According to the American Lung Association , cigarettes kill almost half a million Americans every year, making it the leading cause of preventable deaths in the US. Cigarettes contain over 7,000 chemicals, many of them harmful, and are a significant health hazard not only to those who smoke but for anyone forced to breathe second-hand smoke. So when vaping was introduced a little over a decade ago, promising to provide equal satisfaction at a considerably reduced health risk, it sparked considerable interest. Vaping employs a battery-powered electronic cigarette or e-cigarette.  Some look like traditional cigarettes, while other popular devices look like pens, phones, USB sticks, and even tubes of lipstick. They have a cartridge, or “pod,” filled with liquid, typically containing nicotine, flavors and other chemicals. When you activate a heating element that turns this liquid into an inhalable vapor, you can puff on the e-cigarette. Inhaling this vapor (vaping) is…

Last year in an article on vaping we concluded that although it might be a slight improvement over cigarette smoking, vaping was far from safe. Since then thousands of vapers have become ill with a serious disease called Evali (e-cigarette or vaping-associated lung injury), and a recent study found that vaping greatly increases the risk of contracting COVID-19.   All the more reason to “just say no” to vaping.   A New York Times article gave a harrowing description of 20-year-old Janan Moein’s experience of Evali. After vaping regularly with a cannabis-laced brand for 6 months, Mr. Moein found himself hospitalized with a collapsed lung and in a medically-induced coma. Diagnosed with Evali, he was given a 5% chance of survival. He lost nearly 50 pounds in 2 weeks and now recalls, “My lips were blue. They had to tape my eyes shut. I was hallucinating the entire time that the nurses were trying to kill me, that the walls were made of human skin.  It was a…