The LIGHT Post
November 2017
Tobacco / Vaping - What's the Problem?
Tobacco use appears in cultural history for hundreds of years. Some of the uses for tobacco included: Use as money or for bartering, ceremonial smoking, as an ingredient in folk medicine, inclusion in coffins or sepulchers while burying the dead to insure good passage into the spirit world and many others. In our culture, most accepted smoking, dipping or chewing tobacco up until the middle of the 20th century. At that time, studies linked tobacco use to a host of physical illnesses and to addiction to nicotine. As a result, all tobacco products carry a warning that use of the contents can be harmful to the health of the person who uses that product.
A relatively recent addition to the "smoking" culture is broad spectrum of electronic smoking or "vaping". Paraphernalia for vaping may look like a regular cigarette, a pipe, a pen for writing, a flash drive and many other configurations. Contents of the liquid vaporized can contain almost anything that will liquefy, from nicotine, marijuana, opium oils, a variety of street drugs, flavoring agents, menthol and a host of other liquids. The user may or may not know how the vapor will affect them. Almost all of the liquids contain ethylene glycol, or antifreeze as a carrier agent.
Tobacco Problems :
- Tobacco is a rich source of nicotine, a highly addictive drug that literally effects every organ in the user's body. It is also a potent poison: so potent that if purified, a single drop placed a person's skin may cause cardiac arrest. It found in many insecticides.
- Tars in tobacco smoke can produce up to a quart of black, thick mucus in a smoker's lungs in a year's period of time, and enough ammonia to produce a quart of glass cleaner. It is the cause of smoker's cough, as the lungs try to get rid of it and it is a major problem in the disease, emphysema.
- Tobacco use kills 480,000 people per year on average, and 42,000 of those are victims of second hand smoke. Most of the deaths are due to cancer and C.O.P.D.
- Cigarettes cost about $6.32/package (average) across the U.S.A., although they can cost up to >$12.00 per pack in the Northeastern states. The actual cost, when treatment for the illnesses they cause is factored in is $35.00 per pack. Tax payers spend $28.72 per pack for treatment of the illnesses and for loss in productivity in business during the time smokers are off work.
- Careless use of lighted tobacco products cause the loss of another $256 million in fires in homes, businesses and the wildfires set by throwing them away instead of extinguishing them properly. The average amount of damage per fire in a residence is $27,800. These fires also result in 365 deaths per year.
- Finally, it is estimated that tobacco smoke contains >4,000 chemicals, most of which are not yet identified. 96 of these are known to be harmful to human beings and some 25 to 27 are known poisons, such as arsenic, cadmium, benzene, acetone, toluene, cyanide, formaldehyde, ammonia, mercury, phenol and vinyl chloride.
- Please notice the pictures at the bottom of the newsletter. Tobacco is a beautiful plant when it is being grown. The products, pictured in the center have been found to have serious consequences when used. One cigarette, according to the CDC and others who have studied tobacco, will shorten a person's lifespan by an average of seven minutes,
Some Vaping Problems
- Contrary to the "hype" about e-cigarettes providing safe smoking, the effects of e-cigarettes is still unknown. To make that statement will require years of research as to how they affect the users over a long period of time.
- The "unknowns" in use of e-cigarettes should raise all kinds of red flags in the minds of people who plan to use them. The fact is that each of the ingredients in the liquid used to produce vapor for "smoking" must be considered, as to how the user will react to that substance. Breathing vaporized antifreeze is not healthy under any circumstances. It is not really possible to know everything that may be included.
- If the liquid contains nicotine, then all the problems of nicotine addiction still exist. It is not yet known if the vaporized nicotine will produce cancerous changes in the tissues with which it comes into contact. Additionally, drugs such as marijuana can be included without the user knowing they are present.
- Conversely, if the user knows that drugs such as marijuana, opium derivatives are contained in the vapor, then the effects that these drugs usually produce when smoked will be produced from inhaling the vapors as well.
- It is seductive to young people, in that it appeals to their desire to appear older, or to look more adult than they really are, but at the same time, They can become addicted to the contents of the vapor, just as if they were using nicotine or other drugs directly.
- Vaping materials and the instruments used for vaping are not under a standardized set of rules for production or manufacturing. As a result, numerous accidental burns have occurred, some of them serious, while e-cigarettes were being used.
Content of this newsletter have been taken from information produced by the National Institute of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia, American Cancer Society and "The Lancet" (British Journal of Medicine.) reported by Jim Foster, Student Assistance Counselor, LIGHT Program - Garland I.S.D. Dept. of Guidance and Couseling