'E-cigarettes help more smokers quit than patches and gum' (30.01.2019) Kelland / Reuters

Congrats @Marco If it hadn't been for the pain I experienced I would have switched over as well. It's the best thing we have ever had to quit and we need it to remain an option.

Here in NZ they have been talking about making us smokefree by 2025 and yet they are now considering legalising marijuana. I don't get it. More problems.

I should experiment more with e-cigs and the different options. I wish I could find that inner strength to quit. I have no problem with finding the strength to lose weight if I need to but it's a different story with nicotine. It has to be that chemical hit to the brain which makes it so difficult.

You've given yourself a great chance of many more years of better health than you would have had Marco. I need to try and not give up, as I kind of have lately.

 

Hi Rosie. I'm pretty much a newbie as far a vaping is concerned but there seem to be various combinations that are more tolerated than others if you want to discuss by PM?

 

I'd appreciate that so much Marco. Honestly with the cognitive problems I have I find all the options so hard to figure out with the e-cigs. I will PM you in the next few days. I have a bit of vertigo at the moment and as soon as that eases up I will message you.

 

It's not the nicotine, nicotine, in isolation, isn't that addictive. It's the hundreds of other chemicals they add to tobacco to do various things, like freebase ammonia to increase the addictiveness, like a few other things to numb the throat and make smoking more comfortable etc.

Since switching to vaping I can now go several hours without it, comfortably, but when smoking I practically always had a cigarette on the go.

There are many different mixtures of e liquid available, the strength is the one that if it's too strong will make you cough. An incorrect PG/VG mixture, for you, can cause pain in the upper chest. It's just a matter of finding the correct ratios. I mix my own, primarily because it's vastly cheaper, but it also allows me to customise what I make for my needs, and the climate, at the time. Well that and given I was much less healthy at the time having 20 years worth of nicotine in the freezer seemed a much better than needing to go out to a vape shop every few days. It takes under 5 minutes to make up 2 months worth if you're not that bothered about flavouring, and flavouring is where most of the potentially risky chemicals get introduced, so I don't use any, just a few menthol crystals in every 100ml bottle..

 

In our local hospitals patients who smoke are routinely given patches when they are admitted.

I think there are worries that the flavourings in vaping could be carcinogenic.

 

Whilst all are 'food safe' virtually none have been tested properly for inhalation, and they keep finding potential problems with what were popular flavourings e.g. custards, flavourings that have a creamy component etc.

Hence why I decided not to bother with any of them, apart from the odd menthol crystal, where the inhalation risks are known, and vanishingly small.

 

I bought it years ago before the current rules came in. For a smoker the strongest you can currently buy for mixing, in the UK, is safe if some is split on the skin, just wash it off. For a non smoker, or a child, or even a pet, not so much, all nicotine should be kept safely away for them.

I use a 7.2% nicotine solution to mix down from, down to around 2.4% for vaping, although that strength is dropping. A liter lasts me over 2 years once mixed down (it makes over 3 liters of e liquid)

I also have 99.7% pure nicotine in the freezer. No one who doesn't have hazardous chemicals gear, full body suit, full face respirator, 2 layers of gloves, and adequate forced ventilation, should even be touching an unopened bottle. It's lethal, it has no surface tension so once on your skin it just smears and is absorbed, washing will only speed up absorption. Don't ask how I know this.

It's not a nice way to die if a mistake is made, and for an average sized male 2.4 drops on the skin is enough to be lethal to 50% of the people it happens to.

But 7.2%, for a smoker, someone with some nicotine tolerance, that's safe for skin contact, just mix it down before vaping it or you'll both cough your lungs up and feel sick as a slightly unwell dog. As far as I am aware, since the EU TPD came into force, without a commercial license it's impossible for an end user to purchase more than 2.0% legally in the EU/UK. It's safe, it's overly safe, because of the hysteria created by anti vaping proponents at that time.

@Trish I'm not sure why anyone would be drinking it, it tastes foul, it burns, and if you drink more than a little you'd end up throwing up for hours. It is a poison the body recognises and at the strengths normally available to people, can handle. Just not children, pets, or possibly, non smokers. I don't see what the problem is with keeping it in a high cupboard away from any foodstuffs, I don't see why anyone would mix it up with such things. in much the same way as people don't store bleach in vinegar bottles and keep it in the condiments cupboard. Common sense.

The more concentrated stuff, that's' kept in glass bottles, individually packed in mylar bags with all the oxygen removed, each individually bubble wrapped and packaged inside another mylar bag filled with nitrogen, to protect against breakage, in a dedicated sealed box, in the freezer. All correctly hazard labeled on every layer. It cannot be mixed up with anything else.

I have asperger's, I have a tendency to research and do things properly.

 

I disagree that the current limit on strength is a good thing, it's too low and will lead to some sourcing pure nicotine from China. Quite apart from the risks to workers in it's transit (not all Chinese companies use the correct type of couriers, as they are expensive), there's also the risk that they haven't looked into it and don't have the correct safety gear or environment for processing it safely.

For a heavy smoker switching to vaping 2.0% is just not strong enough to cut it, for them to be successful. These people will either source illegally or give up and keep smoking, when an equally safe limit of 4.5% would have avoided that. The only reason that it was set at the current limit was lobbying and propaganda, the science was ignored, and there was science.

In order to compensate for such an arbitrarily low limit the market switched to high volume devices, to cloud chasing. Devices that used e liquid much more rapidly so as to deliver at the needed rate. Making companies much more money, making big clouds of vapour that annoy people, pricing most vapers out. It costs me around £2 a week to vape, a 10ml bottle of commercial liquid is at least £6, cloud chasing will use 2-3 bottles a day.

The limit wasn't set for health reasons, to protect the kiddies, it was set for commercial ones, to take control of the market.

Watching the whole process of the TPD unfold in the EU was one of the main reasons I voted leave. The EU is corrupt, incompetent, and run almost entirely for the interests of business, not for it's citizens. I know our governments aren't much better but given the option I chose to not give my approval to the EU. I have no problem with immigrants (I was briefly married to an Iranian woman), I have no problem with free movement, or customs cooperation etc. The only issue was the EU itself.

 

The effects of all poisons are strength dependant. Nicotine is in the same range as caffeine in terms of toxicity. It's just people very rarely deal with pure caffeine, it's not a thing.

Everything can be poisonous if ingested in sufficient volume or strength. Even Dihydrogen Monoxide, a common substance which may have killed more people than every poison on the planet.

ETA - up until the last update to the Tobacco Products Directive, nicotine at 7.2% or below was not considered a poison in the UK. Technically it still isn't, but the TPD makes it illegal to sell at concentrations above 2.0%. The TPD was meant to control tobacco use, cigarettes, cigars, that sort of thing. Combustible products that cause almost all of their health issues by smoke inhalation. Both snuff and vaping have been gathered in despite a virtually non existent risk profile, compared with smoking, in fact they are typically used to reduce or stop smoking. Paid for by individuals not health care systems. The decisions regarding their inclusion in the TPD were as a result of lobbying, not health concerns. The limits were as a result of hysterical propaganda, the science, what their was that wasn't paid for by lobbyist or tobacco companies, says that 4.5% was a more reasonable limit.

This was ignored, because it wasn't being pushed by a lobby or special interest group, because the person in charge of the committee was a rabid anti tobacco lobbyist herself.

Of course the UK representative to the council, when asked by a house committee, claimed that vaping wasn't even in the TPD, that there was no reason for concern.

Meanwhile the tobacco companies are still allowed to add hundreds of chemicals to tobacco, to make them more addictive, to reduce evidence of harm to individual smokers, to keep people smoking as much as possible, for as long as possible. And governments still continue to take around 80% of the take as direct tax.

Not to mention that big tobacco now controls most of the vaping market in the UK and EU. Not always directly, but they control most of the companies that do. Before the TPD this was not the case, most, virtually all, of the market was controlled by independants, but they can't afford the fees for testing and certification of hundreds of products, so most went out of business, or by from companies that can afford it, owned by big tobacco. The TPD handed the market to them. So the actions of the anti-smoking brigade gave control, and much greater profits, a path to the future, to the very companies they claimed to be working against, squashing the little independants, the innovators, in the process.

See any similarities with our situation?

It was a travesty, and I have seen absolutely no evidence that every other decision/policy the EU makes isn't handled exactly the same way. I couldn't support such an organisation, that had corruption as part of it's very system of operation, it's not broken, that's how it's supposed to work.