Nice mention of Tony's Chocolonely, if you pass through the Netherlands it's one of the great gifts to pick up to take home.
> The American Lung Association listed use of flavored e-cigarettes as a risk factor for BO in 2016.[37] Health Canada has, however, seen no cases as of 2023.[38] Public Health England writes that the association has come about as "some flavourings used in e-liquids to provide a buttery flavour contain the chemical diacetyl… However, diacetyl is banned as an ingredient from e-cigarettes and e-liquids in the UK."[39] The UK National Health Service's website states that "vaping does not cause 'popcorn lung'".[40]
Diacetyl is a chemical used to flavor popcorn, and is safe to eat. Inhalation leads to "popcorn lung," named because people working in microwave popcorn factories got it.
What happened with vaping was that THC-containing liquids were an illegal cottage industry, being brewed up in people's garages to their novel recipes, despite the labels for selling them being fairly standardized on certain absolutely-not-a-brand-name-but-appears-to-be-one. These thousands of amateurs compared notes on dedicated forums online, and their iterative recipes had a quite good safety record... until the summer of 2019.
In the summer of 2019, some experimenter decided that vitamin E acetate ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CE%91-Tocopheryl_acetate ) was actually a very effective emulsifier/thickener for their liquid, allowing an incremental increase in profitability, and posted about their experiments on one of these forums. Hundreds of fellow independent/amateur manufacturers around the world followed suit and tried it out on their next batch.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaping-associated_pulmonary_in...
Suddenly heavy users started showing up in emergency rooms complaining they couldn't breath. Nobody knew the cause. It took a few weeks to recognize the trend and trace it to vaping, and the cigarette manufacturers immediately weaponized this with propaganda (regulated nicotine vapes / e-cigs retain an incorrect stigma to this day). The press labelled it "vape lung", and eventually doctors settled on EVALI. Rumors of "fake" carts abounded, everybody panicked trying to figure out what was safe and what wasn't. Eventually it was identified as a lipid pneumonia (in some cases postmortem). It took another few weeks for the CDC, some independent labs in quasi-legalized enterprises, and the relatively small niche of cannabis media to put together the pieces and break the story. Once they became aware of the consequences of vitamin E acetate (a lipid which sits inert in the lung blocking airflow), manufacturers immediately stopped using it. But the product already manufactured and sold took a while to work its way through the supply chain, leading to cases showing up all that year.