The Effect of Nicotine on the Vaping Industry

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When it comes to regulatory fights over whether and how to regulate vapor products, much of the debate boils down to a single substance: nicotine.

The most persistent taboo that the vaping industry has had to address is the presence of nicotine in many e-liquids. Nicotine is known to be a highly addictive substance, science has made this clear for decades. This potential for dependency is why it's so important to keep vapor products out of the hands of children, and why even adults who choose to vape should avoid products that contain nicotine unless they've already smoked and are using vaping as part of a quit-smoking attempt.

Addictive properties acknowledged, we thought it might be enlightening to take a look at nicotine. When you strip away the smoke, the tobacco, and even the vapor, what is it? What does it do to your body, and to what extent? As we’ve previously discussed, the effects of nicotine, when separated from the myriad toxins found in combustible cigarette smoke, are relatively benign when compared to other addictive substances.

First, what does nicotine do? Nicotine acts as a mild stimulant, with a chemical makeup similar to caffeine. Like caffeine, it’s an alkaloid and contains nitrogen. It's unique in that it can have a dual effect of either waking or calming a person depending on their mood.

“If all you did when you inhaled cigarette smoke was just inhale nicotine, we wouldn’t see the kinds of health risks, and health harms, and burdens that we see,” says Nancy Rigotti, director of the Tobacco Research and Treatment Center at Massachusetts General Hospital.

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There are multiple ways nicotine can be absorbed. When a smoker inhales from a combustible cigarette, nicotine is absorbed through the lungs, while vapor particles are primarily absorbed through the throat and mouth, due to the larger vapor molecules not passing through the lungs' alveoli. This means that when you use vapor products, nicotine gets absorbed into the bloodstream at a slower rate of uptake. Respectively, nicotine replacement gum is absorbed through salivary glands and nicotine patches are absorbed through the skin, usually through your arm.   

Statistically, there’s about 20 mg of nicotine in a gram of tobacco, and cigarettes contain about 10-14 mg, although smokers only absorb about 1-1.5 mg of nicotine per cigarette because some burns off. By comparison, a study by Dr. Konstantinos E. Farsalinos found that even after an hour, vaping doesn’t deliver the same amount of nicotine in the bloodstream as one cigarette.

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Getting nicotine through vapor can be controlled based on the product, coming in various different nicotine strengths, and one of the advantages to vaping is the ability to control how much nicotine you vape. Juul products have been so popular, in part, because they have much higher nicotine levels than other pods and vape pens. This higher intake nicotine level have made it preferable for ex-smokers who have recently quit combustible cigarettes to pick up vapor products from Juul.

In a recent article published by The Verge entitled “Is Nicotine Actually Bad for You,” the author looks at how much the arguments affecting Juul Inc. largely aren’t based upon individual concerns with the company, but instead are arguments against the use of nicotine and repackaged to fit the current news cycle.

Regardless of the source, nicotine dependence has a host of adverse side-effects and is nothing to celebrate, use should be avoided particularly by people with high blood pressure or who are pregnant. However, due to the relatively new status of vapor products as a nicotine intake method, its long term effects are relatively unknown, and large studies have used that unknown quality as a central point in their analysis.

In the 2016 report “E-Cigarette Use Among Youth and Young Adults” the Surgeon General’s takeaway was that vaping was getting more popular among young people, and due to the long-term unknown risks, vaping should be treated similarly to combustible cigarettes. These broad positions were later criticized by scientists who disputed that the risks associated with vaping were far less likely in the long run in comparison to cigarettes.   

“Indeed, the totality of the best available evidence of the toxicity and carcinogenicity of cigarette smoke and e-cigarette aerosol suggests that while the effects of long-term aerosol inhalation are as yet unknown, the risk posed by long-term inhalation of aerosol produced by properly manufactured e-cigarettes is unlikely to exceed 5 percent of the risk associated with long-term inhalation of cigarette smoke,” wrote researchers Riccardo Polosa, Christopher Russell, Joel Nitzkin, and Dr. Farsalinos in a critique of report.

Overall, nicotine's addictive qualities are indeed troubling, but they're only tenuously tied to the most harmful chemicals found in combustible cigarettes that lead to cancer and death. With that said, reducing nicotine intake is always a good goal for vapers that are concerned, and if you were never a smoker before vaping, the best idea is to avoid nicotine-containing liquids altogether. Still, we hope this explanation helps demystify some of the claims being made about nicotine as it relates to vaping, helping every vaper on their path to a nicotine-free (or reduced-nicotine) future.