What is actually in a vape?

My name is Lily Maddon and I'm a proud Arunda Bungelung calcotton woman from Gadighl Country. The Daily oz acknowledges that this podcast is recorded on the lands of the Gadighl people and pays respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island and nations. We pay our respects to the first peoples of these countries, both past and present.

Good morning and welcome to the Daily os. It's Monday, the twenty ninth of January. I'm Zara, I'm Saram. Vapes are absolutely everywhere at the beach, they're at the pub, the park. They might actually be in your hand right now. But when it comes to vaping in Australia, everything is about to change, and so we thought it was a good time to stop and reflect and to look at how we got here and what's happening next with vapes.

Over the weekend, Australia joined other nations in pausing funding to the UN's Refugee Agency for Palestinians of allegations some members of its staff were involved in the seventh of October attack by Hamas on Israel. In a statement, Foreign Minister Penny Wong said Australia is deeply concerned by the allegations and is consulting with international partners. The UN has launched an independent investigation into the claims and several workers

On Friday, the International Court of Justice, which is known as the ICJ, handed down a provisional ruling after South Africa accused Israel of carrying out a genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. The ICJ ordered Israel to take all measures to limit deaths in Gaza, but the court did not

The US state of Alabama has carried out the country's first execution using nitrogen gas. Human rights experts had warned against the method, which involves slowly depriving an inmate of oxygen. Kenneth Eugene Smith was convicted of murder and sentenced to death in nineteen ninety six. He had been subject to a previous failed execution attempt after prison staff couldn't access

And Today's Good News. A gustav climped painting, thought to have been lost for the last one hundred years, has been found in Austria. The portrait is believed to be one of the last works climped painted. According to the auction house who rediscovered the piece, the painting will be exhibited internationally before being auctioned off later this year, where it's expected to sell for as much as fifty million euros.

The legend goes like this, A pharmacist in China, Homlik tries to quit smoking. By some accounts, he's smoking up to three packs a day, so it isn't easy. One night, he falls asleep with a patch on and has a nicotine fueled nightmare. He's in the ocean and he's about to drown when a wave turns into a giant cloud of feed up. Homelick wakes up and sets out to invent a device that will help him quit smoking, and he goes on to develop the first vape to have mass commercial success.

Bluebery cherry, crumber, it and grit.

You're going to push it with your tongue and you're in a second back.

Do you have an a vape?

By chance?

Yeah?

How long have you vabed? A good six years?

Well, give me my beat.

I remember the first time I vaped, I was fucking gone.

Vapes are everywhere, but things are about to change. No more bubblegum flavors. No more pink unicorns, No more vapes deliberately disguised as highlighter pins for kids to be able to hide them in their pencil cases. In this series, we're gonna look at the forces at play working against the government's attempts to regulate vaping.

I'll keep fighting. I'll fight every tooth in that way.

I can't.

They can smell out a little pole and they push it open and make it into a door that they can walz right through.

But before you can understand what this regulation is and what it'll mean, you have to understand what a vape actually is and what vapes do to our health. From the Daily Odds, this is Understanding Vapes, Episode one.

What's in a vape? I? Do you have a vapeless Yeah?

I do, but I don't have many beeps.

Like okay al and that a random tobacconist on a Tuesday morning?

Which ones you.

Have black blue res.

In Kent?

Oh? Maybe cinnamon? Please yo, pa, thank you.

It's been illegal to buy a nicotine vape in Australia without a prescription for years, but the one I buy doesn't actually say it has nicotine in it, Thanks so much. The only way to know for sure what's in a vape is to get it tested in a lab.

Hello, Hias, thanks so much for having me.

I've actually brought a vape that I was hoping.

Today testing full long chemical analysis who we normally do.

Yeah, I want to know what's in it? Like, is that nicotine in it? Is there anything else we need to be worried about?

All right?

Sure, So the first thing we need to do is uben the device.

The University of Woollongong lab has these big piles of colorful vapes in an assortment of flavors, and as they break vapes apart, you get wafts of these sense diffusing across the room.

I think I can smell it.

Yes, that's the cinnamon.

Doctor Selinkkelso is doing our analysis for us. Once she extracts the liquid from the vape, she puts it in a machine for testing.

So let's put dis sample on and then start the analysis.

When we have the results, her colleague talks us through what they found.

With a cinnamon, like, what kind of level is that?

Yeah, so that's obviously reasonably low concentration.

This is doctor Jodie Moler, Senior lecturer in the School of Chemistry and Molecular Bioscience.

But cinematot is band so it's not allowed to be there in any concentration.

Right.

Cinemelde Hyde, the chemical substance that makes up the cinnamon flavor, has been banned from vapes because we have evidence that inhaling it can cause health issues.

What else are you noticing from this?

Obviously, the really high concentration of nicotine is obviously a standout. So fifty milligrams per mile, huge peak.

That's the equivalent of consuming the nicotine in about twenty five to fifty cigarettes. And remember this vape didn't actually say it has nicotine on the packaging.

So people are you know, if they're regularly vaping these, they're going to be very likely to develop a dependence on nicotine.

Right.

The other one I would say is the WS twenty three, which is our other ginormous peak. So the WS twenty three is our cooling agent.

Lots of disposable vapes have some form of cooling agent. This can be added to address the throat irritation that can from inhaling high quantities of nicotine, But coolants themselves can also cause irritation.

In some of our samples. Recently, we found ethylene glacol, which is the main component in antifreeze, and we found it at reasonably high concentrations. So the highest concentration was about eighty times higher than the concentration that is predicted to cause unbearable respiratory discomfort. And that was in a sample that was taken off a school kid. So we don't know how that school child was even tolerating vaping

That high anti freezers like what used for Fridgers air conditioning.

Yeah, exactly right, and we know that bioral ingestion anti freeze is extremely toxic.

Right, So we've got the nicotine and the cinnamon flavoring are the ones that would be not allowed. And then we've got that coolut, which he said at that level could be potentially dangerous, be absolutely concerning.

Yeah, that's correct. And then obviously there's the things we can't see here because he were on the analyzing the liquid. We didn't actually generate a vapor and analyze.

The vapor, right, So there's potential dangers in the vapor.

There's also that coil metal exactly what you're telling me about.

Yeah, that's right.

So we also get to see what these things look like inside after they've been.

Used, and what do they look like in side.

So what we tend to see is a large amount of scorching.

On the coil.

The coils a bit of metal wire that works to heat up the liquid in your vape and turn it into vapor. When a disposable vape is brand new, like the one I brought to Wollongong, it's just a piece of clean metal wrapped around some material which is soaked in the vape juice. But after some time things can look a bit different.

So when we open them up, we get quite a lot of blackening of the material.

If you think about this, it makes sense. Disposable vapes are only supposed to be good for a certain number of puffs, but if you have limited funds, you might try to make it last longer so you don't have to buy another one.

Sometimes we actually see the coil is starting to degrade.

Is that dangerous?

Absolutely? So we know that there's some heavy metal and some other substances that make up the constitution of these coils and we don't want to see people inhaling those.

It's worth mentioning here that in reusable vapes this is less of a concern because people would be replacing their coils more regularly. But the Labin Woongong concentrates on these disposable vapes because they're the popular ones, especially in Australian schools. The question is what are these vapes and all the chemicals and potential metals actually doing to young people's health. You may have come across videos like this on TikTok.

I am literally chilling in a hospital.

Because I have a vping.

Related lung intery.

Vaping put me in the hospital, like not breathing.

It's really scary.

My heart is a lot smaller than the average twenty one year old and it's because of vaping.

I want to understand how commonly people are being hospitalized for health issues related to vaping in Australia.

So we put in freedom of information requests for Queensland, Victoria and New South Wales.

And I was just asking the government to release whatever information they have to us.

That's correct. Yes.

Daniel Lesto is a journalist at The Daily Os and he often does stories on vaping.

In Queensland has been seventy nine total hospitalizations over the last four years. So in Victoria there's been forty five total hospitalizations.

So that's a bit lower than Queensland.

It is a bit lower, yes, and one of the reasons for that was because in one of the years there was an adminera which is totally out of her hands, and it just resulted in there being no actual specific data for vaping hospitalizations in Victoria, right.

Did you hear back from any other states?

Yes, So I spoke to New South Wales and they actually don't have any vaping data at all.

Right, so they haven't been tracking in not at all.

So that's not a lot to go on, although we do know that vape related hospitalizations are recurring.

What we're seeing is that if you have too much nicotine on board, suddenly there are toxic effects.

This is Professor Emily Banks, a leading expert in the health impacts of vaps at the Australian National University, and I wanted to ask her about someone we spoke to who told us they had a seizure after vaping.

There's a continuum, so people can just feel nauseous, they can vomit, and then there are effects where people lose consciousness, and then having a seizure can be part of losing consciousness. So it's part of that overall picture of just too much nicotine too quickly.

We heard from a thirty year old who was vaping and then was hospitalized and was found to have a three point two millimeter puncture in his lung and.

Was then diagnosed with neumothorax.

Can you tell me a bit about that and how that's presenting in the research.

We have heard reports of people who have been vaping and then have developed a spontaneous new methorics, So so long as you can get it if you've actually been stabbed or something, that's a traumatic new METHORICX, but a spontaneous new methorics where you suddenly get a burst of that bubble in your lung and then you get air going into the lining of your lung.

But it's not just these hospitalizations that Emily's concerned about.

So if you look at people are who are really addicted to nicotine, they will only feel normal when they've had a vape, and after that they'll start to go into a kind of withdrawal and because nicotine gets excreted from the body quite quickly, people can go through that

If you cast your mind into the future an eighteen year olds who's vaping, now, what concerns do you have about their health forty fifty years into the future.

It could be that they'd be fine, or it could be that they would have, for example, long term lung diseased caused by inflammation. They would definitely have the issues related to nicotine addiction, and then I would also be concerned for their cardiovascular health. So we know that nicotine increases your blood pressure and increases.

Your heart rate.

So that's one area where we're concerned about nicotine effects. The other thing where we're concerned about nicotine effects is reproductive health. So if that was an eighteen year old woman who was going to have children, then you would also be concerned about what would happen while she was pregnant and what would happen.

To them baby.

But there could also be health consequences from veping we don't even know about yet.

There's a lot of unknowns, and I think we have to be really clear that not knowing about something is a risk in itself.

Cigarettes as we now know them were first mass produced in the eighteen hundreds. It was one hundred odd years later that researches began in verstigating the connection between cigarettes and lung cancer. Vapes as we know them have only been on the market around sixteen years. At the end of the day, what is worse for your health a cigarette or a vape?

I have to say smoking is so unbelievably harmful. There are very few other exposures that are as harmful as smoking.

It's so dangerous.

You know, up to two thirds of all people who are long term smokers will die from their habit if they don't quit. So, if someone held a gun to your head and said, right, your choice, is to either smoke or to vape, then probably vaping is better. But I would say that the safest thing is to avoid smoking and to avoid e cigarette use.

I started off this episode wanting to know what's in a vap and what vepes are doing to our health, But I've ended up with more questions than when I started. If cigarettes are so bad, why is the government focusing on cracking down on vapes? And if the sale of disposable nicotine beeps is illegal, how come they're so readily available. Next episode, I'm going to find out.

So industry they can smell out a little poor and they push it open and make it into a door that they can loss right through.

So they're deliberately trying to manipulate the market to get these into Australia.

Are you expecting a fight on these regulations? Yeah, we always prepare for a fight. I'll keep thought, I'll fight every tooth in a way I can.

I'm nicople I wrote and edited this podcast. Billy Fitzimons was our executive producer, Lucy Tassel was our fact checker, and Joe Kylie produced this series not just for audio, but also the video version of the series.

That we're doing as well.

Yes, it's been intense. We've traveled across the country. We've been into Parliament House, we've spoken to vapors and we forced the one person in the office who vapes to continuously blow smoke in front of the camera for.

B roots and vaping into lenses.

It's been such a journey and I've learnt so much and I really want to get this into the ears of as many young Australians as possible. So if you've made it this far and you're enjoying what you're listening to, do us a favor. Share it on Instagram, put it in your stories. It's two buttons exactly, and I can't wait for you to hear episode two and three.

Thanks Joe, bye already.

And this is this is the daily, This is the daily os Oh, now it makes sense.