VIDEO: What is really in a vape?

ADAM HARVEY, REPORTER: Here are the three vapes. One of them says that it contains nicotine. The other two don’t say anything about nicotine but you think that, um, you think that there is nicotine in all of them, right?

Working out what’s inside a vape first requires cracking one open. 

DR CELINE KELSO, UNIVERSITY OF WOLLONGONG:  So that’s the battery, the coil, the electronics that control the side panel. 

ADAM HARVEY: Eventually you get to the vape liquid - a visceral insight into what users are inhaling. 

CELINE KELSO:  A lot of illiquid juice is coming out of that. 

ADAM HARVEY:  The cloying odour of the highly perfumed liquid permeates the lab. 

CELINE KELSO:  So the flavour by far are fruity, lolly. sweet connotations 

ADAM HARVEY:  During her career, Celine Kelso, from the University of Wollongong has analysed more than 1500 vapes.

CELINE KELSO:  That's way too many chemicals for the machine to handle. So we have to dilute it down and that's what I'm doing right now.

ADAM HARVEY:  They contain more nicotine than earlier generations of vapes. She says from 2019 to now, the maximum dose of nicotine has increased five-fold. 

CELINE KELSO:  So you get a five times higher concentration of nicotine in your bloodstream, which means that you get exposed to a higher concentration and your body will crave nicotine more.

ADAM HARVEY:  Nicotine releases dopamine, causing a brief pleasure response, quickly replaced by desire for more nicotine. 

Matteo did not vape when he first arrived in Australia two years ago. 

MATTEO:  I saw that everyone was doing vaping here. It's like very common, so I asked like, oh, I want to try. And then after I say, oh, unfortunately it taste good and it is not heavy like cigarettes.

I know what I'm doing. I know that it is not right. And I know how addictive, how addictive it is

PROF. MATTHEW PETERS, HEAD OF RESPIRATORY MEDICINE, CONCORD HOSPITAL:  Nicotine acts on the part of the brain that tells us if we're happy or sad, anxious or depressed or otherwise content and huge fluctuations in the amount of nicotine in our system cause that system to go into disarray. 

ADAM HARVEY:  In 2018, 1.6 per cent of 14- to 24-year-olds said they used vapes. 

Last year, the rate was 17.4 per cent. 

More teenagers and young adults vape than smoke cigarettes and the vapers are taking in much more nicotine than all but the heaviest smokers. 

MATTHEW PETERS: Vaping has introduced the possibility of exposing oneself all day and all night, whereas kids just can't smoke that much. 

VAPER:  I started vaping when I was 22, so about five years, four years. 

ADAM HARVEY:  And how much would you say you do it?

VAPER:  I go through one disposable vape every four days, so a lot. 

ADAM HARVEY:  And how many puffs are in one of those things?

VAPER:  I think 5000. 

ADAM HARVEY:  I have no idea how much nicotine is in.. 

VAPER:  Well it’s a lot. I'm a pretty full-on vaper. I vape in the morning, last thing at night.

ADAM HARVEY:  A 5000-puff device contains the same amount of nicotine as about 15 packets of cigarettes.

The three vapes tested by Celine Kelso were bought over the counter from a tobacconist. 

She assessed them for the presence of prohibited ingredients known to have adverse health effects, and to determine the nicotine level. 

She found no banned chemicals but lots of nicotine which should only be available in products sold in pharmacies. 

CELINE KELSO:  As soon as nicotine containing devices became illegal, the word nicotine disappeared from the packaging. The devices still contain nicotine, but the advertising for them on the packaging was not there.

ADAM HARVEY:  One of the most significant impacts of nicotine is on sleep. Doctors are seeing more young patients with sleep problems.

MATTHEW PETERS:  One of the issues we see with the kids who are highly dependent is they're sleeping with a device under their pillow or next to their bed, and when they wake up or stir during the night, they're having an additional amount of nicotine and that's an excitatory chemical. Exactly what you don't want when your brain needs to sleep. 

Sleep disruption, sleep fragmentation leads to poor sleep quality, sleepiness during the day, poor academic performance.

DR MICHAEL BONNING, AUSTRALIAN MEDICAL ASSOCIATION:  So low mood and depression associated with insomnia is pretty common. And then with the use of vapes and they're causing sleeplessness, we get lots of anxiety as well, which in itself is a trigger of further sleeplessness. 

ADAM HARVEY:  Vapes are supposed to be sold at a pharmacy and come in mint, menthol, or tobacco flavours only and that is partly to reduce their appeal to children. 

You don’t need chemical analysis to know that most vapes breach that requirement. 

CELINE KELSO:  So you do three device that we analysed today we call Cool Fanta, Blackberry and Watermelon. And that's really on par with the trends that we've seen since we did start that studies of vaping products on the market that most of the product will be either fruity or sweet connotation, flavour names or types.

ADAM HARVEY:  The testing showed two of the devices contained synthetic coolants to reduce throat irritation from nicotine consumption, to allow a user with a raw throat to continue vaping. 

Health experts do not yet understand the long-term impact when you inhale these coolants, or flavours, let alone the byproducts of everything else jammed inside a vaping device. 

MATTHEW PETERS:  To look inside these devices are scary. Firstly, you've got the toxic liquid. 

Secondly, the toxic liquid is superheated into new chemicals at 300 degrees. The little element there, which must cost a 10th of a cent, fragments and the metal decays, and that gets breathed into the lungs and the sponge itself, no one knows really what happens to the sponge when it's superheated and what chemicals it produces. 

It's just an extraordinary, poorly engineered device producing a range of chemicals that no one should want to be exposed to.

ADAM HARVEY:  There are early indications that vaping is carcinogenic – it’s just too new a phenomenon to be certain. It took 20 years for scientists to work out that cigarette smoking caused cancer.

MATTHEW PETERS:   With smoking, we saw the cancers first and then the laboratory science explained why those cancers developed. 

With vaping we're seeing the laboratory science first that predicts cancer, which is one of the reasons why we've got to work so hard to reduce or eliminate vaping.