Title : Vape...Or
link : Vape...Or
Vape...Or
To begin, I am not nor have ever been a cigarette smoker, fate perhaps stepping in when I was just a lad of eleven or so and having my friend and I discover a discarded half-used cigarette in a back alley somewhere. As kids are wont to do we felt that we had found an illicit treasure as enticing as if we had snuck into a peep show, because there was something to this smoking thing that we as kids didn't understand. After all, sample packs of cigarettes were being given away everywhere...at the movies, at shopping centers, even at the fairs; and all the movie stars and adults we saw seemed to smoke, and smoked everywhere be it at work or when jetting around the world (luckily, my parents never did smoke cigarettes although my step-father was the tried and true MacArthur image of a pipe-smoker). So, the half-used prized possession in hand, we somehow cornered a book of matches and excitedly lit the darn thing, that cigarette, taking a big drag as we'd seen in the pictures, our cheeks heartily sucking in as we marveled at the glowing end before us. And then we let all that smoke loose on our lungs which proved to be a mistake; they weren't happy. We gagged and choked, and choked some more, then looked at each other with that look of childhood puzzlement. What was the big deal about these things? They were awful...and it hurt our lungs. It was obvious to us that this was something we kids just couldn't understand. Then and there we decided it wasn't for us and out went the ciggie, snubbed out on the concrete and thrown back under the dumpster for someone else to find or to toss away. We were done.Move up some years into my young adulthood and the cigar trend is now the big thing, complete with bars and clubs where you could claim your own personalized spot in their humidor; it was a chance to join those bearded geezers (at least that's how they looked to me at the time) all smoking away in their satin-like jackets as if suavely represented by a certain Mr. Playboy himself; Yes, I should have known better but once again that childhood wonder took hold and I gleefully bought a cigar (no idea what sort to get, just that it had to have the heft and feel of a "cigar" and not be a cigar-ette), went back to my car and lit it up. The smoke was terrible (everyone seems to know that distinctive smell of cigar smoke, as pungent and as recognizable as a skunk's odor wafting in the air) but I dutifully took a drag, again watching that ember-like glow, then took in the smoke. The results were the same, or truth be told quite a bit worse (I didn't know that with a cigar one is not supposed to inhale the smoke). What was the purpose or joy in that, I wondered. I had been fooled again (what's that saying, fool me once....). Which is not to say that I haven't known my share of smokers...but it would appear that there's now a new kid on the block.
Cigarette smoking is somewhat surprisingly heading downwards, partially due to people becoming aware of the health risks and perhaps due to people just wondering how you can possibly mix 7000 chemicals into a product such as a cigarette, or so says John Hopkins Medicine (as with cosmetics and many alcoholic drinks, there is no requirement to list or reveal the ingredients or blends tobacco companies use although Phillip Morris gives you somewhat of a peek of what they add into each country's cigarettes). But the drop may also be because the new FDA (Food & Drug Administration) Comissioner, Scott Gottlieb (a cancer survivor) also announced a few months ago that he would move to lower the nicotine content of cigarettes to "nonaddictive" levels, a ruling likely to be challenged in the courts and already in the hands of the strong tobacco lobby (tobacco manufacturers stocks reacted by a sharp drop in their price). Approximately 38 million people in the U.S. do still smoke cigarettes, according to the last study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: Among daily smokers, the average number of cigarettes smoked per day declined from about 17 cigarettes in 2005 to 14 cigarettes in 2016. The proportion of daily smokers who smoked 20 to 29 cigarettes per day dropped from 34.9 percent in 2005 to 28.4 percent in 2016, while the proportion who smoked fewer than 10 cigarettes per day rose from 16.4 percent in 2005 to 25 percent in 2016. But this isn't true across the board, especially if you're a minority or poor or isolated: Cigarette smoking was especially high among males, those aged 25-64 years, people who had less education, American Indians/Alaska Natives, Americans of multiple races, those who had serious psychological distress, those who were uninsured or insured through Medicaid, those living below the poverty level, those who had a disability, those who were lesbian, gay, or bisexual, and those who lived in the Midwest or South. On the other hand, that's still a lot of cigarettes as evidenced by the 350 tons* of cigarette butts collected on the streets of Paris last year.
Speaking of which, what exactly is in those "filters" or butts? And does inhaling through those filters actually do anything. or are they more harmful (original cigarette filters were made of asbestos). Truth be told, the filters do next to nothing other than psychologically, their cellulose-acetate composition doing little more than change color but designed to be loose enough to let through the harmful elements such as tar and nicotine (earlier filters such as cotton and wool were also tried but they removed much of the above chemicals and alas, that's where the taste was and smokers complained). One thing that the filters do accomplish is to force deeper inhalations by the person smoking so that now the rates of cancer in deeper parts of the lung have soared since the arrival of filters. And if you're wondering, those filters take from 18 months to 10 years to break down...in 1998 we threw away some 2 billion of those cigarette butts, but today the figure is closer to 6 billion.
But where was I? Ah yes, the new kid in town. You've likely seen those cigarette-like products that appear to light and appear to cast off smoke which is primarily just water mixed with some vegetable glycerin and propylene glycol and thus have no real odor to them...perhaps you've seen them around schools, for the teen market is rather large with these devices marketed under such names as Juul, Markten, and some 500 others; make your own if you like since there are kits, and cases designed to look like flash drives or even cigars; many come from China (which currently makes 90% of e-cigs) but Juul is the big name in the U.S. and perhaps the world with 60% of the e-cig market. It's called vaping, and part of that rising popularity may come from the flavors being marketed such as Apple Cider, Hazelnut Cream, Mango and Watermelon. And let's not forget that blast of nicotine (you can even add an extra jolt of nicotine, if you wish)...one e-cig such as a Juul pod has the equivalent nicotine of an entire pack of cigarettes (polls show that 2/3 of Juul users weren't aware that the product contained nicotine). As to actual usage, it boils down to 3% of the adult population now smoking e-cigs but 12% of the high school smoking population. As to that "light," it's just an LED light controlled in part by a microprocessor making recycling the new products a bit more difficult.
So what's the big deal? Aren't those e-cigs actually better for you, that is if you're going to smoke anyway? Well, sort of, said Science Daily: Use of e-cigarettes every day can nearly double the odds of a heart attack, according to a new analysis of a survey of nearly 70,000 people...The research also found that dual use of e-cigarettes and conventional cigarettes --the most common use pattern among e-cigarette users-- appears to be more dangerous than using either product alone. The study found that the risks compound, so that daily use of both e-cigarettes and conventional cigarettes raises the heart attack risk five-fold when compared to people who don't use either product. As a guideline, just smoking cigarettes alone increases the risk of a heart attack by 3 times. So vaping is better (just 2x the risk) but combine that with regular cigarettes, not so good (5x the risk). And still the counts are growing almost exponentially according to Euromonitor: Vape users in 2011 -- 7 million; 2016 -- 35 million; estimate for 2021 -- 55 million.
A piece in the New Yorker talked of the popularity of vaping, and primarily the difficulty Juul is having in just keeping up with demand; after all vaping has now captured 1 out of every 20 adults in the U.S., with close to 6% being men: The omnipresence of Juul on social media has undoubtedly made kids overestimate the extent of teen Juuling -- young people tend to think that their peers drink, smoke, and hook up more than they actually do. And it’s all beyond regulation: the F.D.A. can control the behavior of companies advertising nicotine for profit, but it can do nothing about teens advertising nicotine to one another for free...A high-school sophomore named Kate, from Houston, told me that the Juulers she knows have their own cars to vape in and cash to spare. You have to be twenty-one to shop at Juul’s online store, and the company requires a match between public records, credit-card information, and government I.D. (The site turns more than a quarter of would-be purchasers away, inadvertently filtering out many adults who have recently moved.) But kids can buy Juuls in bulk on eBay and Alibaba with prepaid debit cards and a little creativity. Juul has a team devoted to taking down such listings, but the company says that it’s like “playing Whac-a-Mole.” “And if you deal Juul you can make a lot of money,” Kate said. She described multiple levels and types of Juul dealers at her school: some sold pods, some sold devices, some would do bootleg refills if you wanted a different flavor or THC oil instead. (The resale markup is partly what makes Juuling an expensive habit for teens. Juul is not subject to cigarette taxes, though, so in places where they’re high --New York, New England, Chicago-- Juuling can otherwise be cheaper than smoking.) As to e-cigarettes moving into the world of marijuana...already done, and quite awhile ago (the parent company that spun off Juul still deals primarily with marijuana vape cartridges, said Bloomberg Businessweek).
Of course there's money in all of this and the tobacco companies are not taking any of this casually, introducing their own lines of "heat not burn" tobacco products. And, said The Economic Times, each smoking death nets the tobacco industry a profit of $9,730 (over 7 million people died worldwide from tobacco usage last year). It's a changed world in many respects, my generation growing up with the Marlboro Man (many of actors and models used for the ads were smokers who later died from lung disease); but picture today's new advertising for Juul according to the New Yorker piece: ...viral, teen-centric Juul fan accounts like @doit4juul (a hundred and ten thousand followers) are populated with a different sort of imagery: a bodybuilder Juuling in a tank top that says “Real Men Eat Ass”; a baby (labelled “me”) being shoved into a birthday cake (“the Juul”) by her mom (“my nicotine addiction”); a topless college student who has a Juul in her mouth and is wearing a pink hat that says “Daddy.” Teen Juul iconography radiates a dirtbag silliness. Vapes are meme-ready, funny in a way that cigarettes never were: the black-and-white photograph of James Dean smoking in shirtsleeves has been replaced with paparazzi snaps of Ben Affleck ripping an e-cig in his car. In one popular video, a girl tries to Juul with four corn dogs in her mouth. In another, teens at a party suck on a flash drive that they’ve mistaken for a Juul.
As with so much of the world, this stuff is happening by the billions whether you smoke or vape or not. Often things can be happening right there in front of us and we can remain unaware. Walking right past that cigarette butt on the ground is one thing, but missing the declining bird population (hey, where are all the songbirds?) or those people looking for just one day that they don't have to live in fear (of safety, hunger, cold, abuse, voices, cancer and on and on) is quite another. We need to pay attention, not only to the world around us but to one another. Each person makes his or her own decisions. Being cool is one thing; being led into addiction is quite another (hello pain killers). I was lucky, my discarded cigarette experience shaping my future at an early age. Now that I am much older, I can accurately say that life does seem to pass us by like a puff of smoke...or should I say a puff of vapor?
*Since a pack of cigarette filters or "butts" equals 12 ounces (sans tobacco, just the filters themselves), 350 tons works out to just under a billion cigarettes discarded on the streets of Paris (and this number is dwarfed by the actual number of cigarettes smoked and produced not only in Paris but worldwide, which numbers in the trillions (today's machines can make 20,000 cigarettes each minute). Of course if you want some interesting numbers, ponder this from Smithsonian: Q: What keeps all the satellites and pieces of space junk orbiting Earth from crashing into one another? So far, it has been luck -- lower-Earth orbit, where most of these objects are, is vast. But that doesn’t mean we can keep hurling things into space, warns Martin Collins, curator at the National Air and Space Museum. There are now some 170 million man-made objects bigger than a millimeter traveling through space at 17,500 miles per hour, and some of them are the size of a school bus. Even very small pieces can be dangerous: In 2016, a paint fleck or metal fragment less than a millimeter across put a divot in an International Space Station window.
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