Like many people that haphazardly wandered into the cannabis lifestyle, I picked up a few bad habits along the way. And while some of them--an ability to relax into a near comatose state often confused as laziness and simply enjoy things and an unhealthy fixation on eating potato chips--have been easy to re-contextualize and mitigate, the nastiest of them, smoking, has been an unavoidable and predominantly negative consequence of the fateful decision.

Blame it on the refocusing effect of that post-toke smoke, the easy bar-adjacent socializing, the stimulation of dopaminergic reward pathways in my brain or blame it on a simple lack of willpower, through the year or so I have been smoking I have been waxing and waning through alternate states of enjoyment, despair and hatred, all the while unwilling or unable to give it up and all the while the pain in my lungs getting worse.

And while I have written before that I generally appreciate the North American attitude toward management and moderation of smoking (the numbers speak well, here--there's less than half the number of smokers now than there was half a century ago), there is one space in this political arena which is a shallow mockery of intelligent and forward policy: the electronic cigarette.

The relatively recent technology is, in my mind, a revelation on par with the parallel development of cannabis vaporizers like the Volcano. The idea is simple: in tobacco as in cannabis there are ingredients of primary interest to the user--nicotine and THC respectively--and so there ought to be some way to target those ingredients and, for the most part, ignore the toxic soup of combustion byproduct chemicals that make smoking such a dangerous delivery system.

The solution with the Volcano is the relatively low vaporization point of THC that allows a low heat element to cook the psychoactive out of the plant material leaving the leaf matter unburned. With nicotine the process is only slightly more complicated. The chemical is suspended in an inert solution of propylene glycol along with other flavoring agents, and when the heating element warms up it vaporizes the whole shebang, giving rise to a vapor that is mostly water. The net effect of the electronic cigarette is to deliver most of the smoking experience--the flavor, the thick, warm smoke-like substance, and the nicotine--into the lungs of the smoker without most of the garbage normally found in tobacco side-stream smoke.

So why do the governments hate them so much? Both the Canadians and the Americans have sought to ban the product until further research can be done, citing as a reason the potential for nicotine overdose and habituation, as well as the potential for other toxic byproducts--the only one cited in any study I could find being diethylene glycol--in the "smoke juice".

There are a number of troubling facts here. First, even if trace--as in microgram--amounts of diethylene glycol were found in the smoke juice as a byproduct in the propylene glycol manufacturing process, then you are about as likely to find the chemical in your hot-dogs. The FDA allows up to 0.2% dietylene glycol in the relatively common food additive polyethylene glycol. Second, I don't remember such bans on other recently proposed nicotene replacement and smoking cessation programs such as the nicotene inhaler or the mild acetylcholine agonist pharmaceutical champix--the latter having been reviewed for a mere six months before release in the United States as opposed to the year or so e-cigarettes have been available on the market. Third, with a maximum dosage of 24 mg of per solution cartridge, an e-cigarette user would have to sit down, take forty large puffs, unload the contraption, load it up again and take another forty large puffs in the span of minutes to be anywhere near the "nicotene overdose" range. Fourth, well, they are really phoning it in trying to use "habituation" as an excuse.

Though I don't normally like to side with the paranoid conspiracy theorists, they seem to have it right on this one: the only thing stopping e-cigs from being a viable smoking alternative is the route of cultural administration: since the cigs are neither considered pharmaceuticals nor tobacco byproducts, it's unclear exactly how to fit them under the drug legislation umbrella. And while I don't believe like some of the more rabid speculation that the motivation is purely financial (imagine the loss of tax revenue if everyone were to take the disastrous route and abandon smoking tobacco for this seemingly safer and less-taxed alternative), it's hard to ignore the correlation.

As a relatively new smoker who is just beginning to feel the adverse effects to any noticeable degree, all I can do is try and explain my relationship with cigarettes. Personally, I could take or leave the intoxication profile at this point. Although the body buzz is mildly pleasant, it frequently leaves me dizzy and unable to do anything for a few minutes. For the most part, the reasons I keep smoking are social. I like taking a break at work once in awhile, I like the massage-like feeling of alternating hot and cold breaths, but mostly I like the congenial culture of the cigarette. I have grown to enjoy being outside of bars more than inside of them, and a cigarette is often the only escape I have from the loud music and angry alcoholic grind. If I could get all that without the (literal) heartache, well, why wouldn't I?

What do hotbox readers think? Has anyone experienced e-cigarettes? Has anyone had any bad experiences? Good ones? Tell your stories.

       

Written by :

Chip Dingo