Vaping or Cigarettes: Choose Your Poison
by John Lawrence, June 9, 2019
Only in America can you put a product on the market without any testing to see if there are any health risks. It's about testing by marketing to the American people and you find out later whether the product is toxic or not. In Europe they have the precautionary principle where products are tested first before they are released on the public. So who would have thought that a product that was touted as safer than cigarettes would turn out to be far more deadly and debilitating? Cigarettes contain tobacco which when inhaled is thought to be hazardous to your health, but, like a lot of other products, it won't kill you immediately. That will take 30 years or so. Vaping contains a toxic mixture of chemicals which, as it turns out, can kill you in far less time. Hundreds of people across the country have been sickened by a severe lung illness linked to vaping, and a handful have died, according to public health officials. Many were otherwise healthy young people, in their teens or early 20s.
So who would have thunk it? The Food and Drug Administration is warning that there appears to be a particular danger for people who vape THC, the psychoactive chemical in marijuana. So people will just have to go back to smoking marijuana the traditional way - in a bong. Or maybe in a hookah. A hookah is a device for vaporizing nicotine using water instead of a bunch of chemicals. That seems far more healthier. It seems that the chemicals in e-cigarettes congeal in the lungs making their function useless and leading to lung disease. The e-cigarette industry, for whom vaping is extremely profitable, have tried to lay the blame on vaping THC and other street products. They would hate to see their investments go down the drain. However, in 53 cases of the illness in Illinois and Wisconsin, 17 percent of the patients said they had vaped only nicotine products, according to an article published in The New England Journal of Medicine.
So a word of caution to vapers: Get a life! You can smoke marijuana legally in most states now. Vote for a Democratic President, and, most importantly, a Democratic Senate in 2020, and marijuana will probably be legalized at the Federal level. Some so-called "hard drugs" have even been used on a regular basis by some people who have led very successful, even celebrated, lives. Take jazz drummer, Art Blakey, for example. Today he is being lauded for having had one of the most successful bands in jazz history. He is considered to be a legendary drummer. Blakey was a heroin addict, a very highly functioning one, and he introduced many of his sidemen to heroin. One of them was Lee Morgan, considered to be one of the great trumpet players of jazz history. However, Morgan's addiction did not have such a happy outcome as did Blakey's. By 1967 Lee was a junkie who had fallen so low that he was seen sleeping on the street outside Birdland without shoes and committing petty crimes so he could buy drugs. Still his record, "The Sidewinder", whose title tune was written on a piece of toilet paper during a break in a recording session, became Blue Note's best-selling record ever, breaking the previous sales record roughly ten times over.
So a word of caution to Americans: be careful of what you put in your mouth. The American mantra is Caveat Emptor - Buyer Beware. According to the journal article, “e-cigarette aerosol is not harmless; it can expose users to substances known to have adverse health effects, including ultrafine particles, heavy metals, volatile organic compounds and other harmful ingredients.” Omigod, you mean that I can't trust American products that I can buy legally on the market more than I can trust street drugs? Well opioids are a case in point. They have been prescribed by legitimate doctors, sold by legitimate pharmacies and the patients have become addicts.
Another note of caution: stay away from Monsanto's Roundup, a pesticide whose main ingredient is glyphosate. The Guardian reports:
Germany has said it will phase out the controversial weedkiller glyphosate because it wipes out insect populations crucial for ecosystems and pollination of food crops.
The chemical, also suspected by some experts to cause cancer in humans, is to be banned by the end of 2023 when the EU’s approval period for it expires, ministers said.
Biologists have sounded the alarm over plummeting insect populations that affect species diversity and damage ecosystems by disrupting natural food chains and plant pollination.
“What harms insects also harms people,” said environment minister Svenja Schulze, of the centre-left Social Democrats, who warned of a future when fruit could become a luxury.
“What we need is more humming and buzzing,” added Schulze, stressing that “a world without insects is not worth living in”.
So modern technology is not all it's cracked up to be whether on the chemical level or on the fossil fuel level or on the plastics level. The fact of the matter is that the technology developed in the last couple hundred years since the advent of the Industrial Revolution is ruining the environment on small scales and large scales. Unless there is a change, the earth, let alone the oceans or mundane pollution, will become uninhabitable for humans at least. Probably some insects will survive, but insecticides and pesticides are doing their best to eliminate even those. Probably some day some space travelers will alight on earth only to wonder what happened here that the earth should have become a dead planet.
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