FDA to Ban Juul E-Cigarettes
FDA to Ban Juul E-Cigarettes
Just keep damaging your lungs the old-fashioned way. At least they won't explode.
Remember right before covid hit the wave of articles about teenagers in the hospital with a mysterious respiratory syndrome? The media was stirring up a lot of fear over vaping, and then suddenly the stories disappeared overnight.
Nowadays, vaping scare stories are more likely to involve explosions, which are much more dramatic.
Vaping injury lawyers have cropped up to profit off of the vape carnage. According to LegalMatch:
Many vape defects are design defects, which means that the product was designed in a faulty manner.
For instance, many vaporizer explosions have been linked to defects in the design of the devices’ battery. Poorly designed batteries have sometimes caused the vaping devices to explode when in use. Obviously, this can create a dangerous situation, especially if the device is inside the user’s mouth when it explodes.
Under a strict product liability theory, designers, manufacturers and distributors, e.g. retail outlets, can be held responsible for injuries caused by a product’s defects. A person who is injured by a defective product does not have to prove any negligence. Rather, they must only show that the product was defective in some manner and that the defect caused injury and loss to the person.
Note: According to LegalMatch, e-cigarettes are not exactly the same thing as vaping products, but the two terms often intertwine in common usage.
E-cigarettes are smaller and do not have replaceable batteries or parts, and the oil cannot be changed as with a vaporizer. According to LegalMatch, this might make e-cigarettes a little safer (at least when it comes to explosions), but this is debatable.
I’ve also found stories of e-cigarettes exploding while being charged. Past studies have shown that up to 80 percent of e-cig explosions have happened during charging.
Am I the only one a little concerned that the FDA has created two infographics on vaping, one on how to keep a vape from exploding and the second on how to bring it on board an aircraft “safely”?
At any rate, Juul Labs Inc will likely be forced to take their e-cigarettes off the market, though not for the explosion possibility. I have not found any reports of a Juul device exploding, though I did find one mention of a Juul overheating on Quora, with someone advising:
Yea, I’d toss that thing out immediately. While the actual risk is very low - the coil would probably burn out or something else first - lithium ion batteries can blow up if the circuitry that keeps them within certain operational limits goes haywire. Once they get over a certain temperature, they experience ‘thermal runaway’ which you can youtube if you want a fireworks show.
But first chuck that thing before it asplodes.
The big problem with Juul is that it’s gotten many teens hooked on nicotine. The company has been sued for marketing to teens:
Before spring 2018, when e-cigarette growth was still unchecked by regulators, Juul even went as far as to send representatives to schools, including the one that Fuhrman’s son attended. The representatives claimed – without evidence – that Juuls were safer than traditional cigarettes, describing Juuls as the “iPhone of e-cigarettes” to the students.
I found the following story on Quora:
What does hitting a Juul feel like?
I’m 19 and I’ve juuled for about a year. I vaped before that starting around age 15. I discovered the juul when I was around 18. When you first start using nicotine it gives you a bit of a rush when you first hit the cigarette or vape and then a warm feeling for about 30 minutes after. When you first start using the juul it gives you a much more intense rush when you hit it, you often become lightheaded and it can be a bit overwhelming at first.
Eventually, you get only a slight burst of feeling good and it feels a bit better for a while but it’s mostly just to stave off withdrawal which is akin to being incredibly thirsty in the desert. You feel you cannot go without it and when you hit it it is more a feeling of relaxation and satiation of your desire for nicotine. The only time I really feel “domed” which is the slang term for the pleasant lightheaded feeling, is when I first hit it in the morning or after several hours without it. As I write this I am hitting it and I feel almost nothing except more awake and a bit of a buzz. It’s very nice for a long time but when you get to the point that your tolerance is as high as mine and your brain has become used to it you get the feeling you want less and less. When I drink alcohol the feeling is very similar to when I first started although not quite as much. I consider it a huge positive quality of alcohol that it makes nicotine so much better.
One thing that is common is breathing heavily after hitting it for the first time in a while because it speeds up your heart rate. It also makes you quite thirsty.
On the whole I love doing it but there are many downsides chief among them being a decreased ability to run or do other cardio and also a feeling of anxiety that is perhaps unique to me personally. If I overdo it on the juul I breath quickly and begin to stress about things. I think this is a side effect of the stimulant nature of high dose nicotine delivered in short bursts.
If nicotine gave me the same feeling as my first time I would do it forever without question but the fact of the matter is that it ends up doing very little for you and you don’t quit because your mind heavily rationalizes continued use. The long and short of it is it will give you euphoria and make everything better following a period of bliss right after you hit it when you first start.
My generation has become more or less completely addicted to nicotine because of the juul. All my friends own them and literally anyone will hit it when offered. Give it a try and tell me what you think. But if you do you’ll spend $70 a week on pods, not be able to quit and be in worse shape. I regret starting and I think you would too. I’ve gotten many friends into it simply by allowing them to hit it at parties. It’s extremely addictive to have pleasure on demand. I’ve tried to quit many times and failed. Don’t start is my best advice.
The original idea behind Juul was supposedly to provide a healthier alternative to cigarettes without all the crap that comes with tobacco smoke. But maybe Juul does its job too well while incurring new risk.
So it looks like the FDA is going to put a stop to it. From a Reuters report about the pending FDA ban:
The FDA's review of the applications was based on whether the e-cigarettes are effective in getting smokers to quit and, if so, whether the benefits to smokers outweigh the health damage to new users, including teenagers.
Gee, the FDA actually weighing risk vs. benefit? Whoulda thunk it?
Kids, just go back to getting your nicotine high the old-fashioned way.
Follow me on GETTR @stephaniebrail.
The 800+chemicals in the vapes, far more than the ones in cigarettes. Our bodies can cope with the nicotine from pure tobacco.
It can't cope with all the chemicals they add to the tobacco product, the paper, the filters.
The vapes are bad news and designed using the same tobacco science to make it as addictive as possible. To say that they help people quit is like saying electric cars stop people driving. A person quitting (and i say this an ex smoker) has multiple influences on why something becomes an addiction in the first place. There can be emotional, spiritual and physiological triggers. So it's not clear cut as to why some are able to quit while others are not. The research on injuries sustained and chronic illness achieved in a very short time in younger cohorts, since vape commenced, that's a lot harder to explain, especially when they sit under the umbrella marketing of "safe and effective".
As someone who smoked for 3-1/2 decades and was never able to quit for more than a few days until I tried vaping 8-1/2 years go, I think what the FDA is doing to vaping is utterly insane. Nicotine is addictive, but it's pretty close to harmless, kinda like coffee. It's the other constituents in smoke (tar, carbon monoxide, and a couple of thousand other things you get when you burn dried leaves that are hazardous to one's health. Basically, the FDA is killing off the only thing that worked to get me (and several million other people) off combustible tobacco in a futile attempt to keep teens from becoming addicted. You hit the nail on the head when you said that they'll get their nicotine the old-fashioned (and much more harmful) way. As for me personally, I saw this coming years ago and made myself FDA-proof. But the real tragedy here is that millions of people who still smoke won't have the same chance to switch to a less harmful alternative that I did.