Over the past few months, there's been a larger discussion surrounding the harms of vaping. E-cigarettes and Juuls have been on the rise in the past few years, especially among a younger demographic as cigarette consumption declines. However, the e-cigarettes might not actually be the main cause of the recent spur of vaping-related deaths.
According to CNN's report on the CDC's findings, vaping related lung injuries that have occurred in recent times often occurred to individuals who were exclusively using THC rather than nicotine. Among the 19 deaths that were studied, 63% reported having used THC only, 84% reported to the use of any of these products, 37% of those numbers reported to using products that had nicotine while only 16% solely vaped nicotine products.
Despite this, director of the Center of Tobacco Products at the US Food and Drug Administration, Mitch Zeller, said that the data collected was relied on self-reports which might not be as reliable as one thinks.
"It's the person saying, 'I only used the nicotine-containing products,'" Mitch Zeller said before pointing out that these people might be from places where THC is illegal. Additionally, the report acknowledges that the patients included in this study may have not known what was exactly in the substances that they vaped "and methods used to collect substance use data varied across states."
Be careful, y'all.