Sunday 29 September 2019

77% of people suffering from THC-related lung injuries admit to using THC

I've followed up my Spectator article about the US vape scare from a weeks ago with an article in the Telegraph. Since writing it, the Centers for Disease Control have said that 77 per cent of the cases admitted to having used THC vapes. If a bunch of people at a festival got ill with a particular disease and 77 per cent of them admitted to taking the same drug, we would have no trouble working out the other 23 per cent had also taken it.

As I say in the article...

Case closed. Or so you might think. The CDC accepts that most of the individuals involved admitted to vaping THC before becoming ill, but refuses to exonerate conventional, legal, nicotine vaping on the basis that some of them did not.

This leaves two possible explanations. The first is that there is something terribly dangerous about conventional e-cigarettes that cannot be explained by science. Despite being used safely around the world for over a decade by tens of millions of people, it turns out that they can severely incapacitate and even kill otherwise healthy people almost overnight. These dangers have only emerged in certain parts of the USA in recent weeks and just happened to coincide with a spate of hospitalisations involving exactly the same symptoms that were caused by people vaping illegal THC cartridges.

The second possibility is that the handful of people who have been hospitalised with ‘vaping-related’ lung injuries but who deny vaping illegal THC are not telling the truth, presumably because they do not wish to confess to a crime. Almost unbelievably, a large section of public and political opinion in the USA leans towards the first of these scenarios. A genuine public health problem caused by the black market is being portrayed as a problem of the legal market.

The solution? Turn the majority of the e-cigarette industry over to the black market. It takes wilful ignorance to draw such a conclusion. 
 
The article is paywalled but read it here if you have access.



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