There is a new product on the market that is starting to gain some serious momentum. Well more accurately, as much momentum as the FDA will allow it to get I guess. It's moved from pennys and nickels to a $100 million dollar industry in roughly 12-months.
This is actually not too "new" of a product, it's just recently that it has hit the US shores and managed to anchor itself fairly well.
I'm speaking of the fairly new "smoking alternative" called the E-Cigarette.
The E-cigarette was invented in China, and as a result of this, China is the leader across the boards in the manufacturing of the batteries and other components. Another result would also be the fact that China (of all places) seems to be a lot more accepting of these ingenious devices than our own "democratic" government.
The E-cigarette comes in many different sizes, shapes, and manufacturers. Like any product, all of them naturally have their own pro's and con's. Some of them have great vapor production but have a horrible battery-life. Others have an excellent battery life, but they don't produce enough cigarette-mimicking vapor.
Yes that's right folks: vapor. The E-cigarette is more or less a personal nicotine vaporizer.
There is no actual "smoke," nor is there any actual tobacco, tar, or harmful chemicals. What you actually inhale and exhale is a mixture of Propylene Glycol (or Vegetable Glycol), Nicotine, some natural flavor or another, and water. Now that we mentioned Nicotine, this is the part where the FDA comes rolling in.
The initial argument that the FDA produced after a brief study, was that Diethylene Glycol was a health risk, as it is commonly found in substances such as anti-freeze. What the FDA did here was consciously derail and sabotage the E-Cigarette through their tried and true fearmongering technique of big-worded misinformation.
Here is a part of the original
FDA quote:
"The U.S. Food and Drug Administration today announced that a laboratory analysis of electronic cigarette samples has found that they contain carcinogens and toxic chemicals such as diethylene glycol, an ingredient used in antifreeze."
Is DG (Diethylene Glycol) considered toxic? The answer is yes. But what the FDA failed to mention is that the tested E-Cigarette cartridges had about 1/10 the DG that can be found in aspirin, and about 1/40 the amount found in your typical tobacco cigarette. It can also be found in a variety of consumable products on the market that we use daily. It's actually
not an ingredient in anti-freeze. It's an ingredient in
coolants. They mixed that up with PG (Propylene Glycol) which is actually put into anti-freeze in order to make the anti-freeze
child-safe and/or pet-safe.
Not that it really matters much. But DG is actually
not a typical ingredient you find in E-Cigarettes. It is typically used as a humectant for tobacco products; which would explain its presence in
one out of the 18 E-cig cartridges tested. The presence of Nicotine typically means you will also find DG. If you were to test real cigarettes for this chemical, you would find it in %100 of the tested cigarettes.
But, strangely, the FDA doesn't set an embargo on big tobacco.
DG and PG are actually considered "
Safe for human consumption" in certain quantities by the FDA in several consumable products. To put it into perspective: You would have to consume around 12,000 E-cigarette cartridges loaded up with DG and PG within 24-hours in order to get yourself anywhere near toxic levels of DG/PG. Sounds pretty freaky until you find out that your average E-cigarette user will puff down 1.5 cartridges per day. The heavier puffers will inhale as many as 3.
So why the scary lingo?
I guess it is possible that the FDA made a mistake and used the "toxic/carcinogen" description for the wrong glycol. Plain Ethylene Glycol is indeed pretty toxic. But they didn't find any of that in the E-cigs, maybe they just liked the contents of EG's toxic properties description. So I suppose we could toss lying and/or being utterly incompetent into the equation. Do they actually have "scientists" under the FDA's employ, or is it just another team of monkeys throwing turds and screeching?
An anonymous commenter writes:
"So why is the FDA focusing on diethylene glycol? Because if they told you that e-cigarettes contain trace amounts of aspirin and nicotine you'd stare blankly and shrug your shoulders. But when someone starts throwing around a term like diethylene glycol people pay attention because nobody knows what the hell it means and it doesn't sound like something you necessarily want a tall frosty mug of."
Where can you find Diethylene Glycol and Propylene Glycol?
You can find it in toothpaste, wine, dog food, mouthwash, cough syrup etc etc etc. You can find it in the fog-machines that pump the air full of the annoying stuff at concerts. You can find it in many of the pharmaceuticals that you ingest orally, get injected with, or apply to your skin.
One would have to be incredibly stupid to think that the FDA doesn't know all these facts. They do. They approved all that other stuff; so why derail this?
The magic word here is Nicotine.
I'm not going to sit here and tell you that Nicotine is the greatest thing to put into your body, it's not. It's essentially a poison and a very effective insecticide. Long-term tests on lab rats never showed any adverse effects of nicotine, but regardless, it is still a foreign chemical that you shouldn't put in your body.
But let's be real here. We've all played around and dissolved metal objects in Coca Cola, it's pretty potent as well. Not to mention that it also contains caffeine, which also has addictive qualities. But you don't see Coca Cola facing any scrutiny unless you count the American Dental Association.
My point being, we'll just leave the unhealthiness of Nicotine at the door and continue.
So we all know where to find Nicotine. Tobacco products are an easy one as well as the various stop-smoking aids on the market in the forms of gum, patches, and those weird little inhalers. Then of course we now have our E-cigs to add to this list. The only difference between these
accepted products vs. the
unaccepted isn't really the product so much as it is the supplier.
We get tobacco from our lovely tobacco giants, and we get the rest from our lovely pharmaceutical giants. Many of the pharmaceutical giants get their nicotine from the big tobacco giants. So now we have a love-circle between big tobacco, big pharma, and big FDA. Yes, they all sit around and rub each others shoulders while people die.
Anyway, the article continues like this for another page or two. In a nutshell, the FDA is bullshit and ought to be dismantled. Discuss.