Vaping: the next "Great Leap Forward"?
Back in the very early Noughties, I was in Amsterdam for a number of days for reasons that escape me now. One rainy afternoon, I wandered into an establishment for a "comfort break", to find a cluster of people grouped around a rather large and cumbersome piece of equipment that appeared to be designed as a new way of ingesting cannabis.
Back in the very early Noughties, I was in Amsterdam for a number of days for reasons that escape me now. One rainy afternoon, I wandered into an establishment for a "comfort break", to find a cluster of people grouped around a rather large and cumbersome piece of equipment that appeared to be designed as a new way of ingesting cannabis.
The Way Things Were...
Back in the very early Noughties, I was in Amsterdam for a number of days for reasons that escape me now. One rainy afternoon, I wandered into an establishment for a “comfort break”, to find a cluster of people grouped around a rather large and cumbersome piece of equipment that appeared to be designed as a new way of ingesting cannabis.
Everyone seemed rather excited about this, and so – in the name of scientific enquiry, of course – I felt obliged to participate in the goings-on.
If memory serves, I had to provide my own weed and also had to pay a nominal sum for the experience. Anyhow, I did so, and the “supervisor” took both and placed the weed on a little platform like thing which in turn had a rather complicated blowtorch gizmo situated beneath it. The torch, cables, platform and the rest were all firmly attached to a round base.
All of this was then covered with a sort of big bell jar usually found in laboratories, but with the bottom modified so that the thing could be screwed tightly into the base. There were a number of tubes emanating from the top of the jar, and I was instructed to take one of these, wait until the jar chamber had completely filled with “white” smoke (very important, that bit), and then to inhale as much of it as I could.
With that, the blow torch thing was fired up, and after what seemed like an interminable amount of farting about with dials and knobs, the supervisor explained that the flame didn’t actually touch the grass, but that the heat released the THC vapour (which was why the “smoke” – even though it wasn’t actually smoke at all – was white).
So I followed all of the instructions and I have to tell you, readers, I can’t say I was that impressed. Everyone else seemed to be getting the desired effect, but – hand on heart – I just didn’t get it at all. Neither of my companions was particularly taken with it either, as it seemed like a terribly complicated way of getting not much of anything.
Demonstration over, the sales pitch commenced; this was, the supervisor assured us, the next big thing. No smoke would of course mean diminished health risks, even though (he hastened to add) there was no explicitly proven risk from cannabis smoke in the first place.
Yes, this was my first introduction to the vaporiser, and to cut to the chase, he was prepared to do a once only deal of something like £800 for one of our very own. He seemed quite put out when we demurred.
To be honest, £800 for something that wasn’t exactly discreet (let’s face it: you couldn’t exactly take it anywhere unnoticed), seemed to require a degree in physics and/or electronics to get it to actually work (and even then there was a bit of a question mark hanging about), and worst of all, didn’t appear to actually work wasn’t one of those “snap the salesman’s hand off” moments.
The Way Things Became...
Jump forward a year or two, and miniature versions of this thing began to appear in head shops around the UK. They could set you back anything from £40 to £80. We tested two of them at the time with the same result: a pretty poor hit for a lot of hassle. And this time there were the added minuses (so to speak) of burnt tasting weed and a big potential fire risk. No thank you.
At around the same time, however, glossy dope magazines were advertising rather snazzy, all electronic, switch it on and away you go vaporisers for the medical marijuana crowd. Here too though, there were drawbacks, namely, while they were smaller than the Dutch model, they looked like something you’d find as part of a life support machine (all beeps and flashing LED lights), they nearly all had to be imported from the US, and they had a still pretty hefty £500 - £600 price tag attached.
That said, I read - with a lot of interest - some reports in the scientific literature that were appearing around the time. There certainly appeared to be a lot to be said for these gizmos as far as the health side of things went. Unfortunately, while the American models seemed light years ahead of the things we’d test driven, they just couldn’t make the damned things portable and discreet enough to be used anywhere other than one’s own house.
The Way Things Are Now...
Jump forward to 2012, and wouldn’t you just know it? Big vaporising technology is finally made small, and it comes from a rather unsurprising source: not the tobacco industry, exactly, but the tobacco industry must have some connection with the E-CIGARETTE phenomenon.
Personally, I regarded these initially as something of a fad. Then I tried one (note: not the things sold in supermarket, but a proper rechargeable, adjustable strength, all singing and all dancing one) and I haven’t touched a cigarette in a number of months now.
Quite aside from feeling generally better, not having a cough and all that sort of thing, I’m also saving quite a lot of money, don’t stink like an ashtray all the time, and don’t feel like so much of a social pariah (though there are some residual subjective image issues around looking like a bit of a dick).
Once I had converted to the electronic cigarette, I had the obvious thought as to whether it could be used for other inhalation purposes. And it seems that it can, though it seems that while the hardware technology is coming on in leaps and bounds, the “peripherals” technology (as in what you actually put in it) is lagging a little.
Basically, yes, it seems one can use certain types and brands of E Cigarette “pens” to vape weed. However, there appears to be some controversy surrounding the matter. Ideally, what should be used in E pens is cannabis oil, but – at the present time at least – this is rather difficult to get a hold of in any sort of quantity. The obvious answer then would seem to be to make your own oil, but this can be a rather tricky and fiddly way of doing that requires a bit of scientific know how, and in the UK oil carries a stiffer penalty than regular weed or resin, so there’s that to consider also.
But if you think about it, if there’s any truth in the belief that “the market” responds to demand, then it’s only going to be a matter of time before we see a lot more oil making an appearance, assuming enough people are prepared to turn on to the whole vaping thing.
Better still would be for some whizz kid genius to come up with a way of producing oil from one’s own weed supply that didn’t involve the potential risk of burning one’s house down.
Here’s the thing. Here in Scotland (AKA “The Sick Man of Europe”), dope of any sort is nearly always smoked in joints mixed with tobacco. This, of course, is a bad thing, but comes as a result of three things in my view. Firstly, there’s an economic imperative at work: short of growing one’s own, good weed is just so expensive that “bulking it out” with tobacco seems the only viable option for many people (this particularly applies to younger people with less deposable income to play with, as well as your more “habitual toker”). The second reason is that the dope and tobacco in a joint thing is just how it’s always been done; a tradition, if you like. Thirdly, it also gives tobacco users their nicotine hit and allows “ex tobacco smokers” to carry on living in denial. Note: for those readers unacquainted with the mores of Bonnie Scotland, a large number of people still smoke tobacco.
VIVE LA REVOLUTION! With caveats...
Amazingly, there has been very little proper scientific carried out regarding the medical and social effects of vaping. Significantly, though, ASH (Action on Smoking and Health) has given vaping the tentative thumbs up:
“E-cigarettes, which deliver nicotine without the harmful toxins found in tobacco smoke, are likely to be a safer alternative to smoking. In addition, e-cigarettes reduce second-hand smoke exposure in places where smoking is allowed since they do not produce smoke.”
To my mind, if vaping delivers everything it promises, then for recalcitrant tobacco smokers, a wholesale switch, encouraged and underwritten by the government, should be a public health priority.
It’s worth taking another look at the benefits of Vaping just to remind ourselves of them. There are two main ones:
No smoke, no tar, so (arguably) no cancer.
No smoke, so (arguably) no passive smoking, so no passive health risks.
Plus there are a whole range of tangential benefits, such as decreasing the risk of house fires, reductions in toxins going into the air and so forth. No more holes burned in clothes from cigarettes or joints. No more hot rock holes in t-shirts.
Now think about it for a minute. This could be huge, particularly in terms of the way we consume intoxicants. Let’s start with tobacco, one of the most harmful ones. There’s no real risk from nicotine per se; it’s the tars and the smoke that cause nearly all of the harm. Therefore, if everyone who smokes tobacco switches to Vaping, then...what? The term “addiction” is loaded with negative baggage. Addictions are bad. They’re harmful. But what if one’s addiction to nicotine is satisfied, and the user gets to hold something that looks like a cigarette, even to the extent that what’s being inhaled gives a “burn” and vapour that looks like smoke is exhaled, but without all the attendant problems of harm to self and harm to others? This is why nicotine patches, gum and all the rest of it fall absolutely flat: they just don’t fill that whole experience of smoking need. Where does all of this leave the addiction “specialists” other than whinging about any sort of addiction being bad and that we really shouldn’t be slaves to nicotine? Bullshit.
A lot of health zealots will no doubt be apoplectic at the idea, but there has to be a distinction drawn between good and bad addictions. Let’s not get into the linguistic and semantic arguments here, but in essence, “bad” ones are, well, bad, and have a tendency to be costly in terms of personal and social harms without giving anything “good” or positive back (step forward, tobacco!). “Good” addictions, conversely, are habits that other individuals or groups may not approve of, but don’t really rate as far as harm is concerned, and may actually have some explicit or implicit benefits (again, more research is really required around this).
It’s fair enough to condemn those anti social individuals who blow smoke – dope and/or tobacco – everywhere, but where is the problem exactly with what looks to be an almost harmful vapour? They’re even scented to make them smell nice.
The Futurist in me thinks that what we’re on the threshold of is a social shift on a par with the introduction of “home grow” lights and hydroponics set ups in the 1990’s, hybridisation of weed and all the rest of it; and that’s big news. It’s time to grasp the nettle and seize the day, people. Avanti!
S
Soft Secrets
