Vaping & Carts
Two very different things share the name, and one of them is among the least predictable ways to use.
"Vaping cannabis" covers two things that barely belong in the same sentence: heating loose flower in a dry-herb vaporiser, and puffing concentrated oil from a pre-filled cartridge. One is generally lower-risk than smoking; the other, on the illegal market, is one of the riskiest ways to consume at all. Lumping them together is how people end up making a bad assumption, so this section takes them apart.
Dry-herb vaporisers
A dry-herb vaporiser heats ground flower to a temperature that releases the cannabinoids as vapour without setting it alight. Because there's no combustion, you avoid a lot of the tar and irritant by-products that come from burning plant matter in a joint. The devices range from pocket-sized battery units to desktop machines, and most let you set a temperature: lower temperatures give a lighter, more flavoured vapour, higher ones a stronger, more sedating hit. MIXEDEvidence strength Vaporising flower avoids combustion and appears to deliver fewer harmful by-products than smoking, which is why UK health guidance treats it as lower-risk for the lungs than a joint. The caveat: "fewer toxicants" is not "safe." Vaporising is relatively new, so the long-term respiratory evidence is still thin, and it does nothing about the effects of THC itself: dependence, the mental-health picture, driving. UK guidance via FRANK frames it as lower-risk, not risk-free. If someone is going to keep using and wants to be easier on their lungs, a dry-herb vaporiser, plus dropping the tobacco (see Mixing), is one of the more meaningful changes they can make. Harm Reduction covers the rest.
Oil cartridges ("carts")
The other kind of vaping is completely different: a "cart" is a pre-filled pen containing concentrated cannabis oil. They're discreet, nearly odourless, and strong, and on the illegal market they're a gamble. Because the oil is opaque and sealed, you can't see or judge what's actually in it: the THC concentration, what it was cut with, or whether it's the brand it claims to be. Convincing fake packaging of well-known legal-market brands is common, and there's no testing behind an illicit cart at all.
EVALI: why illicit carts are the real risk
This isn't hypothetical. In 2019 a wave of serious, sometimes fatal lung injuries appeared, mostly in the US. It was named EVALI (e-cigarette or vaping product use-associated lung injury), and thousands were hospitalised. STRONGEvidence strength Investigators identified vitamin E acetate (a thickening/cutting agent added to illicit THC vaping oils) as strongly linked to the EVALI outbreak. It was found in lung-fluid samples from affected patients, and the cases were overwhelmingly tied to informally-sourced, illicit-market THC cartridges rather than regulated products. Key source: the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which led the investigation. The lesson that carried over: the danger wasn't vaping in the abstract. It was unregulated oil you can't see inside. That risk is exactly what an illicit-market cart still is. The blunt takeaway: an unlabelled, illegal-market cart is one of the least predictable things you can put in your lungs, precisely because the one thing you most need to know, what's in the oil, is the one thing you can't check.
Vaping isn't the same as cutting down
One last trap worth naming. Because vaping feels cleaner and is easier to do discreetly and often, it's easy to use more without noticing. Concentrates and carts are far stronger than flower, so the THC going in can quietly climb even as the smoke disappears. Switching from smoking to vaping can genuinely reduce the harm to your lungs, but it isn't the same as using less, and it isn't quitting. If cutting down is the actual goal, that's what the Quitting spoke is for.