Consuming excess nicotine is a pretty horrible experience. You just feel super ill and nauseous. But you don't have to use an ecig to do it, just buy a stronger cigarette and smoke 2 or 3 quickly. Or you can eat part of a cigarette. Or just smoke a big cigar and inhale it like a cigarette.
Anyone who smokes has experienced feeling sick from nicotine and quickly learn to avoid it because it sucks.
You build a tolerance and ecigs make it easy to climb up that ramp where regular cigarettes are harder. People get to the "10 packs a day" of smoking and to the point where there's just limits to how fast you can smoke.
Vapes make it a lot easier to blow past that amount of consumption.
That's true, ecigs introduce different types of risks:
Wikipedia: "The recent rise in the use of electronic cigarettes, many forms of which are designed to be refilled with nicotine-containing "e-liquid" supplied in small plastic bottles, has renewed interest in nicotine overdoses, especially the possibility of young children ingesting the liquids."
And not just ingesting, but absorbing it through the skin.
Also: "Serious nicotine poisoning seems normally prevented by the fact that relatively low doses of nicotine cause nausea and vomiting, which stops users from further intake."
To me that seems to mostly have been an excuse to ban refillable vapes to juice vap manufacturers profits. Refilling your own costs 10-100x less than nonrefillables or cigarettes, disosables give massive profit margins.
Kids can die from getting into all sorts of chemicals, nicotine isn't something especially poisonous or dangerous. They just need proper containers and handling like many other common chemicals and drugs and solvents.
> nicotine isn't something especially poisonous or dangerous.
It's not immediately dangerous, that's for sure.
My concern is more about long-term effects which I don't think we have good data on. Most of our data on the health effects of nicotine are centered on smoking or chewing.
What we do know about nicotine is it's addictive and it can generate a pretty high tolerance. And I think there are studies linking it to an increased risk of stroke.
I'm not trying to take away nicotine. I think it's reasonable to ban the sale of nicotine products to kids but otherwise I don't really care about people accessing it. I also think it's reasonable to research and understand the risks of taking it, even if such research is ultimately just informative.
> Serious nicotine poisoning seems normally prevented by the fact that relatively low doses of nicotine cause nausea and vomiting, which stops users from further intake.
This is true, but this is also about short term poisoning. I'm more thinking about the long term problems. Alcohol will also stop many cases of acute poisoning through similar nausea and vomiting. However, prolonged use is still bad for your health.
I think you are right that cigs are less healthy, but I have to wonder if megadosing nicotine isn't also a pretty big problem.