<p>I have always wondered what an E-Cig really was, if there was nicotine, or other stuff in them, or if it was simply water that becomes vaporized. Recently I read up on them (after seeing a slew of teens “smoking” them) and became alarmed when I learned they do indeed contain nicotine, which is the addictive stuff in cigarettes. </p>
<p>As the “old fogey” I now seem to be, I started thinking about the potential newly addicted “kids”. I know adults that are nicotine addicted and it is not pretty when they can’t get to a cigarette for whatever reason. Now I am envisioning uptight, cranky (crankier than the “normal”), antsy, and worse, teen who probably has zero clue or idea what nicotine addiction is. </p>
<p>Why do we (and I use “we” as the collective population) keep creating more and more stuff to addict us, rather than create more things to help us cope with daily stress and strife? (Rhetorical question, really)</p>
<p>Then this showed up this morning, which does zero to allay my concerns…Dang, I think I am becoming my grandparents, and I’m only 55! :(</p>
<p>I know two people who use these. It’s my understanding that nicotine in and of itself isn’t harmful - it’s all of the chemicals in cigarettes that causes cancer, not the nicotine.</p>
<p>It’s a natural occuring substance in tobacco because it repels aphids from the plant. was taken off the US market because the insectide spray is so highly absorbed through the skin. it’s lethal to humans in higher doses, with similar effects to strychnine rat poison.</p>
<p>This notion that nicotine is not dangerous is a bunch of marketing nonsense from the second biggest industry selling nicotine to addicts – the pharmaceutical industry (gum, patches, lozenges, etc.)</p>
<p>Just as a fluke of nature – nicotine binds to specific reward center receptors in the brain, triggering a powerful dopamine release and causing a sense of well-being – it is one of the most highly addictive substances on earth. That addictive mechanism is there whether you smoke it, inhale it from an e-cig, absorb it from a patch in your arm, or from chewing nicotine gum. However, nothing beats the crack-like rush of the nicotine hitting the brain 8 seconds after a puff into the lungs from a cigarette, so these alternative “treatments” simply prolong the drug addiction and almost inevitably result in a relapse to smoking.</p>
<p>For example, President Obama was photographed a couple months ago slipping a piece of nicotine gum in his mouth at a White House event. He started using nicotine gum in 2007 or 2008. Five or six years ago.</p>
<p>I was at a wedding last weekend and noticed a man furtively using this inside. I’m very aware of cigarette smoke and the fumes wafting in when the door to the outside smoking area was opened were not pleasant. I could not detect any odor from him. I wonder if this will become something people can use at work and in public spaces. I wish people would never start but this does seem less offensive to be around. I don’t think it should be labeled as “healthy” though.</p>
<p>I believe there are flavor packets you can get for these which don’t even contain nicotine.</p>
<p>Honestly, I think the regulation should be directed at the reselling of cartridges with nicotine in them, since that’s the actual drug. If you want one that just gives the flavor of inhaling chocolate, strawberries, or menthol, then go for it.</p>
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<p>Do you seriously believe teenagers today don’t know nicotine is addictive? Do you also think they’re unaware that driving fast can be dangerous?</p>
<p>Many think that nicotine from e-cigs or hookah is not addictive like cigarettes.</p>
<p>Plus, it’s very easy to say that nicotine is “additive” without truly understanding the insidious trap of nicotine addiction. “Oh, I won’t get addicted” or “I’ll stop before I get addicted”. Teens don’t understand that, for many people, the first puff sets off an inevitable chain that leads to addiction and living every minute of every day of the rest of their lives as drug addict until it kills them…</p>
<p>I thought I could quit. Anything that enables teen nicotine addiction is a bad thing in my book.</p>
<p>interesteddad, was it you who said that the brains of the nicotine addicted are similar to that of heroin addicts? That the brain is actually changed by the nicotine in cigarettes?</p>
<p>I have a no smoking policy at work, which means no smoking obviously inside, or in the parking lot outside, vehicles, etc. In fact I do my best to hire non-smokers. Someone’s first day at the job, when told explicitly of our non smoking policy where she said, I don’t smoke, was sitting at her desk smoking one of these things. Co-workers didn’t even know what it was at first. It was funny hearing what people thought it was since most had never heard of it.</p>
<p>Yep. Same region of the brain as heroin and cocaine. The specific receptors that nicotine binds to are supposed to bind to a neuro-transmitter, Acetylcholine. Nicotine molecules are an exact match and bind to those receptors instead, in effect hi-jacking the receptors. It’s really a bad situation because the nicotine in one cigarette completely hi-jacks the receptors. In an attempt to protect itself, the brain de-sensitizes the receptors – a brain chemistry hallmark of physical addiction.</p>
<p>These receptors, when activated properly (or hijacked by a hit of nicotine) releases dopamine, which is a pleasure reward mechanism that teaches us to keep doing whatever we are doing (eat, sleep, get warm, inhale nicotine) That is really insidious for nicotine because it’s the brain teaching us (all day, every day) to associate everything in our lives with smoking and the dopamine release. Thus, adding a powerful psychological addiction to the physical addiction.</p>
<p>The killer is when you try to stop using nicotine. The receptors have all been densensitized, so without nicotine, nothing triggers the dopamine release for a week or two (hard core withdrawal). Studies have shown that if you take smokers, make them stop for a week, and then give them a cigarette while doing brain imaging, the receptors are completely high-jacked with a few puffs. That is why “just having one to take the edge off quitting” is aguaranteed fail. The full addiction is instantly re-triggered in the same way that an alcoholic or heroin junkie is in big trouble if they have “just one more”.</p>
<p>It’s also why nicotine from patches, gum, or e-cigs just prolongs the addiction. Beating nicotine addiction requires 100% abstinence. Ride out the withdrawal so you have a chance of working through the learned psychological triggers over a period of months.</p>
<p>E-cigs, like all forms of nicotine delivery, is playing Russian roulette.</p>
<p>I am all in favor of the e-cig as an alternative for someone who is already a smoker and would like to quit. But not as a new habit for the nonsmoker to try.</p>
<p>I do know someone in my extended family who uses e-cigs, and it has made a world of difference to me, as the bystander. No more second-hand smoke – and we can sit around indoors without the need for the smoker to be exiled to the front porch for a smoking break. Is it healthy? Probably not, but I think it is clear that the harm from the e-cigarette is lower on the scale than the regular cigarettes he was smoking before he shifted to his e-cig.</p>
<p>interesteddad – I think the problem is that most smokers simply are unable to quit cold turkey. So maybe ecigs are their equivalent to methadone – it is not harmless, it doesn’t resolve the addiction, but it is the solution that they can manage and stick to. The e-cigs eliminate many of the other negatives of a smoking habit – their clothes and house don’t smell bad any more, they are not offending or bothering others when they smoke, and they are not destroying their lungs any more. Yes, the nicotine may be bad for them – but the point is that it is not AS bad as the smoked cigarette. </p>
<p>It is precisely because nicotine is so addictive that people need these partial solutions. </p>
<p>I’m a nonsmoker and very sensitive to tobacco smoke, but that doesn’t mean that I want to curtail my relationships with people who do smoke. So that e-cig is very nice in the hands of a person I really enjoy spending time with … maybe not for him, but for me. I can’t sit in judgment of his bad habits - I have plenty of my own – but I do respect the fact that he had taken measures to ensure that his bad habit no longer intrudes upon my space.</p>
<p>*I am all in favor of the e-cig as an alternative for someone who is already a smoker and would like to NOT quit. *</p>
<p>While the e-cig is certainly less annoying to bystanders and perhaps less harmful to the user (depending on how much faith you put in the Chinese suppliers), it is absolutely not going to help someone quit. You can’t beat nicotine addiction by continuing to use nicotine.</p>
<p>The real problem for a smoker is the false notion that they are taking steps towards quitting by using the e-cig (or patches or gum…). A lot of studies have shown that each successive quitting attempt may get harder and harder. So, products that don’t help you quit, but make you think you are “quitting” aren’t beneficial. In fact, one of the real problems with smoking cessation efforts right now is that they steer people away from the one way that has proven to be highly successful: stop using nicotine. That is the way that over 90% of all successful quitters have used. It works. It works better when you reinforce the message that it works rather than bombarding smokers with the message that you should never ever try that…</p>
<p>I don’t know. Quitting rates were increasing steadily from the 1960s until the introduction of over-the-counter “nicotine replacement” products when quitting rates stopped dead in their tracks. At the point quitting rates dropped, there were more ex-smokers than smokers, so cold turkey must have been working reasonably well.</p>
<p>If you go on any goverment or public policy quit-smoking site today, you will be explicitly told that cold turkey doesn’t work and that you should not try to quit without medication. Virtually all of the government money now goes to subsidized pharmaceutical nicotine (patches, gum) and none to cold turkey support groups (support increases success rates). Even crazier, these sites counsel not quitting until you have set a quit date at some point in the future (“to get ready”) and purchased your medication. Yet, studies have shown that most people who successfully quit did it completely on the spur of the moment, not even planning to quit so much as an hour ahead of time.</p>
<p>^^^My mom was a prolific smoker and as obnoxious as hell about it. I remember being a little girl and gasping as she smoked in the car with the windows up during a rainstorm. I remember saying “Mom, I can’t breathe!” Her response was “Well, don’t breathe then.” She wasn’t a bad mother, but she was clearly very addicted. She finally quit when I was pregnant with my first child and told her that I would never tell her what to do in her own house, but that my baby would not be coming to her house ever and she would need to come see her at my place. She quit cold turkey, though she did see a hypnotist for support and believed it helped.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, shortly after she quit (age 48), she had her first stroke. She died at 69 last December after the last of many devastating strokes which made her a virtual prisoner in her own body for years. </p>
<p>I am all in favor of the e-cig as an alternative for someone who can’t or won’t overcome nicotine addiction but wants to reduce health risks.</p>
<p>Someone who switches from cigarettes to e-cigs is no longer smoking but is still a nicotine addict. This is not the ideal situation, but it’s a lot better than continued smoking. Most of the health damage from smoking is caused by substances in cigarettes other than nicotine.</p>
<p>It’s known that there are genetic differences in how easy it is to quit smoking once you’ve started-- and when I say it’s known, I mean that the genes are identified, and the tests have been done. Some people have the genetic curse that if they start smoking, they will find it almost impossible to quit. Other people don’t have that genetic profile; if they are foolish enough to start smoking, they won’t find it nearly as difficult to quit.</p>
<p>So if we have quitting rates increasing from the 1960s and then decreasing, it could simply be that a large cohort of smokers who would have an easy time quitting ended up quitting as smoking became socially disapproved, leaving the remnant of smokers who have a hard time quitting.</p>
<p>Except that it’s not a static cohort of smokers. It’s not like there were no new nicotine addicts coming into the pipeline after 1960.</p>
<p>One thing is for sure, though. The pharmaceutical companies now make a lot of money selling nicotine, which (ironically) they buy from the tobacco companies. Lots of profits to go around from nicotine addiction.</p>
<p>If we were serious about doing something about it, we’d get cigarettes out of convenience stores.</p>
<p>interesteddad - you have shared a lot of the same information my brother did when he ended up at the Mayo Clinic for 10 days (maybe 2 weeks) going through a nicotine detox program 6 years ago. He spent hours and hours a day in a classroom learning about the physiology of nicotine and cigarette addiction. He had literally tried everything to quit and simply was unable to. He was a recovered addict (hard drugs) but could not kick nicotine. he has not touched a cigarette since, and still has to be careful of triggers (like smelling cigarettes). </p>
<p>And to the poster who asked if I “really” thought teens were unaware that nicotine is addictive? Yes, I really do not think teens are aware that it is the nicotine they are addicted to.</p>
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