Doja Cat says she has to cancel upcoming shows due to health issues caused by vaping

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

Singer Doja Cat has canceled a series of performances due to her health problems.

On Friday, the "Say So" singer, 26, took to Twitter to share that she had to undergo "routine" surgery on her tonsils, which would force her to stop touring while she recovers from the procedure.

"Hi guys. I wanted you to hear it from me first. Unfortunately I have to have surgery on my tonsils asap. The surgery is routine but the recovery is going to take awhile due to swelling. That means I have to cancel my festival run this summer as well as The Weeknd tour," the singer wrote. "I feel horrible about this but can't wait for this to heal and get back to making music and create an appearance for y'all."

Link to tweet

Doja Cat, whose real name is Amala Ratna Zandile Dlamini, released the statement just a day after she sent out a flurry of tweets describing her throat issues in graphic detail. On Thursday evening, she spoke candidly about her addiction to vaping, and the problems it was causing for her throat and tonsils.

https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/doja-cat-quit-vaping-tonsils-surgery-202734193.html

Apparently vaping is not the harmless alterative.

[cilla4progress]

1. My daughter left her disposable vape pen with me

after a recent trip together.

I can attest - it is quite harsh!

And wasteful. Will never buy one, myself.

[Mike Nelson]

2. Well...

... I'm way behind the pop culture times, as I've never heard of her... but I hope she recovers quickly and stops vaping!

[Hugh_Lebowski]

3. Hmm, so let's see ...

Smoking cigs, known harms:
Death from Cancer, Emphysema, Heart Disease, and myriad other health problems.

Vaping, known harms:
Could affect a pop star's ability to make money singing by irritating their throat and tonsils (which most people don't have).

So, yeah, pretty much the same thing.

[yardwork]

14. There are plenty of known health risks related to vaping,

And most people under the age of 65 still have our tonsils.

[electric_blue68]

18. I'm 69. Still have 'em.

[Hugh_Lebowski]

21. There's plenty of health risks related to driving cars too ...

In true, there's health risks to a lot of things that most everyone does.

I've seen no evidence (thus far, to be clear) suggesting vaping has even remotely the staggering number of health risks there are with smoking tobacco.

[edhopper]

29. They are not safe

In fact they are quite dangerous.

https://www.lung.org/quit-smoking/e-cigarettes-vaping/impact-of-e-cigarettes-on-lung#:~:text=E%2Dcigarettes%20produce%20a%20number,as%20cardiovascular%20(heart)%20disease.&text=E%2Dcigarettes%20also%20contain%20acrolein,primarily%20used%20to%20kill%20weeds.

[Delphinus]

23. Really?

I'm coming up on 64 and had mine out when I was 4 or 5. Son had his out at 18. I didn't realize it isn't the usual thing.

[yardwork]

26. Definitely not the usual thing anymore.

[Mariana]

15. Some people seem to think that infected tonsils are an entirely new thing.

This never happened to anyone before people started vaping, right? All those tonsillectomies were done for no reason at all.

[Jedi Guy]

4. "Apparently vaping is not the harmless alterative."

Like most anything else, it depends on the details. If you're vaping nic salts because you want a very high concentration of nicotine, there's a throat hit involved. I can see some people reacting badly to it. Or if you're vaping a THC product without confirming the ingredients, that can also end badly. Several years ago a number of people died and others suffered permanent lung injuries because of black-market THC cartridges that had vitamin E acetate added.

I don't use disposable vape pens for those reasons. I use a two-battery mod with an attachable tank and mesh coil, and I only use juice from reputable companies whose facilities are inspected, and even then only at a low concentration of nicotine. The only way that configuration has been shown to be unsafe is if you don't change your coil regularly, but the taste of a burnt coil is a pretty strong motivator to swap it out. Worse than a dry hit.

[Hugh_Lebowski]

6. So much this ... I have the same setup and philosophy

And honestly, the only health effect I see?

I can't sing as well as could when I was younger.

May be the vaping, may be getting older. But I'd not be surprised if the vaping was affecting my singing.

If I ever quit, I'll update y'all on my voice afterwards

[Ms. Toad]

5. I remember the heated discussions here when vaping first started.

Back in 2014-15 there was quite the hubub over this.

The main pro-vaping points from that era seem to be:

1. those who want to ban/regulate vaping are the useful idiots of big tobacco, since vaping gives money to the small businesses creating the juice and takes it away from big tobacco.
2. To the extent big tobacco gets into vaping, they will only capture beginners - beyond beginning vapers, those vaping will be patronizing small businesses
3. It's harmless.
4. It will never be marketed to children.

Those assertions certainly aged well.

[Hugh_Lebowski]

8. Right, and Doja Cat's sore throat proves you were right all along ... congrats! (nt)

[Ms. Toad]

9. No, but the medical research since then does, as to whether it is harmful.

Although vaping hasn't been around long enough to establish a final evaluation (because things like cancer take decades to develop, early studies suggest similar health risks to tobacco use.

Lung cancer
EVALI
Dental/peridontal damage

42% of the e-cig market belongs to Juul (not small businesses, and owned in large part by the parent company of Phillip Morris). RJ Reynolds owns VUSE (36% of the market share). Blu (owned by Lorillard Tobacco Company) has 9% of the market share.

Advertising is targeted at children.

And children are increasingly vaping and being injured by it.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33780391/

Since their introduction in the early 2000s, e-cigarette use is now prolific among youth, per the Monitoring the Future survey, with over 40% of high school seniors reporting use within the past year. Adolescents are vulnerable to the risks of e-cigarettes, as they are targeted as new consumers with advertisements and flavoring compounds, and are not utilizing them as a means to smoking cessation. The pulmonary risks of vaping are rapidly emerging, with the most immediately alarming being the condition electronic-cigarette/vaping associated lung injury (EVALI). Additionally, there have been more recent studies showing extrapulmonary effects including cardiovascular, immunologic and neuro-developmental effects.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32715837/

[stopdiggin]

12. no matter how you slice it

the health effects and 'injuries' associated with vaping are minuscule - in comparison with smoking cigarettes. That was always (and still remains) the major argument in favor. Now you can try to make the argument that vaping is attracting (and keeping) an entirely new and separate population - but it seems the only honest way to evaluate that cost, is by attempting the calculus of how much of that market would never have become cigarette smokers - in the absence of the vaping alternative.

(I myself would not try to claim that number is absolutely negligible - but I still think, in weighing those factors, the 'total health costs' fall almost irrefutably to one side of the equation.)

[Ms. Toad]

28. You are underestimating the harm associated with vaping.

The consequences of smoking have taken decades to establish - as have establishing the consequences of any other repeated inhalation of other crap (asbestos, coal mine dust, etc.). Establishing the dangers associated with vaping is still in its infancy, because of how recent the phenomenon is. (The first e-cigarette was imported into the US in 2006 - the discussions on DU were in 2013-14). To study the hazards of something inhaled directly takes decades because of the length of time from exposure to carcinogens to the development of cancer. There's a similar timeline for other exposure-based lung consequences. It is an even longer timeline to establish the consequences for second-hand exposure (the dangers of second-hand smoke were established approximately 25 years after it was established that smoking causes cancer to the smoker).

Because of the differences between smoking and vaping, I would expect the inherent consequences of vaping to be lower (but not "miniscule&quot . To the extent that vaping is used to quit smoking, the risks are probably worth the benefit. (Pretty sure I said that in the DU conversations in 2013-14). To the extent vaping is a substituted ongoing habit - the jury is still out on that because of how long it takes to establish the connection between inhaled matter and consequences. We should be erring on the side of assuming the consequences are significant, based on the early studies.

As to creating new users - there is no way to measure who would never have become smokers. A better comparison would be high school smokers + vaping early in the development of vaping to high school smokers + vaping now.

In 2013, that number would have been around 22.7%. In 2019 27.5% of high school students were vaping + 4.6% smoking (information from the COVID years isn't as reliable because of the difficulty of adapting survey techniques to a less-reachable population). That's about a 41% increase. (9.4% increase in combined use, divided by the 2013 level of tobacco use - assuming vaping by high school students in 2013 was neglible).

[Hugh_Lebowski]

22. While I absolutely don't support vaping being purposefully marketed to 'children'

at no point have I personally ever claimed to give two shits about 'the children' in general in this equation.

What can I say, I'm not going to virtue-signal 'caring' ... when I really don't. 'Children' are overrated, as I oft opine on this board.

And how are those 'market share' numbers calculated? Is it based on $$$/sales? Because I can fill my nic salt pen or the tank on my regular vape for like 1/6-1/4 what it would cost me to buy JUUL or Vuse cartridges. So I'd guess if small companies have 20% of the market $$$-wise, they likely have as many actual customers as the other 80% of big tobacco products ... have.

And are you telling me that whoever gathered those numbers ... contacted ALL of the 100's of small companies that make vape juice and got their sales numbers to put those rankings together?

Or did they just look at the top handful of big companies and figure their market shares?

In the time frame you're talking about, those assertions you speak of (to the extent that you're accurately reflecting what 'our side' was actually saying) were pretty accurate.

Along those lines, please don't say we were all saying 'it's harmless' back then, or now. That's disingenuous. What we said was 'we KNOW smoking is terrible for you, we don't know that this is, and it's LOGICAL that it would not be as bad because vaping doesn't dump dozens of known carcinogens into your bloodstream and deposit tar and particulates into your lungs'. True in 2015, and remains true now.

And the fact that the big tobacco products now dominate the market is not proof that #1 was wrong, in fact what we were saying was restrictions being considered at that time (many of which were implemented in various states/locales) were going to disadvantage the small businesses and enhance the position of big tobacco in the market, and that big tobacco was likely supporting them.

And that's what's happened, assuming your numbers are correct.

So who was actually wrong back then, hmmm?

[Ms. Toad]

27. As to what was being said -

I went back to the threads to refresh my recollection. The assertions were predictive - essentially alleging that (1) big tobacco wasn't interested and/or that consumers would not patronize big tobacco (one person specifically said that big tobacco would only grab new users, and that once established at vaping, vapers would almost exclusively patronize small companies) and (2) anyone who was suggesting vaping would go the way of big tobacco was being alarmist. We were not, as the current market share and marketing makes clear.

I didn't suggests everyone was saying vaping was harmless, but many were. As to dumping dozens of known carcinogens into your bloodstream - the evidence is growing that vaping is doing just that (as well as causing other problems). The harm can't be absolutely proven at this point, because cancer - and many other consequences of sucking crap into your lungs several times a day - takes decades to develop. But the evidence is growing that it has consequences similar to smoking.

The numbers I provided are market share analysis. Here is the source. They do not specify how they gathered the information, but presumably the small suppliers are included in the 1% of "other"

[Mariana]

25. Doja Cat hasn't provided a shred of evidence

that vaping caused her throat infection. She doesn't claim the doctor told her that. She says it happened because she was drinking wine and vaping. Isn't it funny how that gets completely ignored? No one here is arguing that drinking wine is dangerous and pointing to this story as proof.

She continued, claiming that the reason her tonsils became infected is because she drank wine and vaped while on antibiotics.

[Mariana]

24. "3. It's harmless."

Please provide one example of anyone here saying that. Thanks in advance.

[BannonsLiver]

37. Good luck with that one

You know people who think they’re experts on everything? It’s like pissing into the wind.

[Skittles]

7. I just saw an ad about qutting vaping

it's turning out to be quite an addiction from what I hear

[Mariana]

16. Nicotine is addictive no matter how it's delivered to the body.

That's not news.

[MiniMe]

10. I tried vaping a while ago to try to quit smoking

I never liked it and gave it up pretty quickly. I did finally quit smoking because of heart problems, but I just never liked vaping

[uponit7771]

11. an "addiction to vaping" will no doubt cause this

[Mariana]

17. She also blamed drinking wine, according to the story. nt.

[Mariana]

13. I'm pretty sure people got throat infections before vaping was invented. nt.

[BlackSkimmer]

19. Obviously, I'm way out of it.

No idea who that is.

[Celerity]

30. really? that truly surprises me

Modern e-cigarettes were patented in 2003, introduced in Asia in 2004 and 2005, introduced in the European and US markets in 2006, and really took off starting in 2007 and 2008.

[BlackSkimmer]

32. I've heard about vaping, just not whoever or whatever a Doja Cat is. Maybe you misunderstood my post

One of my close friends does the vaping thing.

I never smoked cigarettes; I found the aftertaste so disgusting. Never had an interest in vaping.

[Celerity]

34. ah, oki! lol, I did totally misunderstand, and of course I can see how many would not know Doja Cat

[BlackSkimmer]

36. I love all music though, so now I'll check her out!

[Celerity]

38. good trap remix from back in better world times (recorded December 2014)

Doja Cat - So High (San Holo Remix)

[XanaDUer2]

31. Me neither

May she be well

[BlackSkimmer]

33. Lol, absolutely!

Whoever she is!

[XanaDUer2]

35. Bless her!

[tavernier]

20. I was vaping about a month after I tried to quit smoking.

I started to notice that when I coughed or sometimes just laughed, my voice had a grainy high pitched squeak. It wasn’t normal or attractive or comfortable so I quit vaping. I decided to cut down number of cigs weekly until I got to one, then one every other day, then one a week until I just said “enough now.” I craved one whenever I had a drink, but only cheated twice. It wasn’t worth how pissed off I was at myself the next day. I gained a little weight but eventually walked it off. I found I could walk uphill without getting out of breath once I quit inhaling smoke. Months later my SIL was outside smoking and I took a puff. It seriously tasted nasty and felt painful, like the very first time I smoked. I knew then that I had finally kicked it. That was several years back and I’m pretty proud that I did it as I’ve never given myself much credit for willpower. Proved myself wrong.