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“WHO THOUGHT SUCKING ON A BATTERY WAS A GOOD IDEA?”

New York magazine has an alarming deep dive into what’s now being called EVALI, or “e-cigarette- or vaping associated lung injury.”

  • UCSF pulmonologist Dr. Jeffrey Gotts says, “People are conducting a huge experiment on themselves about what kind of lung disease you can produce from all these different chemicals that you’re putting into the lung,”
  • The article also tells the origin story of cannabis vape giant Pax. which just named mainstream executive Michael Murphy CEO.
    TechCrunch

From New York:

Scientists warn that EVALI may be just the beginning. Factors other than [vitamin e] acetate, they say, may have been at play in last fall’s outbreak. About 14 percent of EVALI cases are reportedly nicotine only, and the most recent FDA analysis of vaping products used by 89 patients found that in 26 percent of cases, no THC was detected at all.

Officials are even more worried about a quieter, larger vaping epidemic: More than a million teenagers, many of whom might never have picked up a standard cigarette, are now addicted to nicotine and regularly sucking on the end of a battery — the long-term safety of which remains almost a total mystery. It took decades of research to prove the devastating health effects of cigarette smoking, which kills nearly half a million people each year. Widespread vaping is just a few years old and has already produced one public-health panic. It may not be the last.

Read the whole thing.

Related: China’s coronavirus outbreak could interupt the vape hardware supply chain.
MJBiz