Ashtray Blog: An Electronic Cigarette Blog

(But still refuse to issue clarification!)

According to industry consultant Katherine Devlin LACORS have wrongly stated that electronic cigarettes contain up to 20% nicotine.

While products can legally contain up to 7.5% nicotine, a product containing twenty percent nicotine would be likely to cause severe illness.

So why haven’t the thousands of UK smokers experienced this illness?

The answers lies in an elementary mistake.

“The cartidge in question was labelled at 18mg/ml and a non-mathematician could be forgiven for assuming that this would mean 18%, but it doesn’t,” said Katherine, a consultant to www.e-cigs.co.uk, before going on to explain about a discrepancy in the international weights and measurement system which is taught to children at GCSE level:

“The litre (1l) weighs 1000 grams (1,000g). Therefore, 1 millilitre (1ml = 1/1000th of a litre) weighs 1 gram (1g), not 1 milligram (1mg = 1/1000th of a gram.)”

As a result of this mis-reading, the quantity of nicotine in the electronic cigarette were miscalculated by a factor of 10, i.e. the offending device carried 2% nicotine, not 20% nicotine.

This confirms all other tests carried out by the world, including by Murray Laugeson in New Zealand and the FDA in America, which found that e-cigarettes actually carry less nicotine than cigarettes.

Despite explanations by the industry, LACORS has continued to failed to rectify this error. As with the FDA press release (which highlighted the existence of carcinogens without pointing out that they were at FDA approved levels) this incorrect evidence is being used by the MHRA as justification for their regulation of the device.

Thanks to Katherine  from E-Cigs.co.uk for much of the information in this post.

Tags: electronic cigarette, LACORS

This entry was posted on Monday, May 10th, 2010 at 12:03 am and is filed under research. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.