[Hae-Joo] Vaping - A Harm Reduction Theory

imp.unity (57)in #health • 6 years ago (edited)

So I lately gave up smoking for the umpteenth time… But this time, there is something different about my attempt to go cold-turkey…

I’m not actually going cold-turkey; I’m using a nicotine-delivery system.

Now, I realized that trying to go cold-turkey, while simultaneously working 2, sometimes 3 jobs, just never seemed to work for me. I always ended up going strong for a week, maybe two, sometimes as long as a month… And then I would be sucked back in by some extenuating circumstance.

Really, sometimes it felt cruelly unfair… I would cause myself a great deal of suffering, battling my mind, trying to overpower my biochemical urges, fighting what could only be seen as my carnal desires. And I would be so good, so disciplined… And then that pesky human nature, that little Devil in me, would find me in a moment of weakness… He would hit me with that big argument, or that disappointment, or something I wasn’t prepared for: and I would relapse.

This got to be annoying… Like I didn’t want to go out and hang out with my friends anymore. I didn’t want to expose myself to life because I felt whatever happened it would just end up bumming me out and causing me to self-harm. (I know it’s just smoking some cigarettes, and I’ve never been more than half a pack a day, but still. That shit is poison and it sucks.)

According to the Centers for Disease Control, during 2000-2004, "An estimated 443,000 persons in the United States died prematurely each year from smoking or exposure to secondhand smoke. During 2001-2004, the average annual smoking-attributable health-care expenditures nationwide were approximately $96 billion. When combined with productivity losses of $97 billion, the total economic burden of smoking is approximately $193 billion per year." - Source

Well, that’s when this thought hit me: “I wish I could just have something to puff on when I’m just feeling down on myself and I just want to relax and clear my mind, or I’m going out and going to be surrounded with vice and I just want something fun to do with my hands/mouth to take the edge off that’s not like smoking 10 cigarettes”

I really enjoy running and what has always really sucked about smoking is that the carbon monoxide really cuts my drive to run like in half, or more. When I would quit cigarettes, after just a few days I’d be out running for over an hour, running like 7 miles easily. Soon as I’d had a cigarette, I’d be struggling to run more than 2 or 3 before nearing the point of physical exhaustion…

It just sucked.

Until I bought this vape (e-cig), and a couple low nicotine and no nicotine juices (vape liquids).

Now I feel like I can go 2 or 3 days without the need to, and when the need/feeling/nicotine-craving does arise, well I’ve got this little device that allows me to absorb medical-grade nicotine, in a tasty vanilla, orange, cherry or tropical fruits flavor vapor (the possibilities are really endless), that actually is thicker and more fun to play around with than regular tobacco smoke. (It’s very similar to hookah/shishah smoke in reality).

This means I can concentrate on my time doing exercise, eating healthy, living my life, and when my biochemistry / psychology starts doing the whole shadow high-and-low oscillation routine, I’m able to cope perfectly well and most importantly reduce the amount of harm I do to myself by a significant margin

Now I’ve actually been doing a lot of research, and though there’s no way to know for sure what are the unforeseeable side-effects of abusing a vape and e-juice, there does seem to be some pretty solid scientific data suggesting that e-juice nicotine addiction compared to tobacco-smoke nicotine addiction is much less destructive for the body; and I would just like to share some of these memes with you.

1) Smoking a cigarette causes plant material to combust, which, as many know, leads to the creation of tar. When the cigarette smoke is inhaled, that tar is deposited in the lungs, where it is very difficult for the body to get it out. A vape on the other hand deposes no such tar, since it is vaporizing a substance (heating it to the point of turning into vapor/mist) instead of combusting it (setting it on fire). That means that e-juice liquid chemicals (carcinogenic or not) don’t end up getting stuck in the lungs, which in theory, reduces the risk of emphysema, chronic bronchitis, and other horrific respiratory diseases.

Just look at this nasty shit...

2) No carbon monoxide. This is probably the number one reason why I decided to spend close to 250 dollars on this machine (with an additional 20-30 dollars per bottle of juice), when a pack of Marlboro costs less than $2.5 here in China. Even though I do suffer from asthma, and I can tell you for sure that e-juice certainly does irritate the lungs and cause inflammation, what this e-juice does not do is cause carbon monoxide resulting from combusted plant-material to bind to my red-blood cells and cause me to suffocate my body and brain for oxygen. Since I switched off the cigarettes about 3 weeks ago, even if I wake-up and hit the thing straight in the morning, two hours later after drinking plenty of water, I can go out for a run or hit the gym and do some calisthenics and core-exercises and I’m buff full of energy. Conversely, I used to hit the gym, but if I had smoked but one cigarette that day, I was going to be useless… Calling it quits before I’d been there for half an hour.
Now that I vape, if I want to, I can put it down for a couple hours, stretch up, strap on my running shoes and hit the park or the treadmill and my body works the way I would expect to, not like some weak and sickly piece of crap. In my opinion, carbon monoxide makes it impossible to be fit because it literally prevents respiration from taking place at the cellular level.

3) The e-juices don’t cause my clothes, breath, hair or environment to reek. And since quitting the cigarettes, I can definitely feel my sense of smell is back, even though I’m vaping all of these delicious flavors through my nose.

4) Having the vape at hand just comes down to psychological and anthological security. My dream is that I will get bored of vaping. On some days, I vape my 0 nicotine juices, and I know I’ve just been conditioning my brain to function properly on low levels of nicotine. This, like I alluded to above, means that some days I literally go without it (whereas going a day without smoking a cigarette had become a really rare-occurrence for me in the last few years). As I keep getting more and more into my diet and fitness, I plan on relying on my device even less. Hopefully one day, it’ll just be an artifact on my mantle that I haven’t used or even thought of in months.

5) The Cool Factor: It’s just cooler than smoking cigarettes for multiple reasons: First of all, the vapor looks cooler than shitty cigarette smoke. Secondly, as far as I can tell, it’s mostly small and medium sized companies manufacturing all of these juices and equipments. Big Tobacco has plans to get in on it, but it seems they aren’t there yet. It’s a cool little economy as opposed to the money-draining behemoth monopoly of Big Tobacco one is supporting when they smoke cigarettes. And no matter how you slice or dice it, you’d be unable to do as much harm to yourself with this machine as you would using cigarettes.

6) Cigarette companies add all of these extremely carcinogenic additives to tobacco to make the nicotine high “even better”. They add stuff like ammonium because it increases the speed that nicotine reaches the receptors in the brain. This is literally responsible for making people who smoke tobacco into nicotine-junkies. It’s literally like adding baking soda to your cocaine, you know? They add all these additives to give your lungs and throat that “hit” feeling and making the whole experience just that much more addictive for your brain and body. When we smoke a cigarette, we’re putting not hundreds, but over a thousand different toxic chemicals and pollutants in our blood, which puts incredible pressure on our kidneys and liver, which of course can lead to problems down the line. With vaping, it's not the same...

Vaping is just much more chill

First of all, you can make sure you’re smoking alkaline juices (more expensive but better feeling in the body). Next, you can make sure you’re smoking juices that only use natural flavorings, nothing artificial and extra carcinogenic. And lastly, when you vape, you can know and understand exactly what is going in, and out of your body. Propylene Glycol and Vegetable Glycerin

Most juices are made of three basic components: VG (Vegetable Glycerin), PG (Propylene Glycol), and Nicotine. Then some additional flavorings like all natural extracts (vanilla and blood-orange extract!😋), natural oils and fragances and stuffs like that can be added for flavor.

VG ad PG can’t possibly be healthy for the body, especially when they’re being heated willy-nilly; I mean these are all products that the medical establishment pushes on us in our medications. PG for example is the pressurized gas substance used to push salbutamol (ventoline) into our lungs to relieve asthma symptoms. Already as a room-temperature pressurized liquid it can’t be great… Heating it up and being exposed to it for the amount of time you’re vaping can’t be any less bad…

Yet when you weigh the pros and cons, as have the big institutional players (like Cancer Research UK Source and other stop-smoking medical research institutions, government-funded or just NGO style); they’ve all found in their experiments that when comparing the two, vaping is clearly the less harmful **(by a long-shot)** between the two.

The British Government now claims that e-cigs are 95% safer than their analog cigarette counterparts, and are the leading factor responsible for soon-to-be dwindling smoking rates in the country. They also claim that many people believe that e-cigs are just as harmful, if not more so than cigarettes, which all scientific evidence so-far appears to be contradicting. Source

There is even some evidence that Propylene Glycol in e-cigarettes might keep us healthy, as its antibacterial properties might actually act as a powerful deterrent against pneumonia, influenza, and other respiratory diseases when vaporized and inhaled according to a study by Dr. Oswald Hope Robertson. Source - I'm not holding my breath on that, quite literally, but it's still all very interesting.

So it can be advised on a harm-reduction basis, which is exactly how I feel it should be used.

I haven’t full-on tackled, remedied and healed my addiction to nicotine, or the underlying psychological shadow factors that lead to me developing one in the first place, and having it hang over my head like a disease. However, now I can do all of that, which I absolutely have to do, but I can also reduce the amount of harm I’m exposing myself to while I do it…

And it’s not lame like chewing nicotine gum made by Big Tobacco and Big Pharma (which feels like shit anyway.)

It’s literally the best solution for me, and I’m grateful and happy I made this investment, for my health and peace of mind.

I’ll be the happiest man alive if I end up stopping to use this 250 dollar machine before I would have smoked the next 100 packs of cigarettes for the same monetary value.