World Health Organization (WHO) Spreads Lies about the E-Cigarette Industry

Shameless photo-doctoring aside, the so-called World Health Organization (WHO?  I said already, the World Health Organization. WHO? The guy on first base.  WHO?… OK, I had to do it, I’m done now) is as corrupt and lost in an inescapable quagmire (giggity) of bureaucratic deceit, behind-the-scenes conspiring, and mountainous ineptitude as even the most despicable of national governments on this green planet, Earth.  And now that the electronic cigarette/nicotinated E-liquid industry threatens to compete dollar for dollar with the too-big-to-fail “Big Tobacco” corporations, WHO has taken it upon themselves to once again, and with a degree of accuracy that can only be described as creepily preternatural, back the wrong horse in the imagined race for knowledge of Truth.  In their divine international immanence, WHO (not to be confused with The Who, rock stars infinitely closer to God than these corrupt bastards will ever be) has released a study.  And by study, they mean a very official-looking report full of things their corporate overloads told them to put in it.  The study on tobacco regulation is simply full of pure, unadulterated bullshit.  And here is a list of that bullshit, each itemized point married with it’s counter-argument for posterity’s sake:

• Segment 2.1 of Report: ENDS (Electronic Nicotine Delivery Systems) pose significant health risks / Manufacturers have not fully disclosed the chemicals used in ENDS.  In truth, the exact opposite is true of both of these statements.  E-cigarettes do not pose health risks as has been shown time and time again by verifiable, recreate-able, and fully documented scientific research.  And I have yet to find a US or European-based E-liquid manufacturer that doesn’t disclose all of the chemicals used in the production of their products.  And the vast majority of them print ingredients and occasionally even nutrition labels on their bottles.  Their health effects have not been studied.  Actually, they’ve been studied extensively by some of the biggest names in scientific research.  These products could undermine smoking cessation efforts.  I’m not even going to dignify this one with a response, other than to point out that E-cigarette use is on the rise and tobacco (analog) cigarette use is declining.
• Segment 2.2 of Report: The chemicals used to produce these odors and flavors that simulate those of cigarettes have not all been identified.  This is simply untrue.  Most of the flavoring companies (check out the Flavor Apprentice’s website: http://shop.perfumersapprentice.com/c-108-the-flavor-apprentice-world-of-flavors.aspx) list the exact chemicals and molecules used to produce the different tobacco flavors… and their other flavors, too.
• Segment 2.3 of Report: It is not clear how many manufacturers of ENDS exist, but an Internet search revealed at least 24  licensed companies and many more brands and model names. It is not clear whether products of similar appearance from other companies have identical contents, deliveries and effects on the body; it is possible that different devices represent different hazards and effects.  Correct me if I’m wrong, but this statement sounds as if it were made after a five minute perusing of google search results without even bothering to click on the actual links themselves.  If you want to know if products have identical contents, take the devices apart and compare the components.  There’s only three to five “pieces” to an E-cigarette… this isn’t rocket science by any stretch of the imagination.  And if you bothered to understand the incredibly simple inner-workings of an E-cigarette, you’d realize that the only way an E-cigarette could have a different effect on the body would be to lace the E-juice with an illegal drug, which of course are already illegal… hence the descriptive moniker “illegal” drug.
• Segment 2.4 of Report: The United States Food and Drug Administration recently analysed the chemicals in 18 varieties of ENDS cartridges… and found… “detectable levels of nitrosamines, tobacco-specific compounds known to cause cancer…”  Firstly, nitrosamines are natural to tobacco-derived nicotine, and are also found in nicotine gum, patches, and other approved smoking cessation products.  Secondly, the levels of nitrosamines found (only in E-cigarette cartridges, I might add…, not in E-juice or clearomizers) were infinitesimally smaller than those found in the aforementioned approved smoking cessation products.
• Segment 2.7 of Report: ENDS are not nicotine replacement therapy.  Actually, that’s exactly what they are, as is demonstrated unarguably by their very existence.  In essence, a device that delivers nicotine without the burning of organic tobacco plant material (and carcinogenic substances included therein) is a device that delivers nicotine without the burning of organic tobacco plant material.  It’s difficult to come up with a non-existentialist (read: realistic) argument against the incredibly simple logic of A = A, but WHO is trying their damnedest!  If you’re replacing your usual nicotine vehicle with something else, you’re engaging in nicotine replacement therapy!  I might as well try to convince someone who is sitting on the ground in Death Valley that his actions are not a safer alternative to sitting in a pool of lava in Hawaii, because both of those sitting-places are hot.
• Segment 2.8 of Report: However, currently, the evidence is insufficient to conclude that any of the ENDS products is an effective smoking cessation aid or that they deliver sufficient nicotine for them to be used in smoking cessation.  Is it me, or do these statements get more and more absurd as we progress through this collection of dim-wittedness incarnate?  Is a person who is vaping now, instead of smoking… and has been doing so for a considerable length of time (from six months to four or five years in some cases)… suitable “evidence” to prove that people can use ENDS as an effective smoking cessation tool?  Here we go with the WHO’s apparent logical deficiency regarding the pedestrian concept of A = A again.  If it’s successfully used as a smoking cessation tool, it’s a smoking cessation tool.
• Segment 2.10 of Report: …might therefore ultimately increase tobacco product use.  Actually, number don’t lie, and as the use and interest in electronic cigarettes has risen, the numbers concerning the usage of tobacco-products (not including ENDS, which I, personally, don’t label as a ‘tobacco product’) have been falling.  So this sentence has already been proven wrong… and was proven wrong in 2009 as well, at the time of the publishing of this report.

There are plenty of other disturbingly untrue statements in this report, but I tried to cut out repetition as much as possible.  No need to keep pointing out the same error over and over again… especially since they aren’t going to admit that they’re wrong, EVER!  They are suggesting, as a regulatory basis for ENDS, that ENDS be treated as a drug delivery device (which interestingly enough, necessarily makes it a nicotine replacement device) and not as a tobacco product.  I think they’re under the impression that this will cut out the many flavors available in E-liquids.  Take the flavors away, and there won’t be enough of a difference between smoking and vaping to keep people off of cigarettes.  However, they now offer flavor choices for liquid medications at pharmacies, so that theory goes right out the window.

We all know, instinctively, what this is all about.  WHO wants to profit off of E-cigarettes, and then they’ll back off… and suddenly be completely supportive of ENDS as a valid smoking cessation tool.  I would prefer that they just go full-mafia with this and say something along the lines of, “Give us 15% of your profits or we’ll blow your f*****g heads off!”  At least that’s honesty!

Sources:

–The Truth about Nitrosamines in Electronic Cigarettes.

-Peering through the mist: What does the chemistry of contaminants in electronic cigarettes tell us about health risks?

–WHO Study Group on Tobacco Product Regulation

–Is Nicotine Really as Dangerous as Cyanide?

–Documentation for Immediately Dangerous To Life or Health Concentrations (IDLHs): Nicotine

–Propylene Glycol- Wikipedia

–Code of Federal Regulations

–Product Safety Assessment- Propylene Glycol

–Ethylene Glycol Toxicity

–Ethylene Glycol- Wikipedia

–Are Electronic Cigarettes Safe?

–A Germ-Killing Vapor

–Deposition and Fate of Inhaled Ethylene Glycol Vapor and Condensation Aerosol in the Rat

–Two-week aerosol inhalation study on polyethylene glycol (PEG) 3350 in F-344 rats.

-CanadaVapes- Vegetable Glycerine Safety

-InformaHealthCare- 2-Week and 13-Week Inhalation Studies of Aerosolized Glycerol in Rats

-Inchem.org- SIDS Glycerol Study (pdf)

-CASAA: New study confirms that chemicals in electronic cigarettes pose minimal health risk

-SFATA- Effects of Nicotine

-Anxiolytic effects of nicotine in a rodent test of approach-avoidance conflict.

-Nicotine as a cognitive enhancer.

-Nicotine as Therapy

 

 

Just how Poisonous IS Nicotine Anyway?

This is a question I’ve quietly asked myself numerous times in the past 20-some-odd years:  Is nicotine really as poisonous as “they” claim it is?  I’ve seen the commercials conveying the message that nicotine is actually as poisonous if not more poisonous than arsenic.  I’m inclined to need more information, though, because the same commercials claim that a 19-year-old smoker has already lost both of his legs due to his tobacco habit (sorry, but I’m thinking that there has to be another factor in his leg amputations than just smoking almost every other 19 year-old smoker in the world still has their legs).  I’ve gone through some pretty serious chain smoking periods in the past.  When I drove a taxi, for twelve hours a day, I would regularly burn through three to four packs of Djarum, Sampoerna, or Gudang Garum (filterless) clove cigarettes in an evening.  That would be between 2.3 and 2.8 mg of nicotine per cigarette (the highest in the industry, by the way).  There are 20 cigarettes in a pack X(times) three packs = 138 mg of nicotine in a 12-hour shift.  According to data made available by the CDC (Center for Disease Control) the lethal dose for human beings is thought to be between 40 and 60 mg.  I might be misunderstanding this, because there’s something about mg/m^3 involved in this equation, but either way, it would seem that I should be dead after a night like that.  When I went home at the end of a long night of vomiting drunks and schizophrenic hookers, I’d be tired… but I’m not entirely convinced that the extremely high nicotine dosing was responsible for said fatigue.

Spurned on by similar realizations, one Bernd Mayer of Karl-Franzens University in Austria delved a little deeper into this issue.  His initial discoveries were disturbing in and of themselves.  All he could find was a wild goose chase of bibliographical references that circled around and met up with each other, never actually arriving at an actual source.  Then he found a 100+ year-old study a Rudolf Kobert put together suggesting that the lethal dose of nicotine was actually very low… which can’t possibly be true because of the amount of smokers who smoke multiple packs of cigarettes every day and survive (at least for the time being).  So what is the actual lethal dosage of this mysterious drug?

Another study from an even earlier year (1856) relayed the horrific experiences of “experimenters” who apparently dosed themselves with extremely high amounts of pure nicotine.  They experienced everything from headaches to seizures to rectal tenesmus (WTF is that!?!?).  The dose they ingested was 4 milligrams of pure nicotine.  This, at least to me, suggests that the concentration of the nicotine plays a larger part in its effects on the body than does the amount ingested.  If this is true, it certainly means a lot for the E-cigarette community as a whole, due to the fact that pure nicotine is already diluted to 100mg liquid suspended in either vegetable glycerine or propylene glycol.  The dilution of the nicotine, if the above theory is correct, would make the nicotine in E-juice (even the higher-content juices like the 24 and 36mg varieties) exponentially safer than some would have you believe.

Either way, I would say that this is a question that definitely needs more looking into.  Unfortunately, it’s a social faux pas to suggest that nicotine can’t kill you, or at least that it can’t kill you as easily as was once believed.  A few years ago, it would have been nearly impossible to find funding for such an experiment.  We have all blindly accepted an age-old, unsubstantiated claim as absolute scientific fact for longer than most of our grandparents have been alive.  All of our supposedly “official” organizations and government departments have based serious law-making activity on this “fact.”  If the goal of science is to discover the Truth, no matter what the implications might be, then what the world now needs is a more serious, all-encompassing study on nicotine in order to provide the blooming E-cigarette industry with verified information regarding the “dangerous” chemical used in the production of their E-liquids.

Sources:

–Is Nicotine Really as Dangerous as Cyanide?

–Documentation for Immediately Dangerous To Life or Health Concentrations (IDLHs): Nicotine

10 Things you might not Know about Nicotine

The following are a few interesting facts that you might not have known about nicotine.  This can be helpful to those of you who are trying to defend your decision to vape E-cigarettes from the sceptical mindsets of friends, family, co-workers, etc.  The misconception that nicotine is a carcinogen, and a dangerous drug, is often confused with the many other chemicals specifically in cigarettes that are carcinogenic, dangerous, unhealthy, etc.  The following is a list of many of the health benefits of nicotine:

1.  There are over 4,000 chemicals in the average cigarette… many of them carcinogenic.  Nicotine is NOT one of them.

2.  Nicotine has been found to reduce approach-avoidance behavior in animals, and healthy human volunteers.

3.  Nicotine interacts with cell membranes in such a way as to ease the passage of certain ions through the membrane.  This aids in, among other things, the communication between synapses in your brain, increasing cognitive functions.

4.  Nicotine has been found to substantially increase immediate as well as long-term memory abilities.

5.  Nicotine increases attentiveness in patients who suffer from Alzheimer’s Disease.

6.  Nicotine is used for certain types of neurodegenerative pain issues, and also pain problems associated with come mental disorders.

7.  Nicotine can be used as analgesia for postoperative recovery.

8.  Nicotine is being researched as a possible additive to opioid medicinal regimens, because it stimulates respiration, opposing the opioid’s tendency to depress respiration.  It also increases alertness in sharp contrast to opiod’s well-known “drowsiness” effects.

9.  Nicotine decreases appetite, as much if not more than cannabinoids increase it.

10.  Nicotine is currently being considered as treatment against such diseases and disorders as ADD/ADHD, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, inflammatory skin disorders and injuries, obesity, and ulcerative colitis.

There is one thing holding nicotine back from the many positive uses that it is capable of… disinformation (properly defined as the purposeful conveying of untrue facts as opposed to misinformation which is merely accidental).  Cigarettes and nicotine have become a hot-button political health issue that has long since ceased to be about actual health and now has more to do with which sides buys and pays for the most politicians.  Enter into the mix, electronic cigarettes, which deliver nicotine, and only nicotine in a way that’s outwardly reminiscent of the smoking of “real” or “analog” tobacco cigarettes.  The politics of the issue make it easy to demonize something that is even remotely similar to tobacco cigarettes. But don’t let them get away with it!  And when you hear negative “scientific” evidence about e-cigarettes, try to find the other side of the story… because there’s always another side to the story.  There is a lot of valid, correctly-done scientific work being done out there regarding the health benefits of e-cigarettes.  On the other side of the coin is poorly constructed, statistically skewed “scientific” information regarding the health dangers of e-cigarettes.  Don’t let them scare you back to smoking!  You know you feel better now that you’re vaping than you did when you were still smoking.

Sources:

SFATA- Effects of Nicotine

Anxiolytic effects of nicotine in a rodent test of approach-avoidance conflict.

Nicotine as a cognitive enhancer.

Nicotine as Therapy