All about nicotine – the guru has spoken
Posted on August 26, 2021 By Colin
The world’s leading expert on nicotine has published an authoritative report on nicotine and vaping. It is a must-read for all vapers.
Professor Neal Benowitz is Emeritus Professor of Medicine at the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education, University of California San Francisco. His work on nicotine over the last 40 years has been the go-to reference and is always considered and reliable.
Some of the key comments in the review are listed below, but I recommend all vapers read the paper carefully. It is available here.
“If smokers used ENDS to quit smoking, even if they continued to use ENDS, we expect that there would be an enormous benefit to public health.”
Nicotine
- Nicotine per se is not harmless, but is much less harmful than combusted tobacco use. The effects of nicotine include ’pleasure, arousal and stimulation, and reduction of anxiety and mood stabilization’
- Vapers and smokers take in the same amount of nicotine into the body each day
- Daily intake of nicotine is much the same for users of high powered devices with 3-6mg/ml for MTL as for low powered pod devices with 60mg/ml nicotine for MTL
- Experienced users take in more nicotine than new vapers, so satisfaction increases over time
- E-liquids with high levels of propylene glycol deliver more nicotine than those with lower levels with the same nicotine concentration.
- Of the nicotine that is inhaled from an e-cigarette, more than 90% is retained by the smoker so very little is released into the surrounding air.
- One 5% JUUL pod delivers a similar amount of nicotine to smoking around 18 cigarettes.
- The rate of rise of nicotine in the blood is similar for cigarettes and e-cigarettes, but in general peak levels of nicotine are lower with e-cigarettes.
Safety of vaping
- ENDS products expose users to much lower levels of toxicants compared with cigarette smoking. Based on the far lower number and levels of potential toxins in ENDS aerosol, it is predicted that toxicity will be much lower than that of smoking, but toxicity will likely differ by device.
- High powered devices have a greater health risk. The clouds are larger and the higher temperatures create more toxic chemicals. Devices with high concentrations of nicotine salt generate smaller, cooler clouds with less toxin exposure.
- Although no smoking or vaping is preferred, switching to less harmful e-cigarettes long-term would likely reduce smoking-related disease risk and would be an acceptable alternative compared with regular use of tobacco cigarettes.
- Dripping” (ie, dripping drops of the e-liquid directly onto the heating element and then inhaling the produced vapor) can lead to high liquid heating temperatures and generation of harmful more chemicals.
- Long-term harm is unknown because the products have not been used for long-enough