Got a request today to stock up on vape juice due to this. Part of me can’t really argue with it. There is some contaminant causing serious problems and they don’t have enough data yet to know for sure what it is or what might be contaminated.
But a blanket ban on everything related makes me uncomfortable. And knowing that people are going to panic-buy while they can naturally leads me to think that there’s money backing this for the sake of more money.
calling it “juice” has always seemed kinda creepy to me, like intentionally appealing to children
as far as I know you can’t get vaping supplies by squeezing fruits and vegetables
It’s weird, though. IIRC, most of the people affected have gotten their supply from dubious sources. Shutting down legitimate sales is the kind of thing that might worsen the problem, rather than helping.
Vaping has been dubious from the get-go, though.
First person I met who vaped bragged about how there was no nicotine in his “juice”, so it was just something he could enjoy legally in restaurants (those were the days). Sitting beside him at the restaurant was like sitting beside a cherry-flavoured scented candle.
The ads made hay about how it was just a “harmless vapour” being exhaled. Meanwhile, a vape store opened in the ground floor of my building, and all the condo units knew when people were vaping in the shop, because our apartments would reek of lemongrass or fruit or whatever. The condo board finally got them to make the actual shop vapour free – it should have been anyhow per the condo by-laws. I can’t use scented candles in my apartment without opening a window either, and even then.
Then they added nicotine to the liquids, which for people like me means it’s no longer harmless. Oh well, the laws restricting where and when one could vape came in around the same time.
Now some liquids are making people ill… the whole thing is life a live-action risk assessment.
Might as well post this, though I hope it’s an isolated incident.
Sounds like they might have found the smoking gun.
One of my takeaways from this is that California is apparently doing it right, which is a relief after the troubles they had getting it done.
I’d rather not inhale it at all but hydrogen cyanide is one of many harmful chemicals that are present in tobacco smoke:
I’m curious as to why 12 deaths warrants as much coverage as it is getting and yet people take smoking-related illnesses entirely for granted.
Maybe because vaping has been thought to be safer than smoking? Another reason might be the latter takes years to have an effect, while the vaping deaths seem like acute (i.e., sudden) deaths.
I think the key there is “safer than smoking” rather than “entirely risk free”. You’re still taking in a strong stimulant through the mucous membrane in your lungs, with much of the risk to your heart and respiratory system that you would expect it to entail.
Public Health UK says that vaping is twenty times safer than tobacco. By my reckoning, that brings the risk of dying from “smoking-related” diseases down from 1 in 2 for lifelong smokers to 1 in 40 for vapers. That’s still quite high, but it’s a lot better than the alternative. My worry is that the publicity fallout from this will stop people making the switch because they think they are equally dangerous.
Good points.
One other thing: vaping is new, so obviously anything about it is “news.”
That’s true. I find it difficult to suppress the voice in my head that is saying that the only people who benefit from this amount of publicity on what is essentially a fairly small number of incidents that seem to have been caused by tainted eLiquids are Big Tobacco though, and the more the story unfolds, the more credible I find it that there’s a profit motive behind the disproportionate amount of publicity it is getting.
Time to break out my tinfoil hat, I guess… 
Given what else Big Tobacco has got up to, I don’t think you’re wrong.
My best guess is declaring anything not made by them as “dangerous” lets them take back control of the supply chain before it gets too disruptive. Big Tobacco remain the reliable Merchants of Death who only kill slowly and and kindly, over decades, so it doesn’t count. Not like those crypto-hipster upstarts who kill in mere months. They’re the bad guys. Obviously.
I have no problem with recognizing this. My problem is with the people who insist it’s “perfectly safe”.
My preference is that we work at figuring out the true risks to the user and others, put together safeguard rules that protect others (like with smoking) make sure the risks are well published and publicized, then let people make their own choices. If it’s truly safer than smoking, even over the long term, that’s something we should study and know, versus telying on anecdotes from people who either want to sell to us, or those who are afraid their vice will be taken away.
As for your conspiracy theory, there’s another layer: look how quickly the hype changed from “vaping can kill you” to “black market/knock-off/THC cartridges will kill you!”. Juul is owned by Altria, aka Phillip Morris. This is the perfect excuse to start putting out DRMd product that forcefully locks users into their ecosystem. Unlike the printer companies, Juul can say it’s for public health and safety.
My guess is the suddenness of it. People have been vaping for a decade and a half with few incidents and nothing like this. Now suddenly hundreds of hospitalizations and several deaths all within a few weeks - that stands out.
And it’s obviously a contamination event. But unlike your typical “pre-packaged salads contaminated with e. coli” or whatever, they had no idea what the contaminant is or what to recall or how to get to the source, and no way to enforce it if they did. So it’s kind of a systemic failure.
Those two things make it newsworthy, add the trendiness of vaping angle, and it becomes easy to make “panic now!” headlines that get clicks/sell.
What bugs me is that the instant reaction of many policymakers is “Oh, there’s poison in the black-market stuff? Let’s ban all the stuff that’s not black market! That way they’ll have to buy the poison!” That makes me think that our education system has failed miserably. Everyone should immediately recognize that as a very very bad response.
“Something you thought was safe is dangerous,” is pretty much the reason local news anchors get up in the morning.
It’s weird that every one of those articles starts off by saying how terrible vaping is and then, after a few column inches, points out that the illnesses and lung damage almost certainly have nothing to do with vaping nicotine and were in fact caused by dodgy THC cartridges.
The push here should be “legalise and regulate” but the Trump administration’s takeaway from it is “ban certain flavours of an entirely different product.” How exactly is that supposed to help anyone?
The comments on this one are actually not bad.
Ugh, more closed-box logic. Within the tiny little walled garden they’ve constructed, perfectly valid.
Yeah, lung cancer risk blah blah blah, but all it takes is an evening in a closed room with one person smoking and I come down with a sinus infection that lasts for weeks. But you know, non-lethal, so fuck my health outcomes and any other knock-on effects of second-hand smoke for anyone.
And sadly I don’t have a link, but there was a show about how the habits of high school vapers are not the same as those of mature smokers switching to vaping. Mature smokers switching to vaping emulate their old smoking habits (unless they’re also trying to quit). Teenagers vape more, because the lack of smoke clinging to their clothes and hair means they think they can get away with it more. And while mature smokers think of a cigarette’s worth of vaping as “done smoking”, teenage never-smoked-before vapers think of finishing the cartridge as “done”. Which means their nicotine ingestion is far higher than the average smoker’s, and the lung damage caused by the vaping is more.
That, plus the black market issue, is what is notable. It’s got nothing to do with “morals”.
This crap is so back to the 70s.
ETA: aha, found it: