Nicotine Limit Coming

The day appears to be set for July 23, but it looks like the 20mg/mL cap is now official. This means that any eliquids or pods above 20mg/mL will no longer be legal for sale after July 23, 2021. Please consider stocking up to get by, but as we've been advising our in-store customers for the past few months, do your best to step down to 20mg/mL as soon as you can. 

How can you reduce your nicotine level this quickly? It may be tough, but we have a few suggestions for people that find it difficult to transition down this quickly. We hope you find it useful:

1. You can use 20mg/mL with a device that offers higher output, effectively increasing the nicotine delivery per inhale. This is the simplest and most effective solution. It will also result in more flavour than the comparable 50mg/mL at a lower power setting.
2. You can try mixing a 12mg/mL or a 6mg/mL freebase nicotine juice with a 20mg/mL salt nicotine product, which should provide more actual nicotine than a 20mg/mL salt nicotine product by itself.
3. Stock up on 35mg/mL to bridge down from a 50, while you work on vaping less frequently and get used to that before stepping down once more to 20mg/mL over the next month.

To give a brief background on life before salt nicotine, the highest level that was ever normally sold was 24mg/mL and this was considered very high. The device power levels tended to be higher back then, but with recent evolution in pod mod devices, we're getting back to similar power levels in more compact devices. The most common "high nicotine" juice sold was the 12mg/mL. While it sounds a lot lower than 50mg/mL (salt nic), simply by virtue of a higher output, most people were easily satisfied at 12mg/mL on the high end. In fact, the majority of ejuice sold before salt nic was 3mg/mL and then 6mg/mL, in that order. So while the new nic cap certainly sucks for many people, there are still very livable options left on the table for you.

A simple way to look at the whole nicotine delivery process is: output x frequency, or (how much you inhale) x (how often you inhale). Output is further broken down into (nicotine concentration) x (volume). So if you have half the concentration of nicotine, it would take twice the volume to make up for it, holding frequency constant. Otherwise, you could double your frequency at the same volume, but this is more likely to impact you as you can't double work breaks, nor do you want to be spending twice the amount of time in a day vaping. 

While doubling the volume might sound like a lot, it really isn't considering how little today's devices output. Today's disposables and pods, for the most part, deliver a small fraction of what was common just a couple years ago. Moving up from 7 Watts of power to 14 Watts is a very small jump. 14 to 28 is still a tiny jump, but doubles your nicotine delivery once again. For perspective, the old "common" devices went up to 200 Watts, which is admittedly quite high. Most people fell between the 40 - 80 Watt range, which is still far more output than what small pods deliver. 

So what does this mean? Basically, doubling your device's power will double your nicotine intake and make a 20mg/mL feel like a 40mg/mL and you won't be reaching for your device any more frequently than you're used to. You will get more flavour as a result. Bonus. The clouds will be a tad larger, but still nothing like what the industry used to look like.

If you have any questions about the regulations, or strategies to deal with the new nicotine cap, please email or call us and we'll be happy to help. We wish you the best with your transition down to 20mg/mL or below, if you are among those impacted. Take care for now!

-The TheraVape Team.