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Welcome to ECF! And, congrats on your upcoming 6 month mark. If you go to your profile you can put in your location (it can be just your state or country if you don’t want to share exactly). It’ll help people when they’re answering any questions you have, as laws and regulations and availability are vastly different across the globe.
Hello and welcome to ECF. Congratulations on kicking the cigarettes to the curb.
Howdy and welcome 
. There’s a lot of that here. It’s also a good place to get questions answered. Got anything you want to know sing out and we’ll give you what we got.
. There’s a lot of that here. It’s also a good place to get questions answered. Got anything you want to know sing out and we’ll give you what we got.
Welcome and glad you joined.
Most posters may not see your above reply. I just happen to get a "like" and was interested concerning my reply. If you like a particular reply, you can click "like" (the thumbs up) icon,or other icons, at bottom right hand corner of this post, this action will notify the poster of your chosen noted response.
Hello, and Thank You for your warm welcome. I joined ECF for several reasons, but most importantly to gain information and knowledge. I am a recent convert and I see vaping as having great potential as a cessation tool, but find the industry of my new found solution in peril. This leads me to the question, is vaping truly "less harm"? Granted, at this point there seems to be little conclusive research and a whole lot of "need more research" conclusions on places like PubMed. I am hoping that the other participants on ECF will direct me to peer reviewed factual data, not only for my personal edification but as an advocacy tool. As I see it, the industry is in peril because it lacks the kind of citizen participation required to persuade the dispositions of our policy makers. We need to remember that legislators seek the approval of voters "only at the ballot box", and once in office they seek the approval of their peers, and if at this point you are fully convinced that vaping is a valid solution, then you better start to make your voice heard on the local, state and federal levels and threaten the ballot box; otherwise your legislators will indeed find the approval of their peers.
The downright lies that are being bounded about in the US are indicative of a far more widespread problem and are far beyond the scope of just the vape issue.
I am English and live in France and although rules have been put in place in Europe the generally accepted opinion is that vaping is roughly 95% safer than smoking.
Here is a link to a very good and interesting USA based youtube account called regulator watch which tries to wade through some of the multi-dimensional vaping and BT related problems and lies being bandied about.....it is a good watch
Regulator Watch
Good luck to you.
less harm than what is the question.
Less harm than cigarettes? Vastly. Numbers like like 95% safer are bandied about.
Less harm than iQOS? Almost certainly though numbers are being kept secret
Less harm than other smoking cessation methods?
Depends. Some seem to be less safe, while others may be more safe. It does tend to work better than any of em though.
“Salts” vs “Freebase”
both of these are marketing terms invented by JUUL. The term the JUUL scientists themselves use are protonated and unprotonated. Unprotonated “freebase” nic has been studied publicly since the 1950’s and the body of research is large and well known. Unprotonated Nicotine itself is largely harmless. No cancer or respiratory problems.
Protonated nic or “salts” on the other hand are largely brand new, have been studied by only one corporation, JUUL, and all such data is secret. For “salts” there is effectively no data at all.
Less harm than not smoking at all? No, or at least we have to assume not. Breathing anything at all including air is less than safe. Of course NOT breathing air is even less safe so we do it anyway.
depends on what bit you are talking about, but in many cases yes. Ecig development moves faster than public research can keep up
otherwise translated as “we’d like more funding please”
It’s actually got a decent amount of that. The problem is that it is fight two of the most monied industries in the country: big tobacco and big Pharma. Both are simple market share issues. The amount of money these groups have though is flat out outlandish. So much that they are able to actually direct anti-smoking advocates to do their work for them through indirect funding. (Making a third anti vaping group btw)
I read a PubMed article regarding this "Protonation" and I believe they intimated alkalinity, perhaps I will post it here if I can find it again. Thanks for your response.
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Ah. That.
Basically the deal is that most things are either slightly alkali or slightly acidic. Unprotonated nicotine is slightly alkali. As such if you mix it with something else that is acidic the two will naturally combine to make themselves ph neutral. This is called a “salt”. The classic two are sodium (highly acidic) and chlorine (highly alkali). Mix em together and they release a lot of energy and produce NaCl, or table salt. Strong acid, strong base, Very very stable salt.
Weaker acids and bases produce less energetic reactions and less stable compounds. The issue is that if you mix an acid and a base you get something that behaves differently than either of the original chemicals. And we don’t know much at all about what these behaviors are. They might be safe. They might not be. We just don’t know.
Most but NOT all “nic salt” is in real life a chemical called nicotine benzoate. Unprotonated nicotine reacted with benzoic acid. There are others though. JUUL tested 8 or so IIRC. Thing is there is a compound for every even moderately acidic thing that exists. Hundreds and hundreds of different compounds could be referred to as “nic salt”.
The most common ones I’ve read about are nicotine citrate, nicotine benzoate, nicotine salicylate, and nicotine lactate.
While there are long term public studies on unprotonated nic, there is very nearly NOTHING on any of these, and what very very little there is was pried from JUUL’s unwilling hands via a class action lawsuit. Also what there is doesn’t look particularly good. There are limited indications that they’re all of them more addictive than nicotine. Possibly a LOT more addictive.
Me I’m classifying then as designer drugs and staying the heck away from them myself until actual research is done. They might not be dangerous. They might be fine. But they also might not be.
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