Dangers of Nicotine Vaping
What is Nicotine?
Nicotine is an addictive chemical compound found in tobacco plants. Nicotine use can cause serious health problems including increased blood pressure and hardening of arterial walls, causing heart attacks. Products with tobacco such as cigarettes, cigars, most e-cigarettes, and hookah tobacco contain nicotine.
How Nicotine Affects the Brain and Body
When a person consumes nicotine, they get a slight, brief high from a surge of endorphins. Nicotine also increases the levels of dopamine in the reward circuits of the brain. This makes people want to keep taking products containing nicotine. Repeated exposure to nicotine changes the parts of the brain that deal with stress, learning, and self-control. These changes make a person more susceptible to addiction. The pleasurable sensations from nicotine don’t last very long. This causes a person to want to keep inhaling or ingesting nicotine to get the next rush.
When it enters the blood, nicotine stimulates the adrenal glands to release adrenaline, also called epinephrine. This hormone stimulates the central nervous system, leading to increased blood pressure, heart rate, and breathing. Nicotine’s half-life is two hours. This means it takes about two hours for half of a dose of nicotine to leave the body. But this time frame can vary between one and four hours depending on the individual.
Instead of bathing lung tissue with a therapeutic mist, just as a nebulizer does, vaping coats lungs with potentially harmful chemicals. E-liquid concoctions usually include some mix of flavorings, aromatic additives, and nicotine or THC (the chemical in marijuana that causes psychological effects) dissolved in an oily liquid base.
Teens are 7x more likely than adults to vape nicotine and 96% of them use flavors.
E-cigarettes heat nicotine (extracted from tobacco), flavorings, and other chemicals to create an aerosol that you inhale. Regular tobacco cigarettes contain 7,000 chemicals, many of which are toxic. - Johns Hopkins
Both e-cigarettes and regular cigarettes contain nicotine, which research suggests may be as addictive as heroin and cocaine. Among youth, e-cigarettes, especially the disposable kind, are more popular than any traditional tobacco product. According to the 2021 National Youth Tobacco Survey, more than 2 million U.S. middle and high school students reported using e-cigarettes in 2021, with more than 8 in 10 of those youth using flavored e-cigarettes.
What does our government say?
FDA policy does not allow:
Any pre-filled flavored vape pods that snap into vapes like Juul pods. However, menthol and tobacco flavors are still allowed.
Synthetic nicotine to be treated any differently than nicotine from any other source.
FDA policy continues to allow:
All refillable flavored vapes, like Suorin and Smok.
All disposable flavored vapes, like Flum and Lush Flow.
Pre-filled menthol and tobacco-flavored pods.
The youth vaping epidemic finally prompted FDA action. However, pressure from the tobacco industry created a dangerous loophole that lets kids continue to obtain vapes in thousands of flavors, including menthol. Since the flawed policy was adopted, sales of all menthol vapes have jumped by 52%. Companies that used to sell fruit-flavored or pre-filled flavor pods to kids changed tactics. Now, they push the vapes that remain unregulated, like menthol and disposable. No surprise, those sales are up.