Vaping, combustion and your lungs
Vaporising isn't the same as smoking — and not all 'vapes' are equal. An honest look.
"Vaping" gets used for two quite different things, and the difference matters for your lungs and your safety. It is worth being precise.
Combustion versus vaporising
When you smoke flower, you burn it. Burning any plant matter produces smoke, and smoke carries tar and a range of irritants and harmful by-products — that is true of cannabis as it is of anything else set alight.
A dry-herb vaporiser heats the same flower to a temperature high enough to release its cannabinoids and terpenes as a vapour, but below the point of combustion. Because nothing is burning, you inhale far fewer of the harmful by-products that smoke carries. It is widely considered gentler on the airways than smoking — not risk-free, but a meaningful step down.
The important caution: illicit vape cartridges
The other "vape" is a cartridge of cannabis oil in a battery-powered pen. Here the honesty has to be blunt. In 2019 a wave of serious lung injuries — known as EVALI — was traced largely to illicit-market THC cartridges cut with additives, vitamin E acetate chief among them. People were harmed, and some died.
The lesson was not "vaping is deadly" so much as "you cannot inhale a mystery liquid from an unknown source and hope". A cartridge whose ingredients and origin you do not know is a genuine risk, and the illicit market is exactly where you cannot know them.
Where a club helps
This is one of the quieter arguments for the club model. Knowing what you are taking, and from whom, is not a slogan when it comes to something you inhale — it is the whole safety margin. If you use cartridges or concentrates, knowing their source matters more here than almost anywhere.
The honest summary
No form of inhaling is entirely without risk to the lungs. Vaporising flower is gentler than smoking it. And whatever the method, a known source is not a nicety — it is the difference between a considered choice and a gamble.
