Another negative study about e-cigarettes. This one comes from researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health (If I had the energy, I’d check out Michael Seigel’s e-cigarette apologist blog to see him point out how the researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health have no idea what they’re doing … anyway, I digress.).
Popcorn lung doesn’t actually make lung tissue look like popcorn. It’s a name given to a disease called bronchiolitis obliterans. It got the name “popcorn lung” because scientists discovered that chemicals called diacetyl, 2,3-pentanedione and acetoin, which are used in artificial butter flavouring for popcorn, can cause lung disease, especially in people who work in packaging plants.
Well, guess what? Those sweer and surgary e-cig flavourings also give off large amounts of diacetyl, acetoin and 2,3-pentanedione. This study found that these chemicals are found in e-cig vapour in 47 out of 51 flavours. That’s 93 percent.. Nice. OSHA has strict guidelines to how these chemicals are handled in workplaces, but they just show right up in e-cig vapour.
Bronchiolitis obliterans was first brought to light in 2000 when eight employees at a popcorn plant in Missouri developed lung illnesses. It causes dry wheezing, a cough and shortness of breath. One of the effects of this disease is that air can actually get trapped in the lungs because of obstruction from scar tissue or inflammation. The overinflation of the lungs limits the ability to breathe in fresh oxygen molecules. There was actually a high-profile case of some guy who ate microwave popcorn every day for 10 years developing this disease. He won a multi-million lawsuit over it.
And dang, I always liked popcorn. Now, I’m paranoid of it. At least microwave popcorn.
So, this is part of a growing body of evidence showing that e-cigarettes are not completely benign and harmless. Other studies have shown that e-cig vapour contains a lot of formaldehyde. Are they still safer than cigarettes? Do some former smokers swear by them? Sure. But, they certainly aren’t inert. And keep in mind, they are completely unregulated for the moment, in particular there are NO rulles whatsoever about sweet and surgery e-cig flavourings, which a lot of tobacco control advocates are convinced are used to entice teenagers. And it certainly seems like the more e-cigs are studied, the more nasty toxins are found contained in the vapour. It wasn’t that long ago that the industry and e-cig advocates were insisting that e-cigarette vapour was entirely, wholly innocuous.
In short, this means that e-cigs absolutely, positively must be regulated and studied further, and more must be done to keep teens from being enticed by e-cigs (ie, cracking down on e-cig marketing to teenagers.). Much is still not known about this relatively new product.
Yesterday, I posted about a Washington Post article examining the dropping smoking rate in the U.S. since 1970. As part of that article was information about teen smoking. I thought it was worth exploring in a second post.
Cutting the teen smoking rate is critical to stamping out smoking because virtually no one takes up smoking past the age of 21. Most smokers started when they were 16, 15, 14 years old. If a kid can make it to 19 without taking up smoking, he or she will likely never take up smoking.
It’s been a very frustrating battle to cut back on teen smoking, with both Big Tobacco and Hollywood conspiring to fight anti-tobacco efforts. However, the teen smoking rate has absolutely collapsed in the past couple of years; unfortunately, not necessarily for a good reason.
I made a second graph using my Excel skillz showing the teen smoking rate, then added some explanations for what has been going on for the past 25 years.
The teen smoking rate was incredibly high in the 1990s, peaking in 1997. What is considered the biggest culprit for this? Joe Camel. Joe Camel was introduced by RJ Reynolds in 1987 and was a disgustingly brazen attempt by RJR to lure teens into the smoking world with an aggressive campaign showing Joe Camel as cool, suave, sophisticated, hip, etc. Joe Camel was portrayed as an Air Force pilot, a motorcyclist, a James Bond character, etc.
RJ Reynolds never copped to this of course, but internal documents released by the various court cases confirmed it. According to these documents:
A) In 1974, RJR’s Vice-President of Marketing gave a presentation that “young adult market . . . represent[s] tomorrow’s cigarette business. As this 14-24 age group matures, they will account for a key share of the total cigarette volume – for at least the next 25 years.”
B) A 1974 memo by the R. J. Reynolds Research Department points out that capturing the young adult market is vital because “virtually all [smokers] start by the age of 25” and “most smokers begin smoking regularly and select a usual brand at or before the age of 18.
So they were absolutely going after kids. Joe Camel was incredibly successful. The teen smoking rate in 1991 was 27.5 percent and by 1997, it had grown to 36.4 percent (even as the adult smoking rate was plummeting during this time).
Then came along the Master Settlement Agreement in 1998. The MSA is much-maligned for not doing as much as it could have to stamp out smoking, but it did one extremely important thing — it banned Joe Camel. RJ Reynolds and other tobacco companies were no longer allowed to use cartoon characters (Many years ago, Kool used a cartoon penguin to market its brand) in their advertisements. One of the other things the MSA banned was the product placement of tobacco products in Hollywood movies.
No more on-screen smoking for you, Wolverine
This had a remarkable effect on reducing teen smoking, as did the billions of MSA funds spent on tobacco education programs in schools. The teen smoking rate dropped down to 21.9 percent by 2003.
Then a very weird thing took place. The teen smoking rate actually went UP in 2005, to 23.0 percent. What happened? One very big thing. States began to figure out they weren’t actually required to spend MSA funds on tobacco education and cessation programs and they started diverting the MSA payouts to their general funds simply balancing their budgets. Funding for anti-tobacco programs dried up. And the teen smoking rate rose. It was an incredibly frustrating period.
The other bizarre thing that happened is that even though placement of tobacco products was specifically banned in Hollywood movies, the rate of smoking scenes in PG-13, PG and even G movies actually went UP … even though Hollywood supposedly wasn’t collecting a nickel from Big Tobacco. They were literally giving Big Tobacco free advertising because Hollywood was stuck in this insane notion that smoking was cool and hip.
When it became apparent that Hollywood studios were part of the problem, a movement began to require an R rating for smoking scenes. Finally in 2008, the MPAA agreed to consider R ratings for smoking scenes. The policy isn’t perfect, but I think it’s actually worked, because movie studios don’t like R ratings and they just don’t want to bother butting heads with the MPAA over these ratings when they plan well ahead of time for movies to be rated PG-13. So, even well-known smoking Marvel characters such as Wolverine and Nick Fury were forced to stop chomping their cigars.
So, that teen smoking rate started dropping — to 18 percent in 2011 and 15.7 percent in 2013. Partly because of the lack of smoking in movies marketed to teens, I believe and partly because of the great work done by the Truth Campaign, a non-governmental, non-profit organization that’s been around since the late 1990s fighting teen smoking with a series of really good anti-smoking ads on TV and YouTube. Truth was originally funded with MSA funds, but that source has dried up and is now funded by donations and savvy investments.
Kids using e-cigs … it makes me crazy.
The recent rapid drop in teen smoking is great, except for one caveat. The biggest reason for the recent collapse in the teen smoking rate (now, down below 10 percent) is the rapid rise in the popularity of e-cigs. The teen use of e-cigs tripled from 2013 to 2014 and in fact now, many more teens vape (13.4 percent in 2014 and I guarantee that number is higher now) than smoke. This is a mixed bag. On the one hand, teens aren’t smoking. But, on the other hand, they are getting addicted to nicotine. No nicotine addiction at all is the ideal. And studies have shown that a higher percentage of kids who vape eventually take up smoking than those who don’t vape. The Food and Drug Administration plans to ban e-cig sales to minors, but they need to crack down on e-cig marketing to teens (e-cig companies are using the EXACT same marketing techniques as Big Tobacco did 20 years ago to appeal to teens) and online sales of e-cig products.
I saw two stories within a few days of one another of two separate guys — one in Georgia and the other in Florida — in comas after their e-cigarettes exploded in their faces.
It sounds funny, but it’s not when people end up severely burned and put into comas. I found a bunch of stories and photos on Google about e-cigarette explosions or fires started by e-cigarette batteries. These are not isolated incidents. But, these two latest explosions literally left two people near death.
The first was in Cobb County, Georgia, in September. A guy was left with a “dime-sized hole” in his mouth and had to be put into a medically induced coma with severe burns. The second was a couple of weeks later in Naples, Fla. A 21-year-old guy was left with severe burns to his face and neck and likewise also had to be placed into a coma after his e-cig exploded.
fire started by exploding e-cig battery.
I did a bit of Googling and found another major burn incident. This was a California woman who was injured in 2013 when her e-cigarette exploded. This story is about a jury awarding her a $1.9 million settlement over her injuries.
I don’t know the brands for the latest incidents, but the 2013 incident burning the California woman was a brand called VapCigs.
Ah, here we go — VapCigs are made cheaply in China.
This is yet another issue with e-cigarettes. Many brands are actually cheaply manufactured in China, where safety standards and regulations are notoriously lax. I’m wondering how many other accidents and explosions there have been that didn’t result in major injuries. That’s not even getting into the hundreds of poisoning cases that have occurred from kids drinking from the vials of nicotine that are part of using e-cigarettes (there have also been people poisoned by simply spilling this nicotine juice onto their skin.) And e-cigs remain wholly and utterly unregulated by the Food and Drug Administration.
OK, I don’t do many of these stories. I should do more. This is just too funny to pass up.
NBC News did a story last week about how a woman, apparently very drunk, tried to fire up her e-cigarette on an airplane and was told she couldn’t vape on the airplane. Even after she was told to put it away as she entered the airplane, she apparently tried to use it in her seat. For her trouble, she apparently was detained by the FBI and could face charges of interfering with a flight attendant.
After being told to put her e-cigarette away, she apparently tried to sneak in a few vapes in the bathroom. Witnesses said she then cursed at the flight attendant, exposed her breasts and threw a soda can at him. I love her explanation. “THAT is not true, I was trying to throw it in a trash can next to him.”
Yeah, because airplanes have trash cans….
She was ordered to move to the back of the plane where she apparently fell asleep. She was taken into custody after the plane landed.
“Maybe no one will mind … or notice….”
What really cracks me up about this, is at least once or twice every month, you will still to this day on the tobacco news boards (I used to see a lot of these stories back in the Topix days six, eight years ago), find a story about some smoker freaking out on an airplane after being told to put it out. Smoking has been banned on domestic flights for 25 years now 15 years on international flights. After 15 years, you will still find people who just gotta try and smoke on an airplane or in an airplane bathroom or fiddle with the bathroom smoke detector so they can smoke. Look, here’s one from just three weeks ago. And they’re usually drunk, too. I just don’t get this phenomena of drunken people lighting up on planes. You know you can’t do it, you know you won’t get away with it, you know you could go to jail for it …. all over a cigarette. But, some nitwits still try it. And now there’s going to be a few nutty vapers apparently joining that group, now. I know e-cigarettes aren’t as obnoxious as cigarettes, but c’mon, you have to know you cannot vape on an airplane. (There is no law against it, but I looked it up, no airline allows vaping.).
Hey, nicotine is nicotine. Junkie behaviour is junkie behaviour, no matter what the nicotine delivery system.
According to a state study, only 6.9 percent of Florida kids under 18 are smoking cigarettes, the lowest level ever recorded. However, NOT a coincidence, 15.8 percent are now using e-cigs. That number is up from 5.4 percent in 2013.
This follows a similar trend all over the country in which the teen smoking rate has plummeted in the past five years; at the same time the teen vaping rate is skyrocketing. Kids are simply ditching cigarettes for a different nicotine delivery system, one that is easy to buy and ultimately cheaper than cigarettes. And studies show kids who vape are three times MORE likely to ultimately take up cigarettes, which makes total sense to me — they got the nicotine Jones already and they gotta keep getting their little nicotine fix somehow.
So, I consider it mixed news. Kids getting addicted to nicotine sucks no matter what the delivery system. This just adds more fuel to the fire to have the Food and Drug Administration crack down on e-cig marketing to teens. The agency was supposed to issue new regulations on e-cigs months ago, but for some reason is dragging its feet. In draft regulations released a year or two ago, the agency made no recommendations to control e-cig marketing and instead recommending simply banning e-cig sales to minors (which is already banned in most states — but kids can still easily buy e-cig products, especially online.).
From an article out of West Palm Beach, Florida:
The use of e-cigarettes, and this dramatic increase that we’re seeing among youth, threatens to normalize smoking again,” said Shannon Hughes, director of the Florida Health Department’s Community Health Promotion Division. “We have worked for decades to de-normalize smoking.”
This isn’t the first study to raise alarms about the level of formaldehyde in e-cig steam. Another study about a year ago said that when e-cigs are turned up to their highest heat level, e-cigs actually give off more formaldehyde than cigarettes. (This study was roundly downplayed by the industry and e-cig advocates, who pointed that people rarely if ever charge their e-cigs at that high of a temperature.).
Formaldehyde is one of the most infamous nasty carcinogenic chemicals and substances known to be given off by tobacco cigarettes.
According to this article from the International Business Times:
An independent laboratory analysis looked at 97 e-cigarette products from two dozen manufacturers and found most emit higher levels of these cancer-causing gases than allowed under California’s Proposition 65, the Safe Drinking Water and Toxic Enforcement Act of 1986.
Anyway, this latest CEH study completely contradicts a study done recently in the UK suggesting that e-cigs are safe and recommending that they be treated as an effective tool for helping people quit smoking cigarettes. It was a study loved by the industry and by e-cig advocates.
The Oakland, Calif.-based CEH obviously strongly disagrees. The group is planning litigation in California courts citing the state’s consumer protection act to crack down on e-cigs. The CEH cites the exceptionally blatant marketing of e-cig products to teenagers in its response to the study.
“For decades, the tobacco industry mounted a campaign of lies about cigarettes, and now these same companies claim that their e-cigarettes are harmless,” said Michael Green, executive director of CEH.
“Anyone who thinks that vaping is harmless needs to know that our testing unequivocally shows that it’s not safe to vape.
“This is especially troubling given the reckless marketing practices of the e-cigarette industry, which targets teens and young people, and deceives the public with unfounded health and safety claims. Our legal action aims to force the industry to comply with the law and create pressure to end their most abusive practices.”
A glowing study about e-cigs out just came out of England this week that in some ways 180 degrees contradicts another study done at the University of Southern California.
Public Health England came out with an absolutely glowing report on e-cigs …. so glowing that I’m immediately left a little skeptical about who was really behind it and what their agendas may have been. However, I can’t really question the biggest conclusion in the report, which is e-cigs are 95 percent safer than cigarettes. I can buy that. The report calls this, “the best estimate so far…”
The report suggests that e-cigs may one day be dispensed like a medicine such as nicotine patches or nicotine gum to help smokers quit.
From a Guardian article:
While stressing that e-cigarettes are not free from risk, PHE now believes that e-cigarettes “have the potential to make a significant contribution to the endgame for tobacco”.
The message was backed by the government’s chief medical officer, Dame Sally Davies, who nevertheless cautioned that “there continues to be a lack of evidence on the long-term use of e-cigarettes”. She said they should only be used as a means to help smokers quit.
“I want to see these products coming to the market as licensed medicines. This would provide assurance on the safety, quality and efficacy to consumers who want to use these products as quitting aids, especially in relation to the flavourings used, which is where we know least about any inhalation risks.”
Kevin Fenton, director of health and wellbeing at PHE, said: “E-cigarettes are not completely risk-free but when compared to smoking, evidence shows they carry just a fraction of the harm.
“The problem is people increasingly think they are at least as harmful and this may be keeping millions of smokers from quitting. Local stop-smoking services should look to support e-cigarette users in their journey to quitting completely.”
Peter Hajek, of Queen Mary University, London, one of the independent authors of the review, said: “My reading of the evidence is that smokers who switch to vaping remove almost all the risks smoking poses to their health. Smokers differ in their needs and I would advise them not to give up on e-cigarettes if they do not like the first one they try. It may take some experimentation with different products and e-liquids to find the right one.”
I’m all for e-cigs being used as a smoking cessation tool. Studies are very mixed as far as e-cigs’ effectiveness for quitting cigarettes, but I know the anecdotal information is pretty strong. I’ve seen tons of e-cig users online absolutely swearing by them (poor Haruko got into it with some of these folks) as “life-saving,” a “Godsend,” a “miracle.” etc., etc. You see so much of that anecdotal testimony online that you have to take it seriously. My attitude is when all else has failed, try them. You have nothing to lose.
And I really like the idea of e-cigs being prescribed and only sold over the counter at pharmacies, etc. That would make it much more difficult for kids to get them and to get started using them for their nicotine jolt rather than cigarettes.
However, this is where I think the English study goes off the rails and I think makes a dangerous assertion. The study also suggests there is zero evidence that e-cigs leads to kids smoking. This completely contradicts a study from USC that came out just the day before, which states that kids who take up vaping are more likely to use tobacco than kids who never vape.
From the Guardian article:
The switch in policy towards e-cigarettes coincided with publication in the Journal of the American Medical Association of research from Los Angeles suggesting that high school students who had use e-cigarettes are more likely to go on to try tobacco.
But Hajek said this did not show that vaping leads to smoking. “It just shows that people who are attracted to e-cigarettes are the same people who are attracted to smoking. People who drink white wine are more likely to try red wine than people who do not drink alcohol.”
Well, when other studies have said otherwise, colour me skeptical on this conclusion at best.
The study surveyed 2,500 kids and found that a higher percentage of kids who take up smoking vaped first than those who never vaped. Thirty-one percent of the kids who vaped moved on to tobacco products while only 8 percent of non-vapers did.
I would absolutely love it if the only use of e-cigs was by people trying to quit. But, the rate of vaping among teenagers is skyrocketing (it’s tripled since 2011). This study strongly suggest that it is not helping to steer kids away from actual smoking, e-cigs are actually helping to create more eventual smokers.
From an NBC News article:
This could simply show that some kids are more rebellious than others, or keen to try new things, the researchers said. Or it could be some are more easily seduced by nicotine — the active ingredient in both e-cigarettes and traditional combustible tobacco products.
“Adolescents who enjoy the experience of inhaling nicotine via e-cigarettes could be more apt to experiment with other nicotine products, including smokeable tobacco,” Leventhal said.
Researchers blame the marketing. E-cigs aren’t under the same rules as cigarettes, they can use cool cartoon characters to market to kids. And rock and roll music and international superstar Steven Dorff (????) decked out in a hip racing uniform vaping his e-cig … and e-cig advertising on girls’ panties. No rules against any of that. Thank you, Food and Drug Adminstration for dragging your feet for two @#$%ing years on this.
From the NBC article:
“There is ample evidence that e-cigarettes are marketed in ways that appeal to children and adolescents. Prompt, effective action is needed to protect youth and reduce the demand for e-cigarettes by nonsmokers of all ages,” Dr. Nancy Rigotti of the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School wrote in a commentary.
I’m not sure what to think of this, other than the less kids get hooked on nicotine, the better.
Because of the wild success of vaping (e-cigarettes), the latest trend in e-cigs is moving toward vaping caffeine.
Hey, if it makes vaping nicotine less popular, more power to them. Though I wouldn’t considering myself an expert in talking about caffeine, I have no doubt it is considerably less nasty than nicotine. The New York Times describes this as “Red Bull for the lungs.”
A typical cup of coffee contains between 95 and 200 milligrams of coffee. By comparison, caffeine vaporizers contains 2 milligrams of caffeine per puff, meaning you’d have to puff about 50 times to get the same amount of caffeine as a cup of coffee.
Like nicotine e-cigs, the Food and Drug Administration hasn’t set any rules about caffeine vaporizers. In fact, it doesn’t appear the feds have even really studied it. (The FDA is working on final nicotine e-cig regulations … for like two years now.).
According to one writer who tried the caffeine e-cigs, the steam tastes like candy and little happened until the 10th puff. From the New York Times:
In a recent test, I found the Eagle experience a far cry from smoking, or drinking coffee. The first drag on this cigarillo-size plastic tube produced a blue glow from the LED tip, and a mouth filled with a surprising hard-candy sweetness; it felt a bit as if one had been freebasing a Jolly Rancher Cherry Stix.
After the fifth hit, a promising tingle in the fingertips emerged. At 10 hits, it was an official buzz, albeit more the tingly, full-body caffeine glow one associates with Red Bull rather than the brain-focused coffee jolt.
A very interesting poll this week put out by Reuters kind of confirms what a lot of us have been saying now a few months — that a small percentage of people using e-cigarettes are using them to quit smoking.
According to this poll of 5,679 people, 75 percent of the people using vaping products are continuing to smoke tobacco. Apparently a number of these people rely on e-cigs to get a nicotine charge in public places where tobacco is discouraged.
According to the poll, roughly 10 percent of adults “vape,” and about 15 percent of adults under the age of 40. That’s up dramatically from 2013, when the estimated number of vapers was 2.3 percent of Americans.
Despite that 75 percent figure, about 40 percent of vapers believe e-cigs are an effective tool for quitting cigarettes. In fact, a recent study shows that e-cigs are not especially effective in helping people quit smoking. (That doesn’t mean they don’t help anyone quit smoking, it just means that e-cigs are not some sort of “miracle cure” or for tobacco use. They might help some people, but they don’t appear to be any more effective than Nicorette, nicotine patches or simply quitting cold turkey.)
