Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/01/17/illicit-thc-dealers-are-raking.html
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Just like moonshiners selling wood alcohol that killed or blinded people.
We’re slowly learning that just because someone has an online presence doesn’t mean they’re a legitimate business. In an ideal world we’d have a functioning government agency that tracks down criminal that are hurting people and put them in prison for a long time.
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Instagram or Twitter? Headline seems to disagree with the screengrab.
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xeni dont be a narc
Reminder: All THC and all nicotine vaping products in the US are illicit in that the FDA, shirking its responsibilities, has vetted and approved none of them.
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As those of us in the cannabis and vape industries have known and have been warning people for several years, Dank Vapes sells packaging, and ONLY packaging to anyone wanting to buy it. Anything Dank Vapes is homebrewed, illegal, and dangerous. Stop buying carts off the street.
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Are we, though?
Why would they vet THC, isn’t it still Federally illegal?
But yes, these should be legal and oversight that they are relatively safe.
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The “public health crisis” was Vitamin E Acetate.
It’s over.
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My point as that the headline implies that there are licit vaping cartridges/fluids in the US: there aren’t any.
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Yeah, no. The vaping (both THC and nicotine) public health crisis still includes:
- Increased risk of cardiovascular disease
- Increased risk of pulmonary disease
- Increased risk of smoking cigarettes among never smokers
- Increased risk of nicotine addiction
- Increased risk of arterial disease
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None of which constitute a “crisis”.
Producers started using vitamin E acetate. People died. Producers stopped using vitamin E acetate. People stopped dying.
That was a crisis. The risks of nicotine vaping need to balance with the risk of smokers smoking. That’s not a crisis.
Also I’d like to note that today is nine years to the day since I smoked a cigarette after a 25+ year smoking habit. E-cigarettes were the only method that worked. I still vape.
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As someone who has lived long enough to have observed the “LSD crisis”, “the psilocybin mushroom epidemic”, the “gateway drug marijuana crisis”, as well as various other hair-on-fire food scares, contaminated-aspirin-bottle mass death scares, the teens are inserting-alcohol-laden-tampons up their poop chutes scare, the Ebola-will-kill-us-all scare, I admit to viewing these kind of “crisis” pronouncements with a jaundiced eye.
Often, they originate from a normal warning about possible ill effects which gets blown massively out of proportion in the clickbait landscape. Other times they are simply an effort by the government to influence behavior when they know that they have little real control over human activity. And they almost never are put into any kind of real perspective to inform people about the actual statistical risks that exist.
We have more access to information than ever before, but also more access to faulty information, and we are increasingly unable to sensibly evaluate any of it.
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There’s a line between ‘being a narc’ and letting people sell faulty products that kill others. You don’t seem to get that, but, heavens, you should.
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This isn’t a scare. THE CDC has CONFIRMED that Vitamin E acetate in unregulated THC products will kill you.
No one’s trying to scare you off, here; they’re trying to keep you alive.
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First, it was a firmly tounge in cheek comment, Xeni is one of my favorite authors here 
Second, it’s my understanding that it’s a small minority of carts that have issues.
Any illegal market will have product safety issues since they by their nature are not subjected to regulatory scrutiny. And I suspect the issue is incompetence, not malice, for a majority of “bad” cart makers.
This is why it should be legal at the state level and descheduled at the federal level.
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Perhaps I wasn’t clear enough in my comment. I never said that there is absolutely zero cause to be fearful, but I did say that the concern is vastly overblown. The best evidence that i can find says that there were roughly 40 deaths from the Vitamin E acetate which is suspected as the cause of vaping related illness and death. Even if the additive was still being used (which is unlikely) the chance of illness or death is incredibly small compared to the millions of instances of vaping of both nicotine and marijuana. That is not to say that the problems are nonexistent, but rather to say that it is very, very small. To my knowledge, no causal link has been scientifically proven.
Nothing is without risk, but we accept a certain level of risk in nearly everything that we do. I’ve had salmonella from eating tainted food at a restaurant, and it could have killed me (I wished I was dead for most of it), but I haven’t quit eating at restaurants. The point was 1) to take into account the source of the information and whether that source has an axe to grind, and 2) examine the statistical chance of harm in the claimed problem.
Cigarettes kill 1 in 2 people who use the product as directed. Calling that (including the part where vaping brings folks—teens mostly—to smoking) “not a crisis” is bullshit.
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Very slow we are. Like geological time scales. I hope future generations evolve sense organs to detect patent medicine scams, and ear flaps to filter out sudden loud advertisements. And perhaps a second brain that can be shed when it gets too depressed from excessive exposure to psychological marketing.
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