vape improves smokers' success rate
vape was invented in the hope that it could help smokers quit smoking and improve their health. In fact, since the advent of vape, although it has accidentally brought about a Vaping culture, it has really not made any particularly outstanding contributions in helping smokers quit. Many smokers started to try vape with the determination to quit smoking, but most of them gave up. Why are they reluctant to continue using vape? A very important reason is that smoking vape does not get the same satisfaction as smoking conventional cigarettes.
Smoking is addictive because the nicotine in tobacco crosses the blood-brain barrier and stimulates the brain to produce pleasing dopamine. This sense of pleasure is relaxing, so when the sense of pleasure fades away, the smoker will want another one. Smoking addiction is not only physical dependence on nicotine, but also psychological dependence on smoking. Psychological dependence is also the main reason why it is difficult to quit smoking-who can easily say goodbye to lightheartedness? It is a pity that while smokers enjoy this sense of pleasure, they also inhale a lot of substances harmful to the body, such as carcinogenic tobacco tar, carbon monoxide, and formaldehyde.
Based on this information, the earliest inventor of vape developed vape for vape, which contains only nicotine and does not produce harmful by-products. Using vape as an aid to help smokers quit smoking, the first is to quit real smoke, the psychological dependence of smokers on real smoke is reduced, and the harmful byproducts inhaled when smoking real smoke are reduced. It is true that nicotine is an addictive substance in vape, but the content of nicotine in vape is artificially controllable and adjustable, which can make smokers psychologically without causing physical withdrawal symptoms. Quit real smoke, and then smokers gradually reduce the frequency of vape use or reduce the nicotine content in vape, thereby gently reducing physiological dependence on nicotine.
However, although nicotine is also consumed, smoking vape does not give users the same satisfaction as smoking traditional cigarettes. The reason behind this is a very interesting question for me as a chemist.
I started to pay attention to smokers and vape because I have been engaged in the research and development of respiratory drugs. I have witnessed many diseases caused by smoking and second-hand smoke, and the huge medical investment caused by them. I think if we can reduce the source of harm from the upstream, that is, let smokers smoke less or not, similar to disease prevention, we can reduce the harm caused by smoking and greatly relieve the pressure on public health. This is the concept of "blocking is worse than sparse" I often mention, and I am very much looking forward to using new science and technology to help smokers quit smoking scientifically. Is vape the new technology?
Every chemical substance exists in nature in a different chemical form. After analyzing the natural ingredients in tobacco, my initial hypothesis was that vape is oversimplified compared to traditional cigarettes. The existence of nicotine in e-liquid may be different from that in cigarettes, so the vape in the mist The amount of nicotine that reaches the brain of smokers and stimulates the production of dopamine is not enough to make smokers feel the same pleasure and satisfaction as smoking. Smokers cannot get the habitual satisfaction from vape, and they can't help but touch a real cigarette.
Natural tobacco, as a solanaceous plant, contains thousands of chemicals in addition to nicotine. It was widely used to treat wounds and ulcers in ancient China and the American continent. The presence of organic acids makes nicotine as an organic base, and a large part of it exists in the form of "nicotine salt". So on the basis of the previous assumptions, go one step further, are the missing acids and related nicotine salts in the vape the source of the missing satisfaction? If smokers can get the same satisfaction from real smoke from vape, they will no longer have the need to "touch a real smoke".
With this hypothesis, I screened out more than twenty kinds of possible nicotine salts from dozens of acids such as citric acid, acetic acid, salicylic acid, benzoic acid, and malic acid in natural tobacco based on the physical and chemical properties of the acid. For the experiments, select dozens of alternative salts which can form high stability suitable for e-liquid production. For each of the alternatives, a blind test of the satisfaction of old smokers, an analysis of the components of simulated smoke in the laboratory, and a clinical blood nicotine concentration test were performed.
This is a long R & D-test-improved exploration process. In order to find the formula that best outputs the satisfaction that old smokers expected, dozens of old smokers scored three rounds of blind selection; in order to theoretically test the hypothesis about nicotine salt, I designed and produced a set of smoking with the team And related experiments, using data to demonstrate the establishment of the hypothesis; at the same time, in order to confirm the smoke composition inhaled by smokers, we cooperated with the professional testing institutions in the United States to test the smoke composition and fine-tune the vape atomization temperature to ensure that there is no overheating And formaldehyde is produced.
Because the intensity and speed of the pleasure caused by nicotine intake is closely related to its blood peak and time point, after screening different clinical experimental institutions on several continents, I decided to work with a New Zealand institution with rich scientific research experience in smoking health. Cooperation, flew twice to New Zealand to observe the progress of the experiment and communicate with healthy smokers who volunteered to participate in the experiment, so as to get more first-hand user feedback.
Finally, based on the results of various experiments, I chose benzoate for Juul at that time, and e-liquid containing nicotine salt was officially born.
I often see media reports that the invention of nicotine salt has revolutionized the vape industry, has a profound impact, and so on. Objectively speaking, the invention of nicotine salt does have a great impact on the vape industry. This is because the e-liquid containing nicotine salt, during the atomization process, the nicotine and the organic acid are atomized at the same time. In the smoke, compared with the smoke produced by the early vape, the content of free nicotine in the nicotine salt smoke is greatly reduced due to the effect of acid-base balance. The previous vape products used "free base nicotine" e-liquid. "Free base nicotine" was heated and sprayed into the smoke, which was very irritating to the mouth, throat and the entire respiratory tract. Too much free base nicotine can easily make smokers cough, so most of the nicotine is not sucked into the lungs and then crosses the blood-brain barrier to reach the brain.
Some early vape developers only understood that the production of pleasure and satisfaction is positively related to the concentration of nicotine in the blood, and blindly increased the concentration of nicotine in e-liquid, but did not know that most of those high concentrations of nicotine were coughed by smokers. In addition, the irritation and cough also make those vapes feel worse, and it is more difficult to motivate users to give up real cigarettes and switch to vapes.
In addition to nicotine, natural tobacco is also rich in organic acids. Therefore, most of the nicotine in the tobacco produced by tobacco combustion is in an acid-base balance environment and exists in the form of protonation instead of free base. In other words, e-liquid containing nicotine salt is very close to real smoke in the existence and output form of nicotine, which greatly improves the transmission efficiency of nicotine in e-liquid through the respiratory system to the blood-brain barrier. Provides an effective alternative to make smokers willing to abandon their original smoking habits and use this new type of tobacco product that does not produce harmful carcinogenic by-products such as tar.
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