Do CBD Vape Pens Have Vitamin E Acetate?
With more than 2,200 people sickened across the United States by a lung illness related to vaping – and with Vitamin E acetate named as the illness’s most likely culprit – people across the country who vape are rightfully concerned about whether what they’re doing is safe. Could I be the next person to get sick? Am I vaping Vitamin E? Why would anyone add Vitamin E to vaping products in the first place?
The concern is especially pronounced among people who use CBD vaping products. After all, most of the attention surrounding the lung illness has centered on vaping products derived from cannabis, and CBD is a hemp product.
We’ll start with the good news. No; CBD vape products from companies like VSAVI do not contain Vitamin E. The best thing that you can do to ensure your safety, though, is to understand why Vitamin E is an ingredient of concern and why some producers would add it to cannabis vaping products. This article will educate you and help to ensure that you can vape safely.
Why Is Vitamin E an Ingredient of Concern in Vaping Products?
Vitamin E is an ingredient of concern because the lung illness being reported is lipoid pneumonia. Oil is settling in the lungs of the victims and impairing their breathing. This isn’t just a situation where people can cough up the oil and feel better; their bodies are attacking the oil like a pathogen. The illness causes damage to the lungs. Some people have died. Others have required steroid administration and ventilator support. Whether the survivors will have permanent lung damage or experience relapses is unknown. This is a deeply concerning illness that is killing some victims and changing the lives of the survivors forever.
Health authorities have retrieved and analyzed lung fluid from some victims of the disease. Every lung fluid sample contained Vitamin E. Although it hasn’t been confirmed that Vitamin E is the only cause of the lung illness, it seems pretty obvious that any person who vapes would be wise to avoid products with Vitamin E.
Why Would Vaping Products Have Vitamin E?
Vitamin E is an ingredient that you generally don’t find in legal vaping products of any type. That’s why health authorities investigating the lung illness have zeroed in on the illicit cannabis vaping industry. To understand why that is, you must first understand how THC vaping works. There is a large black market for vaping cartridges pre-filled with THC oil - see the best place to buy delta 8 thc cartridges. THC oil is an extremely potent extract made from cannabis flowers. Vaping cartridges filled with THC oil have the same psychoactive effect as the flowers, but they are much more discreet and easier to hide. A single THC cartridge can have the same potency as several grams of cannabis flowers without the size or the smell.
So, THC oil vaping cartridges are a boon for the illicit cannabis industry. They’re discreet, potent and easy to conceal, so they’re a big win for everyone, right? Not so fast. The big difference between buying cannabis flowers and pre-filled vape cartridges is that, when you buy a liquid-filled cartridge produced for an unregulated market, you don’t actually know what you’re getting. It didn’t take long for producers of illicit THC cartridges to realize that, if they found an undetectable diluent, they could use less THC oil in each cartridge and make significantly more money in the process.
In 2019, illicit THC cartridge producers discovered that Vitamin E acetate has virtually the same color and consistency as THC oil. Using Vitamin E, they found, it was possible to make extremely low-strength THC oil cartridges that looked the same as full-strength cartridges.
Some illicit THC vaping cartridges contain more Vitamin E than THC oil. Even the companies that developed Vitamin E-based diluents never expected producers to put so much of the substance in their cartridges.
If you are going to buy cannabis – and you have no legal dispensaries in your area – you would be wise to avoid pre-filled vaping cartridges completely. The use of diluents is incredibly common in the illicit THC vaping industry, so you can’t expect a pure product unless you buy whole flowers.
The Importance of Buying CBC From Reliable Sellers
Let’s conclude the article by circling back to the original topic of CBD vape pens. Should you worry about Vitamin E if you use CBD vaping products? The answer is that you have no reason to worry if you buy those products from reputable sellers. Legal CBD brands are required to disclose the ingredients in their products because those products are made for consumption. In addition, reputable CBD brands have no reason to lie about the CBD content in their products or to surreptitiously dilute the CBD oil in their vaping cartridges.
CBD oil is extremely thick, so it is necessarily to dilute it in order to make a vaping product that works correctly. Reputable CBD brands, however, don’t use Vitamin E for that purpose. Instead, they use compounds like plant-derived terpenes. Some producers also use propylene glycol and vegetable glycerin, the same two compounds used to dilute commercial nicotine vaping liquids.
The purpose of Vitamin E in the illicit THC vaping industry is to dilute cartridges without making them appear watered down. Legitimate producers of CBD vaping products have no reason to do that because they clearly disclose how much CBD their products contain.
Despite the excellent safety profile of CBD, it is always important to confirm the reliability of the seller before buying any CBD vaping product. Are you tempted to buy an off-brand CBD vape pen from a gas station? You might want to ignore that temptation. Off-brand CBD sellers may import their CBD oil from bulk wholesalers in China, and in that case, there is some reason to be concerned about potential adulterants. Always look for CBD vaping products from a seller that discloses the origin of its CBD oil and subjects its products to third-party lab tests that confirm purity and potency.