this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2023
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I would recommend strongly against inhaling any oil containing product. Your lungs do not have much surfactant and they cannot deal with it.
Doesn't uhh weed contain oil?
Yeah, I was making a general statement. The big problem is THC is only oil/alcohol soluble, so if you're using a vape product you're not only inhaling the natural oil in the plant, you're inhaling what they used to dissolve that oil out of the plant. Compare that to nicotine, which in its freebase form dissolves in water. There's a significant difference between the dangers in weed vapes and nicotine vapes due to that reason, they're essentially different products with different risks. All of that said, you could reduce the amount of oil by putting a surfactant and creating an emulsion for your vape, but I don't really know what manufacturers are doing, because I don't smoke weed.
edit: https://www.wikihow.com/Make-Cannabis-Oil-for-Vape-Pens
This is an example of what I'm talking about. They're recommending using terpes(an alcohol that is insoluble with water) instead of glycerol(an alcohol that acts as a surfactant). They're also giving a guide on how you extract ALL the oils in the plant. If you're not careful, you're going to end up with more oil than you want and they'll form big globs in your lungs and not make it to your blood stream. This leads to inflammation and lipoid pneumonia. The fix for that is a very unpleasant lavage, or washing, of your lungs.
Ohh yeah I 100% agree then, the wikihow method is a bit of the diy at home crackhead way, but usually its extracting via butane or co2 in professional production, which both are volatile in oxygen and so if professionally handled can be entirely safe.
The issue arrises when manufactures try to add things for flavour and viscosity, which there's little regulation for and can cause problems.
But inhaling vaporuized oil specifically isn't too harmful, even if it solidifies in your lungs out lungs are fairly well designed to remove foreign contaminants, its another question whether they were designed to do this daily tho
edit: that's cool about nic tho, I'm only a stoner so I know weed best, but it'd be so easy to extract (tho I wonder if polar substances tend to be less volatile with the intermolecular forced holding things together)