A little follow up with GRBC - I revieced an email this morning about this topic, really glad to see the guys over at GRBC are taking this much times to educate there customers, very classy. They write...
Hey Rogo!
Allow me to explain.
E-liquid contains several common ingredients.
All but 1 of those ingredients are on US FDA GRAS lists. The GRAS list stands for "Generally Recognized As Safe" and is a list of thousands if not millions of molecular structures that scientific literature has shown do not pose any risk to humans if consumed. The GRAS list is like the green list for chemicals a company can use in a product that the FDA has verified won't make it harmful.
Propylene Glycol and Vegetable Glycerin are both GRAS listed ingredients, and as such are found in all kinds of products from toothpaste to soup to shampoo. Produts you eat, products you rub on yourself, products you use to treat yourself. They are inert ingredients that are GRAS by the FDA.
The HARMFUL component of e-liquid is the Nicotine.
Nicotine is NOT a GRAS listed ingredient, infact, when shipped in its pure form it is classified as a UN Packing Group 2 Hazard Class 8 hazardous material. It has an NFPA safety rating of H4, F1, R0, with no special circumstances. This means its Health Hazard rating is a class 4, the highest possible rating for health hazard under the NFPA rating system which means short immediate exposure to sufficient quantities can result in immediate death to humans and animals if the doses are sufficiently strong enough. Its also a very effective environmental toxin shown to be extremely toxic to aquatic life like frogs and fish as well as insects (nicotine is tobacco leafs natural pesticide that it produces to stop insects from trying to eat it - the same thing ... is for ......... plants a natural insecticide produced by the plant, both have a different effect in the mammalian body than they do in the insect body)
Pure nicotine is 1001mg/ml strength, a single droplet of pure nicotine on your skin can be fatal. In e-liquid its dosages are usually less than 1/30th the strength of pure nicotine. At these concentrations a drop on your skin won't be much to worry about. However if you spilled the entire contents of a 30ml eliquid bottle on yourself and did not change your clothes/wash your skin, its possible you could sustain a fatal overdose after enough had absorbed transdermally through your skin, ALL AT ONCE. When you vape it, your vaping a much much smaller dosage thats far below the toxicity level of nicotine (its generally believed only 30% of the nicotine actually gets absorbed when your vaping so if your vaping 10mg/ml your probably only intaking 3-4mg of nicotine for every ml you vape, and 3-4mg is less than alot of cigarettes state on their emissions). If you drank the entire bottle of eliquid, you'd be absorbing 99% of the nicotine content, all at once, you'd have a really uncomfortable death.
Simple common sense should keep you safe. If you spill e-liquid on yourself, wash it off. If you spill some on a table, thoroughly wipe it up or else your dog might smell it and lick it up. The fatal dosage for nicotine is far less for an animal than a human, the smaller the animal the more careful you should be about leaving any droplets laying around on household surfaces that your dog might come across and start licking because it smells good and then an hour later drops dead because of it. Nobody wants that!
Children may also be invited to want to eat the eliquid because of its nice smells. Childproof caps are a good first step, but they arent a guarantee against anything, good parenting is a guarantee. The best advice id have if you vape and have small children around, is to sit the children down and explain to them that the contents of your eliquid bottles are poisonous and that they must not drink them no matter how good they smell. Its really no different than explaining to kids not to drink paint thinner, or not to play with the bottle of chlorine bleach, or any other household item that is potentially harmful (corrosive or toxic or both). Also generally good practice to keep your eliquid out of the reach of children and animals at all times, thats the fail safe. In a cupboard high up on a shelf, out of sight out of mind as they say.
Hope that helps Josef! Nic is toxic, but so is tylenol. Its all about moderation. Many things are toxic in large dosages, but fine in therapeutic dosage ranges.
- Daniel
Very helpful and in-formable. So maybe Nicotine is what we should be really concerned about here, instead of bouncing back and forth on the PG/VG debate.
Rogo
