripping in teens. (Researchers don’t yet know how common dripping is among adults.) The new statistics appear in the February Pediatrics.

Most teens who dripped said they had hoped it would let them make thicker vapor clouds or give the vapor a stronger taste. At present, little is known about the health risks of this type of vaping, Krishnan-Sarin notes.

And that worries her. “There’s great concern,” she says, “that kids are being exposed to higher levels of known carcinogens this way.” Researchers don’t yet know if this is true. And that’s because no one has yet studied whether more of these compounds get into the body when people drip instead of vaping normally.

For now, Krishnan-Sarin says a bigger vapor cloud or more flavorful hit probably isn’t worth the risk. “You don’t know what you’re exposing yourself to,” she points out, and no one should assume that the e-liquids and the vapors they generate are harmless  

White House abruptly cancels meeting with vaping advocates

The White House abruptly organized — and then quickly canceled — a meeting Thursday with frustrated conservative policy leaders, to try to tamp down anger about a sweeping vaping ban that’s inflamed the Trump administration’s traditional allies, four individuals with knowledge of the meeting told POLITICO.

“A ban on flavored e-cigarettes could cost Trump a second term,” Paul Blair of Americans for Tax Reform argued in a Washington Examiner op-ed last week. The “well-organized vaping constituency could swing the outcome of the Electoral College one way or the other.”​
 

Hi All! Sorry if this is long. This place is a lifesaver. I was a 30 year PAD smoker. Tried all the recommendations to quit. Resigned to smoking forever. I heard of vaping in 2013 and found this site. The day my Ego arrived in the mail on April 15, 2013, I put down the cigs and haven’t had a puff since that day. (I still smoke in my dreams every night.) I started out at 18 mg, and went up to 24 for a while. I vaped way higher nicotine than my cigs had, and much more often. I even took my Ego pen to bed and put it under my pillow to use through the night. No matter how much Nicotine I inhaled, I still went through the same withdrawals that I did when quitting cold turkey, or the gum, or the patch, or setting a timer between smokes. It was obvious I wasn’t withdrawing from nicotine. It’s from whatever chemicals are in the cigarettes.

Over the last 7 years, I’ve gone down from 18mg, to 12, to 6, and now 3. Not by choice. I was happy at 18. I started getting lightheaded, so stepped down the nicotine in levels. Not because I wanted less nicotine, but because my body couldn’t handle it. I’m now at 3mg, and starting to getting lightheaded from it. Next step is 0mg. I’ve no problem going to no nicotine, but after so long, I can’t imagine not having the inhale/exhale/hand to mouth repetition.

Has anyone gotten to 0mg and still vapes, or have you broken the habit?  

To bring you up to speed on my vaping. I started in mid 09 and went 2+ years with out an analog np, Then kinda dropped it for bar hopping and I really dont know why. Kept vaping but only when smoking was prohibited.

I come back, and I have always been a mod whore. So pickin up where I left off. But now we got all the sub tanks and sub ohm mods, ect. I find myself in the odd position that my desire to be a mod whore, and my ability to vape these new powerful devices is leaving me,,,,,,,,unfulfilled. Worse yet I think TC or some form of that will be the future of vaping.


So today with my new MiniM and new Kanger subtank mini Ni coils. I begin to try lung hits. Doing pretty good for being at it less than an hour. I brings me back to a time in my misspent youth.


But I immediately noticed some differences in what works and what. More specifically I used to hit the button slightly before I would take a mouth hit. If I didnt it would cause me to cough. With lung hitting the opposite seems to be the only way, (Hit as I press).


I really want to get my brain around this. Is their any other "Lung Hit" tips anyone cares to share??


A problem I anticipate is I probably have $300 worth of 24mg juice laying about. So I suppose I will really be reliving my glory days.


Looking for lung hit tips?????  

Heard a brief mention of this on the radio this morning.

Marijuana use for college students at 35-year high, University of Michigan study shows
By Martin Slagter | mslagter@mlive.com

ANN ARBOR, MI - Marijuana use among college students reached a 35-year high in 2018, according to the University of Michigan’s annual Monitoring the Future national survey.
...
The study also indicated a significant increase in vaping marijuana between 2017 - increasing from 10.7% in 2017 to 20.2% in 2018. The 9.4% increase was among the greatest one-year increases for any substance since the Monitoring the Future Panel began more than 40 years ago.

There also was a significant increase in the 30-day prevalence of vaping marijuana among college students, which increased from 5.2% to 10.9% from 2017 to 2018, representing one of the largest one-year proportional increases for any substance over the past four decades.

Vaping nicotine also increased significantly across all ages groups, as well, from 2017 to 2018. The 30-day prevalence of vaping was up among eighth graders (3.5% to 6.1%); 10th graders (8.2% to 16.1%); 11% to 20.9% for 12th graders; 6.1% to 15.5% for college students and 6.5% to 10.6% for all young adults.

The increase among college students was among the greatest one-year increases the survey has seen in the past 40 years.

The full report is available here.
http://www.monitoringthefuture.org/pubs/monographs/mtf-vol2_2018.pdf