"Do people die from chicken pops, Uncle Jason?" the tiny, little Logan asks.
"Oh, sure. People die from it all the time! My own twin brother fell victim to chicken pox when we were just little kids...about your age, as a matter of fact. Of course, it was called Devil's Eyes back then 'cause people thought that the Devil could see through the spots."
"Really? Because Jimmy McDermott is gonna get to stay home for two weeks 'cause he got 'em."
"Didja like 'im?"
"No! He's always passing notes to Smelly Shelly telling her that I like her even when I DON'T!"
Uncle Jason shrugs noncommittally. "Well, I wouldn't worry about him any more. Even if he does survive the cranial urine shots, his chances of living through the insideoutomy are slim."
Logan goes wide-eyed. "Inside Out Of Me?"
"Insideoutomy. Y'see, when Devil's Eyes reaches an advanced state of festering, the skin can no longer survive. So what the doctors do, to keep you from breaking open and spilling all over the floor, is to take out your insides and put them in a garbage bag, brains, eyeballs, and all. Of course, the bones might puncture the bag, so they leave those behind."
Logan stands perfectly still, staring off into space with a mask of horror on his pallid face as the idea of an insideoutomy churns his brain and stomach.
"Don't worry, though. It's not so bad in there. My brother lived in the bag for two whole years. His last meal was an egg."
I saw an endangered sight yesterday: a lemonade stand. Actually, it was a "Kool-Aid Stand," but the set up was familiar. A card table on a front lawn; a posterboard sign with blocky, cockeyed letters scrawled on it; a pitcher of liquid and a cigar box of money; and a pathetic ragamuffin quietly whining, "Wanna buy some Kool-Aid?" He was so nervous and lost and needy that the slightest whiff of rejection might have thrown him into an irreversible tailspin of despair. At least, that's how he played it.
I didn't want any Kool-Aid, however. I don't drink Kool-Aid to begin with, and Lord only knows what kind of concoction those grubby, little hands smooshed together.
"I make my Kool-Aid out of Pixie Stix and soy milk! That way it's delicious and good for you!"
No, thanks. I gave the kid a dollar anyway, and walked down the street recalling my own business ventures in the powdered drink industry, twenty-plus years ago. I was very successful in my enterprise because I had one very special ingredient that none of my competitors could duplicate: my little sister.
All I had to do was create the set and provide the initial capital. After that, it was money in the piggy bank. It wasn't that she was some cute, little girl who I put on display to attract customers. No. First off, she was far too small for her age and could pass herself off as two or three years younger. Second, she was a sharp and savvy little grifter who knew exactly how to extract her desires from others. Simply put, she was a pro, twisting her cuteness into voodoo blood magic that we would use to reap money from unwitting locals.
I first learned of my sister's special powers when we rode the bus to our Grandmother's house. Our parents gave us both fare, so I would climb onto the bus and drop my coins in the slot, but my sister would lag behind me, looking innocent and bewildered. Then, in rehearsed motions, I would get back off the bus and usher my "baby sister" onto the bus for free. I'm sure we could have simply asked for fifty cents, but candy is always so much sweeter when you earn it.
My sister was only six or seven years old when we came up with that little stunt, and I wasn't sure she could pull it off. After all, she was my little sister, and little sisters can't even breathe correctly according to older brothers. But the instant the doors on the green limosine opened and she glazed her eyes and wobbled up the stairs one at a time, I knew I was in the presence of greatness. My little sister was a natural born liar.
As she grew older, she lied less for personal gain and more for personal entertainment. It became an exercise in what people would believe and, more importantly, what she could convince them to believe. She raised lying to an art form. I called her a lyist.
My favorite fib was her tendency to tell people that her "real" name was Blanca. She deftly worked her fake name into the conversation whenever she met somebody new, and people would eye her suspiciously because she was an alabaster Polish girl.
"But you're white," they'd say.
"Yeah, exactly," she would casually reply. ""Blanca" means "white" in Spanish. I'm white, so my parents named me Blanca." Then her targets would squint in concentration and nod slowly as if thinking, yeah... I guess that makes sense. It was like watching a Jedi mind trick.
"Then why does everybody call you Cass?" They would eventually inquire.
"Cass is my middle name. Do you think I want to walk around with a name like Blanca? I'm white, for Christ's sake. Geez."
~ ~ ~ Happy Birthday, Blanca.
For quite a few years, I've dabbled in 3D modeling and 3D rendering, usually to conjure silly products. It was always fun and fascinating for me to develop random skills in the realm of 3D, and it has led to a completely joyous obsession with Pixar, the virtuoso pianist to my seedy lounge act.
However, while enjoying my purely digital flights of fancy, I always kept a shiny and hopeful eye on the distant horizon of 3D fabrication. For years, it was a purely theoretical idea, explored primarily through the context of Star Trek: The Next Generation's replicators. When, finally, a 3D printer was actually built, it had all the fidelity of a pile of Lego bricks. You were better off carving your idea out of a tree branch with a moderately sharp rock. But the geek community kept at it, growing as technology grew, refining as hardware shrunk, until personal fabrication by everyday people became the reality it is today.
The picture above illustrates the first ever translation of my 3D modeling into a physical object, a Mobius Bacon Strip. It's not much, only three centimeters tall, but to me it is positively thrilling. There now exists a Venn Diagram with an intersection that absolutely captivates me. In one circle lies all of the things that I am capable of developing as a 3D model; in the other circle lies all of the things that are capable of existing in physical space; in the intersection lies shit I can just make up and then have. It's the closest thing to being a goddamn wizard that I can think of... except the wizardry takes six to eight weeks for processing and delivery.
Okay, so it doesn't exactly make me Merlin. There are all kinds of limiting factors. For instance, in my initial zeal I created more than one project that would have cost nearly a thousand dollars to produce. I suppose cold hard cash is the mana or ylem in this particular form of wizardry. Also, the library of manipulable substances if slim indeed. Of course, metal and plastic are available and the fundamental building blocks of consumer products, so that particular limitation isn't very limiting. But if you're looking to fabricate a plutonium core with a beryllium housing, you're out of luck.
Limitations being what they are, it's still easy to get excited when considering the fact that this technology is only just beginning. I cannot wait to see how it advances over the coming years, and I am brimming with childlike giddiness at the idea of the things I might create.
There typically isn't a whole lot of discussion going on between me and my boss, which is fine. He's not interested in books or computers or drawing, and I'm not interested in seeing how many times I can awkwardly shoehorn the words "titties" and "blowjob" into any and all unrelated topics, so we usually leave each other to our separate means.
The one thing that we can talk about is Boy Scouts. He has a twelve-year-old son in Scouts, he was in Scouts when he was twelve, and I was in Scouts when I was twelve, so he'll tell a story about something his kid did over a weekend, then I'll compare it to Scouting twenty years ago, and he'll compare it to Scouting forty years ago. All in all, there hasn't been a whole lot of evolution in the realm of uncoordinated nerds. All of the same archetypes from 1967 and 1987 exist today, but now, instead of running home to mommy after getting beaten up, they just text her so she can file a lawsuit.
Last weekend, my bosses' kid took a canoeing class in order to prepare for an upcoming trip. His description of the event brought back fond memories as he told of paddling in circles, and of swamping canoes, and of spazzing out at the sight of a fish, and of the general ineptitude observed when a group of twelve-year-olds grapple with anything unfamiliar. It's a scene I've witnessed hundreds of times, and it's always a delightful cruelty on par with tying paper bags to a cat's feet or giving a dog a huge glob of peanut butter just to watch them deal with it. Completely unnecessary and completely hilarious, every single time.
My own canoeing exposure came in a similar fashion, but it was an hour a day for a week at summer camp. It began, as it does year after year after year, with a severely pissed off teenager. He hadn't even met us, but he hated us right down to our bones because he already knew that teaching canoeing to twelve-year-old boys is like teaching algebra to squirrels. Each is an exercise in futility, and either way it's a major accomplishment if, after months of training, you can get them all to look at you at the same time and feign comprehension. So our pissed-off, teenaged counselor didn't want to teach us canoeing, but he had to do it because it was his job. Subsequently, he hated us sight unseen and began yelling at us immediately.
The first thing he yelled at us was to keep everything out of the sand. Sand is abrasive and destructive over time . He yelled that at us so we would pay attention and understand, but his efforts were laughable. Our mothers had spent twelve years demanding, coercing and begging us to keep our shit off the floor, and that wasn't working either. At the age of twelve, if it wasn't for gravity, our shit wouldn't even make it to the floor. It would simply hang suspended in the exact location where it failed to maintain interest or utility.
Keeping canoeing paraphernalia out of the sand was absolutely out of the question, leading our counselor to spend the entire week screaming, "Get your paddle tip out of the sand! Don't just drop your life jacket on the ground! Stop dragging the canoe, pick it up! Up!" He yelled continuously, red-faced and frantic, like a ghost that didn't know it was dead and couldn't understand why nobody would listen. "I'm right here screaming in your face! Why are you staring at a bird with snot running down your face, and your paddle tip in the sand?!"
That is the greatest transgression against a canoeing instructor. War, famine, genocide... sure, those things suck. But to look a canoeing instructor in the eye with a defiant grimace as you jam a paddle blade deep into the wet, hard-packed beach is to stab him right in his heart. It's not that pissed-off teenagers care so deeply and passionately about molded plastic canoe paddles; it's that they care so deeply and passionately about themselves and the things that they say. When the things that they say, such as, "Stay out of my room," or, "Don't touch my stuff," or, "Keep your paddle tip out of the sand," are ignored by twelve-year-olds in the depths of a wicked Ritalin jones, the natural order is torn asunder, causing the pissed-off teenager to freak out and take canoe paddles very, very seriously.
All of this became clear well before we saw any trace of water. Water takes the experience to a whole new tier of pissed-off freak out. Once we twelve-year-olds hit the water, not only were we oblivious to the frenzied instructions of our counselor, but we had surrendered all control of roll and yaw to the whimsy of nature. Our canoes spun lazily and aimlessly as we mastered the paddling finesse necessary to flick globs of algae onto one another. The counselor manned his own vessel and herded us like a sheepdog... a sheepdog that has to contend with a flock composed of sheep that are just as likely to eat one another as to randomly float off into outer space without so much as a bleat.
For two days, we floated around "learning" to canoe. On day three we "learned" to right a sunken or capsized canoe. One would assume that by the third day, we would have been consummate professionals in this regard, because the first and second days were an almost constant succession of overturned canoes. But on Monday and Tuesday, that was the counselor's problem to fix. On "Wet Wednesday," it was ours.
Sinking the canoe was a snap. Experience had taught us that we need only recite the canoe-sinking incantation of, "Oh, hey, look... a turtle," which would spin our group into a frenzy. We had all seen plenty of turtles in pet shops, at zoos, on television, in the wild... many of us owned turtles that went ignored and unloved for days, weeks, months at a time. But it didn't matter. We wanted to see that turtle right now, so we would stand up and lean forward to search, forgetting entirely that we were balancing on the surface of water in a tin splinter. Sinking came very naturally to us.
Un-sinking was a different story. That was a full hour of non-stop calamity, right there, because not only did we have to un-sink our canoes while floating in the middle of a lake, but we had to then clamber back into them without immediately sinking them again, which we always did. Why, one might ask, did we have to go through such a Sisyphusian ordeal? Because we were in a canoeing class, that's why. Like many youth lessons, the lessons learned in the canoeing classes we were taking would have been completely obsolete if not for the existence of the canoeing classes we were taking. If it weren't for canoeing classes, canoes would be extinct. But there will always be canoes because people will always need canoes for all the canoeing classes there are out there, classes that only exist because people wonder, "What's the story with canoes? I should enroll in a class and find out." Canoes exist only because people wonder what the hell they are. It's a vicious circle.
But kids have to do something with their time. Left to their own devices, kids would just dig holes in the yard all summer. So parents ship them off to camp and arm them with paddles with which to dig holes in the water, though they'd really rather use them dig holes in the sand and piss off the counselor.
This is one of those kinds of images: either you totally remember it, or you totally do not. It's a generational thing.
The Caller ID on my cellular phone read [Parents] and the mild guilt crept into me as it always does. Every time I think that it has been a while and I ought to call my parents and I'll get to it later, maybe tomorrow, they always call me first. I can count on one hand the number of times I've called my parents for an unspecified chatting session, just to catch up and keep in touch. They've made that same call to my telephone hundreds of times. Perhaps thousands.
"Hello?"
"Hiya, Jay. I just called to tell you about the crazy lady." That is not an unusual way for my mother to begin a conversation. She works in a nursing home, and therefore has an abundant supply of auxiliary crazy ladies in the event that our immediate family finds itself mired in a momentary lapse of non compos mentis. This time, though, she was talking about the genuine article.
A few days ago, after a lengthy errand spree, my parents returned home to find a woman of twenty-odd years sitting on their living room floor arranging my mother's acrylic paint bottles on a dinner plate. As my parents walked in, she just looked up at them. She made no attempts to get away, nor did she exhibit any signs that she believed herself to be "busted."
"Who are you?"
"I'm an angel."
"How did you get here?" This is a pertinent question because my parents live miles away from the nearest middle-of-nowhere. It's just trees and sand in all directions, making her "angel" response all the spookier.
"I was walking down the road. I was on the Back Forty."
"What's the Back Forty?"
"My father is probably looking for me. I should get back, my father is probably out looking for me."
"Where is your father?"
"How should I know? He's out looking for me."
As my mother questioned her further, trying to glean any information from her cryptic replies, my father gave the house a once-over. Nothing appeared to be stolen or damaged, but everything was out of place. Apparently, they had been visited by the little-heard-of Angel of Symmetry. Every food item and condiment in the kitchen cabinets was turned upside-down. My father's beer steins were lined up in a row on the floor, all of the handles pointing in one direction, and all of the tops flipped up. All of my mother's sweaters were removed from their drawers, refolded into identical squares and replaced. And, more chaotically than everything else, there was a large chunk torn out of the middle of a loaf of bread.
"Why did you tear up the bread?"
"I had to feed the cats."
"Oh."
After a frustrating Q&A session, my mother finally said, "Look, honey, I'm going to see if I can find some identification in your purse. Is that okay?"
She responded casually, "Yeah," and my mother opened her purse. My mother, who has administered a great many varieties of crazy lady medication, saw most of them in the girl's purse. The bottles carried her name, Amanda.
Again, they had to ask her, "How did you get here?"
"I was with the Waylons."
"Who are the Waylons?"
"They are the brothers."
"They're your brothers?"
"No. Ronnie and Dwayne. Ronnie said I wasn't what he wanted."
The conversation only got weirder and more worrisome from there, so my mother stopped and asked point blank, "Look, have you taken anything from us?"
Amanda thought for a second, wondering about events that may have passed, and replied, "No." Then, a moment later, said, "Wait," and pulled from her pocket a glass bead that she had found in my mother's craft supplies. She placed it in my mother's hand.
My parents were understandably befuddled. The woman did not belong in their house but she didn't appear threatening, just confused, and they couldn't push her out the door to fend for herself out in the dark nothing.
"Honey," my mother finally asked, "why did you come in here?"
"Because I'm cold and scared." That was an answer my mother could understand, and upon which action could be taken. She wrapped a blanket around Amanda, laid her down on the couch, and dialed 911.
It seemed a bit extreme to dial 911 under the circumstances. 911 is what a person dials when the house is on fire or an axe murderer is on the lurk or some other such event where every passing second is another step toward death and William Shatner's dramatic voice-over is apropos. But there is no Animal Control for crazy ladies, so 911 it was. My mother dialed and explained the situation.
"We'll send someone right over. What are you going to do with her until then?" the operator asked.
"Well, right now I have her tucked in a blanket on the couch." I like to think of that as the motherly hippie version of chaining her to a radiator in the basement. She's completely restrained and subdued by comfort, understanding and cosmic love. It isn't something that a 911 operator is accustomed to hearing.
"You're rather calm in all of this," the operator remarked.
"Meh. I deal with this kind of thing every day. But I usually get paid by the hour."
"Oh."
The police arrived and took Amanda away, but only after my parents agreed to press charges. My parents were reluctant to do so -- they didn't feel that the crazy lady needed a criminal record to compound the problems in her life -- but the officers explained that if charges were not brought against Amanda, the most they could do was take her in, question her, then let her go on the streets. That wouldn't do, so my parents charged her with trespassing with the intention of later dropping all charges.
Amanda is exceedingly lucky that, however the hell she got there, she randomly wandered into my parent's home. Around there, in Hillbilly Shangri-La, she could have just as easily walked into the house of a man who has been waiting for years for just one trespasser to set foot on his property, specifically so it would be within his legal rights to shoot that person in the face. Either that, or she could have just as easily wandered into some backwoods kegger and, as my mother put it, "been passed around like a party favor."
My parents like to joke that while they feel blessed to have been visited upon by an angel, they also feel gypped that God would send one that was completely out of its mind. The way I see it, though, to follow the theme of the joke, God is lucky that his fallen angel crashed through my parent's roof. Had anything unseemly happened to His charge, He'd have a lot of explaining to do to His higher-ups.
This is an animation I created with the help of a little PHP script. It takes one pixel at the center of the image then, based on various data fed to it, replicates a certain number of times, a certain distance away and at a certain angle.
You can fiddle with the numbers and create designs of your own (though static, not animated). For a nerd like me, this can waste quite a lot of time. With the right numbers, the results can be quite ugly or staggeringly beautiful. Before I give you the link, though, let me tell you this: don't freak out if it takes the page a minute to load. Nothing is broken. It's going through a lot of calculations, so be slightly patient when you click on this link.
Now I lay me, down to sleep;
I pray the Lord my soul to keep.
If I die before I wake,
I pray the Lord my soul to take.
My parents, mindful of their little son's eternal soul, made me say that prayer each night since before I can remember and I'm fairly sure that I'll never sleep properly again. I must have learned the prayer immediately after I learned how to speak, so the sentence structure was far too exotic for me to understand. The only thing I could do was pick out the words that were emphasized and cobble together whatever sense I could make out of it. That added up to, "Me-Sleep; Lord-Soul-Keep; I-Die; Lord-Soul-Take." That freaked me out. The gist of the prayer, as I interpreted it, was, "If I sleep, I might die and God will swoop down and harvest my soul." At that age, I didn't know from God. For all I knew, God was some distant relative who never visited.
"You know, God loves you very much."
"Yeah? Then how come he never sends me a birthday card?"
So, instead of the benevolent protector that my parents thought they were conjuring images of, I had concocted The Ultimate Boogie Man, except where The Boogie Man hid under the basement stairs and was going to "get me," God was everywhere, could do anything, and desired nothing other than to steal the essence of my existence.
My father tucked me in each night and said my prayers with me. If he weren't there I might never have said the prayer again, but each night, there he was, making sure I brushed my teeth and did right by God. I'm sure he saw the scene as a father looking down into the face of his son while they both sang the accolades of Our Everlasting Savior, but from my perspective it was The Authority Figure looming over a frightened child, forcing him to chant the ritualistic incantations of The Soul Reaper. Even if my father hadn't been at my bedside each night, I knew that not praying was a sin and that sins pissed God off, so I probably would have forced myself to blubber the words through tears of terror in order to keep The Almighty Father from smiting me in my sleep. Ours is a vengeful God, and if one little boy misses a single prayer, heads will fucking roll.
Each night I was reminded of my mortality and of the fact that my soul was on the line. Immediately after this reminder, it was lights out, and my father was hardcore. No night lights for this little punk. Darkness. Bleak, cold darkness. As memory serves, I slept shackled to the ceiling by my feet in a five foot cement cube filled with centipedes, but I'm pretty sure that's mostly a product of an overactive imagination left to function without a night light and saturated in mind-shredding horror.
So, now--like then--I never want to go to sleep. To this day, laying down to sleep feels like surrender, like death, so I put it off as long as I can. I stay up as long as I am able to manage, sometimes for days at a time. I've never drifted gently to sleep; I've always either crashed or passed out for twelve hours of solid unconsciousness.
It's not that I still believe that God is jonesin' for my soul, but old habits are hard to shake. I now understand that God isn't an Omnipotent Harbinger of Annihilation, but more of an Invisible Man in the Sky who likes to make flowers, grant wishes, and conquer evil, much like my Grandmother or a very powerful Pokemon.
An FDA News Release from July 22, 2009:
FDA and Public Health Experts Warn About Electronic Cigarettes The U.S. Food and Drug Administration today announced that a laboratory analysis of electronic cigarette samples has found that they contain carcinogens and toxic chemicals such as diethylene glycol, an ingredient used in antifreeze.
Do you happen to have a beverage at your side? What is it? ... Wait, what? Are you serious? O'm'gawd, your drink contains an ingredient used in antifreeze! Yeah, that's right. Water. The term "...is an ingredient used in antifreeze" is the comestible, fear-mongering equivalent of "...then the terrorists win." I must concede that diethylene glycol is indeed toxic. That much is true. But how toxic is it? It possesses one-tenth the toxicity of household aspirin, not to mention one-fortieth the toxicity of nicotine, the primary component of e-cigaratte vapor which is administered in much higher doses. So why is the FDA focusing on diethylene glycol? Because if they told you that e-cigarettes contain trace amounts nicotine, you'd stare blankly, shrug your shoulders, and take another long satisfying drag off of your e-cigarette before blowing a bunch of vapor in their faces. But when somebody starts throwing around a term like 'diethylene glycol,' people pay attention. Nobody knows what the hell it means and it doesn't sound like something you'd necessarily want a tall frosty mug of. Or does it? Diethylene glycol is also an ingredient found in toothpaste, mouthwash, cough syrup, dog food, wine and cigars among plenty of other consumer products. Do you know what it is not an ingredient of? Antifreeze. Propylene glycol is used in antifreeze. Diethylene glycol is used in coolants. Let's get our scare tactics straight, shall we? I'm reminded of city officials in Aliso Veijo, California who nearly proposed a ban on polystyrene containers because they heard that Styrofoam cups may contain dihydrogen monoxide, a colorless odorless chemical that is the main ingredient of acid rain and is lethal when inhaled. What is dihydrogen monoxide? H2O.
Electronic cigarettes, also called "e-cigarettes," are battery-operated devices that generally contain cartridges filled with nicotine, flavor and other chemicals. The electronic cigarette turns nicotine, which is highly addictive, and other chemicals into a vapor that is inhaled by the user. These products are marketed and sold to young people and are readily available online and in shopping malls. In addition, these products do not contain any health warnings comparable to FDA-approved nicotine replacement products or conventional cigarettes. They are also available in different flavors, such as chocolate and mint, which may appeal to young people.
I have yet to see any marketing for these devices out in the wild, let alone marketing geared toward young people. My own searches bring up loads of marketing, but nothing even remotely geared toward teenagers. Every bit of e-cig marketing that I can find consists of either poorly constructed web pages that don't appeal to anybody, or lots of heraldry, parchment and black satin. Perhaps teens are more sophisticated than I recall. And c'mon, FDA. It's like you're not even trying. Chocolate and mint may appeal to young people? I guarantee that chocolate and mint appeal to young people. Chocolate and mint appeal to all people. That's like saying scuba divers are preying on children because scuba diving places a major emphasis on breathing, an activity that many young people are known to participate in. What exactly would adult-centric flavors be? Liver & onions? Butterscotch hard candies? Dentu-Creme? What's the flavor that appeals to twenty-four-year-olds and not sixteen-year-olds? It doesn't exist. Marketing aside, these things cost fifty to one-hundred-and-fifty dollars each, not including accessories and recharges. A pack of smokes? Ten bucks. The Senate has approved a number of tax increases on cigarettes with the specific logic that the higher the cost on cigarettes, the fewer the teens that will smoke them. If the FDA has anything to fear, its that tobacco cigarettes will act as a gateway to e-cigarettes. Regardless of price, however, teens don't start smoking for the flavor. "Boy, I sure could go for a mouthful of stink right about now." Kids start smoking to be popular. To fit in. To be cool. To be bad ass. If some punk shows up on a street corner with an e-cigarette, it'll be shoved up his ass within sixty seconds if he's not laughed into oblivion.
Public health experts expressed concern that electronic cigarettes could increase nicotine addiction and tobacco use in young people. Jonathan Winickoff, M.D., chair of the American Academy of Pediatrics Tobacco Consortium and Jonathan Samet, M.D., director of the Institute for Global Health at the University of Southern California, joined Joshua Sharfstein, M.D., principal deputy commissioner of the FDA, and Matthew McKenna, M.D., director of the Office of Smoking and Health for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, to discuss the potential risks associated with the use of electronic cigarettes.
Do you see what they did there? Two unrelated sentences jammed together in a flurry of words to create the illusion that these specific public health experts are saying something that they never said. What that paragraph breaks down into is, "Some people have denounced e-cigarettes. The topic will later be discussed by these four other public health experts."
"The FDA is concerned about the safety of these products and how they are marketed to the public," said Margaret A. Hamburg, M.D., commissioner of food and drugs. Because these products have not been submitted to the FDA for evaluation or approval, at this time the agency has no way of knowing, except for the limited testing it has performed, the levels of nicotine or the amounts or kinds of other chemicals that the various brands of these products deliver to the user.
If the FDA has no way of knowing the amounts or kinds of other chemicals in e-cigarettes, how do they specifically mention diethylene glycol and other carcinogens? And, in the very next paragraph: "The FDA'S Division of Pharmaceutical Analysis analyzed the ingredients in a small sample of of cartridges from two leading brands of electronic cigarettes." So this whole letter boils down to, "We've determined that e-cigarettes contain a number of chemicals, but we have no way of determining if there are any chemicals in these e-cigarettes because nobody has submitted these e-cigarettes we've been analyzing for analysis."
The FDA's Division of Pharmaceutical Analysis analyzed the ingredients in a small sample of cartridges from two leading brands of electronic cigarettes. In one sample, the FDA's analyses detected diethylene glycol, a chemical used in antifreeze that is toxic to humans, and in several other samples, the FDA analyses detected carcinogens, including nitrosamines. These tests indicate that these products contained detectable levels of known carcinogens and toxic chemicals to which users could potentially be exposed.
Nitrosamines! Another ten dollar word. Scary stuff. It's true that some nitrosamines might be carcinogenic; half of them have shown trends that indicate that they might be carcinogenic in humans. The risk is certainly there, but it's not like the FDA has cared about it before, because anybody can find nitrosamines in many food products including beer, bacon, fish, pickles, and a variety of other meats and cheeses, as well as in party ballons and condoms. And, of course, in cigarettes.
The FDA has been examining and detaining shipments of e-cigarettes at the border and the products it has examined thus far meet the definition of a combination drug-device product under the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act. The FDA has been challenged regarding its jurisdiction over certain e-cigarettes in a case currently pending in federal district court. The agency is also planning additional activities to address its concerns about these products.Health care professionals and consumers may report serious adverse events (side effects) or product quality problems with the use of e-cigarettes to the FDA's MedWatch Adverse Event Reporting program either online, by regular mail, fax or phone.
None of this is to say that I am pro- or anti-electronic cigarettes. Or that I am pro- or anti-smoking. I, myself, am an ex-smoker who can understand the benefits and detriments of smoking or not smoking tobacco or e-cigarettes. I'm not here to convince you one way or the other except to say that not smoking at all is probably the healthiest way to go, should you find yourself concerned about such things. My primary goal is to open the question: "What's in it for the FDA?" Why would the FDA put out a letter that is so obviously spun to demonize electronic cigarettes with virtually no evidence that they cause any more harm than the tobacco cigarettes that are perfectly legal today? I don't know the answer to that, but I am curious to find out.
