New Study Shows Disposable Vapes Are Worse Than Cigarettes

They're worse in one particular way, which isn't the most significant way that cigarettes cause harm. They're not worse overall. Vaping has been a major public-health success story, and it's odd to see people trying to discourage it with misleading headlines. The perfect is the enemy of the good here.
- And they’re talking about cheap Chinese gas station vapes here. If you use quality coils, there won’t be lead at all.
- They’re also a worse pollutant. Policies that favor disposable vapes over refillable ones are a travesty but ultimately disposable vapes are far more profitable for big tobacco.
- Yeah except smoking rates have increased since the invention of vapes. It if was strickly people smoking cigarettes swapping to vapes then maybe we could call it a success
  
  You can always count on the tobacco companies to turn a useful tool into something evil.
  
  I admit I don't see people vaping as a major problem. The harm is not so severe that it overcomes my inclination to let people make their own choices. This is especially so when the harm is not intrinsic to the act but rather the result of contamination.
  
  I think people might smoke more in total because people are stressed out more?
  I don't have a study on this, but from my personal environment, i can attest that people seem to be more stressed-out, and more worried, about work and wages than 20 years ago. But i could be wrong here. Maybe it's just that i'm getting older and paying more attention to these things now.
  Anyways, "more stress" would explain why people smoke more. To many, it seems to have a stress-relieving functionality, at the cost of long-term health disadvantages.
- Yeah, i agree with you.
  Just, tell me if i understand this correctly, please:
  The part of cigarettes that makes you addicted is nicotine, and the psychological habit of "smoking one" as a social ritual.
  However, nicotine is not really dangerous to your health. The smoke is what's damaging your lungs. Smoke contains half-burnt chemicals, that are acidic and corrosive, and that damages your lungs.
  Vaping uses (water) vapor instead of smoke, and since vapor is not as acidic or corrosive, it's less dangerous for your health.
  Vapes still make you addicted though, because they contain nicotine, and that's why you have to buy them over-and-over again, which means you still have the economic disadvantage of spending significant money on them.
  
  From what I understand your spot on except for the nicotine part. Nicotine on its own right from what I understand isn't all too terrible for you, however having nicotine in ur airways keep ur lungs and throat from expelling contaminants from lungs via the cilia (hairs that push contaminants out of airways). So by the very nature of vaping or smoking, the nicotine in ur airways stops ur airways from clearing out the crap that's bad for ur lungs (for example if u smoke weed and vape, the weed smoke that's bad for u can't get out and will cause more damage than if u didn't vape). This is why when u stop vaping or smoking, after a few days to a week you tend to have coughing fits. This is ur Celia finally getting back to business and pushing nasty shit out of ur lungs after being suppressed for so long. This discovery is also why I finally quit vaping, as I quit smoking cigs for a healthier life but I was not achieving what I wanted by replacing it with vaping. Yes it's better for you, but better is relative. It's still bad for you and there's no arguing that.
  
  That is my current understanding as well, except that I would add that cigarettes are so expensive because of sin taxes, not because they're inherently that expensive to produce. In NYC (admittedly a place with particularly high taxes on cigarettes) the total tax on a single pack is $7.86. Therefore I don't have a lot of sympathy for arguments that the government ought to discourage smoking specifically because it costs poor people a lot of money. (With that said, public health arguments for discouraging the burning of tobacco are valid.) My guess is that a nicotine habit doesn't have to be much more expensive than a caffeine habit.
- Vaping has been a major public-health success story
  WHO disapproves of electronic nicotine delivery systems.
  https://www.who.int/news-room/questions-and-answers/item/tobacco-e-cigarettes
  
  Oh really, guess I’ll go back to cigarettes then.
- Tobacco / Nicotine lobbyist AI, right? You guys are making billions from all the addicts slowly killing themselves. As long as they stay alive long enough to turn a profit though.
  
  Would you like a cupcake recipe?

- No wonder young men are more stupid and violent than they have been in a long time! /s
  
  Are they? I was under the impression that violence has been trending downward for some time.
- Maybe in a another couple thousand years we'll finally learn to avoid it

PLEASE stop using disposable vapes.
I quit cigarettes 10 yrs ago and had been exclusively using the old school refillable box mods. The kinds with big clouds, not the nic salts like disposables. I was doing fine, great even, for the last ten.
But this past year, after picking up those disposables, I kept having breathing problems. I would stop using them for like two weeks before I picked them up again. The cycle finally led to me going into atrial fibrillation, a cardiac emergency. Had to have my heart shocked. in my 30s!
I ended up quitting nicotine entirely now. it was surprisingly easy to quit! once you wanna do it, it's already done. as long as you don't mope about it and celebrate it instead. it's easier than the whiners would have you believe!
- My grandfather wakes up in the hospital after his third heart attack. The Doc comes over and says "you'll need to stop smoking or else" and my grandad asked "or else what?" The Doc leaned forward and stared him dead in the eyes "Sudden death"
  Apparently it worked. He said he never smoked after that
  
  After i read "sudden death" in the smash announcer voice, i thought your grandpa was going to smack his doctor
- Wow, congratulations for quitting. And thank you for spreading the message.
  Can I ask: What caused you to go from refillable box to disposable? And what is the draw to them?
  
  Great question. I used both concurrently. The reason for the disposable: accessibility.
  The old school vapes are just getting harder and harder to find. I had to order parts online. The juice companies were getting shut down. I didn't want to give up my addiction, and I felt so much better on vapes than i had on cigarettes, so I figured it was fine. (Nicotine alone is a removed to your heart, though...)
  I started trying out the disposables because they were readily available. I could pick one up anywhere, I didn't have to bring juice around with me, no giant batteries or kits to maintain on the go... and in exchange a much harsher hit.
  this also led to me doubling my nicotine strength. I had been using 3mg juice for ovet a year by then, but all the disposables measure out to 6mg. Nothing weaker was available. had to switch to stronger stuff on the box mod.
  it pisses me off how much they enshittified vaping. it was a really cool and helpful tool that got me off of tobacco. but they started targeting it at minors. instead of rich savory flavors you get all this fruity menthol crap that middle schoolers like. you get tiny vapes with flashy blinking light and fixed high potency. you get bans on it, and regulations/fees so strict that indie vape companies that started this shit for people like me now have to shut down.
  oh well. it was all a facade anyway. nicotine itself is the problem. it pushes your systems into overdrive and then wears you out on seconds, until you cant even be at homeostasis without nicotine in your system. the joy of smoking is just the temporary relief of withdrawal. it's like wearing a pair of tight shoes just so you can enjoy taking them off for 5 minutes. I'm done living my life in withdrawals. so happy to be free! (and it was honestly fucking easy, you all can do it too)
- Plus those disposables create massive amounts of e-waste.

*New study shows one brand of disposable vapes causes higher lead exposure than cigarettes

The researchers tested flavored and “clear” versions of three of the most popular products — Esco Bar, Flum Pebble, and ELF Bar — and found “excessive emissions of toxic metallic elements” in the aerosols from each of them.
All three of which are from the same company. I'm not seeing any information there about where these are manufactured, but if I guessed China, I probably wouldn't be wrong.
- Are any not made there?
  Eta: I'm not sure this is a manufacturer as much as a dealer.
  
  Oh yeah, that's what I meant. I'm sure they're not making them themselves. They're sourcing them from overseas somewhere for sure.
- How are they from the same company? To me it looks like different companies
- Does this mean the emissions that are inhaled by the user, or the emissions that are exhaled?

if you're hooked on nicotine and you havent tried them, then give nicotine pouches a try. i switched to them from vaping and all the asthma went away overnight. plus no one knows when you've got one under your lip
- Everyone knows when you have one under your lip
  
  ok. i've never been asked to "go outside to nicotine pouch" so whatever
  
  Lol extremely untrue
- Do they offer low-nicotine ones to wean off? Or are you just limiting yourself to oral cancers instead of oral, lung, etc.?
  
  Yes, they do offer them in varying levels of nicotine. I decided about a month ago to stop vaping after doing it daily for 10 years. Ordered some patches and some gum, and while I was waiting on those I tried the pouches. They do work and you can get them in lower strengths to wean yourself off.
  If your goal is to quit nicotine entirely, be careful that you don't just fully swap one addiction for another. I'm still working on getting off of the pouches, but it's getting better, and my lungs feel so much better now.
  
  I find the pouches really easy to quit cold turkey, so there's not really a need to ween off once you've switched to them, but it is an option with pouches ranging from stupidly high to almost no nicotine content. It does suck for the first day not using them, but by day 3 I've completely forgotten they exist. Totally different experience quitting pouches vs a vape.
  I've quit and picked up the habit several times, mainly because they're so easy to quit that I don't see a huge harm in using them again after a long period without. I wouldn't touch a vape again because it was such an effort and pain to quit.
  Also nicotine isn't a carcinogen (tobacco is), and nicotine pouches are not linked to any cancer risk. Nicotine is basically as harmful as caffeine.
  Nicotine products in general have been linked to reproductive harms such as stillbirth, premature birth, and low birth weight. Conversely, non-tobacco-based nicotine pouches (also known as "nic pouches") are classified as non-carcinogenic since nicotine itself is not a carcinogen. However, they are still harmful to cardiovascular health due to their nicotine content, and are associated with moderately higher risk of cardiovascular disease, stroke, and reproductive harms.
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snus
  Nicotine itself is currently classified as non-carcinogenic according to the International Agency for Research on Cancer, and according to the Royal College of Physicians nicotine in itself is not a hazardous drug. In turn, it is hypothesized that if nicotine can be delivered without tobacco and smoke inhalation, most, if not all of the harm of smoking can be avoided. However, if not carcinogenic, nicotine is still moderately harmful to cardiovascular health, therefore long-term use of non-tobacco nicotine pouches very likely causes higher risks for cardiovascular diseases, stroke, and reproductive harms.
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicotine_pouch
- Those will only make your nicotine addiction worse.
  If you actually want to quit: give nicotine gum a try. Satisfies the craving and won't give you mouth cancer. I quit smoking within a month on the gum. And then another three months of tapering later I no longer needed the gum. Have been nicotine-free since 2018.

Fortunately there is a 100% natural plant based alternative to vaping.
- "Smoke"
  
  Are you smoking yet

To help put things in perspective, the researchers compared the health risks of disposable e-cigarettes to other types of smoking, and found that Esco Bar devices released more lead during a day’s use than 19 packs of traditional cigarettes.
- This is salt based liquid though
  
  And? The metals come from the metal components of the vaporizer itself.

Paywall removed https://archive.is/4XDxW

Since the toxins are transmitted via the aerosols: can there something be said about the effect on involuntary "passive smokers"?

Fuck, how difficult could it be to create a system that heats water above evaporation temperature without releasing toxic metals in the process. Incredible.
- They make ceramic type coil systems. Idk if they are any better.
  I'm not saying vapes are good, not at all. I'm quite sure the opposite in fact. However I believe any attempt to publicly dismiss them is paid for by big tobacco
  
  We report excessive emissions of toxic metallic elements in aerosols from flavored and “clear” versions of three popular products (Esco Bar, Flum Pebble, and ELF Bar), orders of magnitude higher in concentration than traditional cigarettes and other e-cigarettes.
  So they tested more than three but found these for three in particular had problems.
  They also don't compare cancer risks to the rest of the tars versus heavy metal this is metal vs metal.

Weed vapes are healthy tho right? :/
- Seriously, why do these articles always bring up nicotine vapes, while simultaneously forgetting that weed vapes are a thing too?
- Seriously, why do these articles always bring up nicotine vapes, while simultaneously forgetting that weed vapes are a thing too?

The closest thing you should hit to one of those is a pulsar 420dl.
Weed carts > niccy capes any day.
Especially if you got a good source on dabs so you can make you own.
- If you've got a good source of dabs, abandon the carts and get a concentrate vape like the pax 3 with concentrate adapter. The carts often have cheap heating elements with lots of nasty stuff contaminating them.
  
  I've tried but they never seem to vaporize right.
  Might try one again w/ cart juice (cooked dabs + pyur thinner).
  Either way not really compatible with discretely hitting 0.3g a day at work, since ya gotta keep refilling those XP

I got dv'd to the ninth circle of hell for saying this, some months ago. I wouldn't have said it if my Dr hadn't said they had the opportunity to look at deceased smoker's lungs next to deceased vaper's lungs. I left out that part, but still.
- And?
  
  I'll trust someone with four years undergrad, four years medical education, and 3+ years of residency over random internet users.
- The smoker lungs may have had more tar build up and scarring, you cant necessarily visually see the lead and other heavy metals from vaping on the vapers lungs, especially if those are entering the bloodstream and being distributed throughout the body.
  
  Doc said they were atrophied and scarred. Listen, my health is on me, everyone else's is on them. I shared what information I have from a verified source, if people reject it, they will have to deal with any consequences, just as I will.
  "Drinking poison may be a mistake, but that doesn't mean you escape the consequences." Duquette

Who fucking cares. If you are dumb enough to do the shit, then die.