Of course, "dripping" - dropping your homemade vaping mix directly onto heated coils - threw any this splitting hairs out the window. But common sense informed anyone they saw vaping for the first time that that massive cloud exhaled into the air couldn't be a "safer" thing.
I'm not sure if you have a full understanding of what dripping is - there's still a wick, it didn't necessitate homemade juice more than any other kind of e-cigarette, and users didn't apply the mix to an already-heated coil. If anything the point of dripping was that it was less, not more prone to dry hits compared to the wicking technology common in tanks when dripping became common, which was why people did it - as you hint at with the "giant clouds" thing, it let them apply more power without dry hits, which was sort of the point.
There was a short period of time a few years ago where it was very popular to use "dripping" as a scare-word in the news media - I think it sounded enough like slang associated with illegal drug use (like "mainlining" or "tweaking") that it was effective in convincing people it was something fundamentally different/dangerous/sinister, when it was just a different mode of soaking a piece of cotton with liquid.
Now, that knife cuts both ways - if dripping is not fundamentally that different than normal "tank" use was/is, then it's subject to the same weaknesses - I.E. if the formaldehyde problem was shown to be an actual effect at non-dry-hit voltages, you'd expect it to be a problem in both cases.
With all that said, this article is less about "think e-cigarettes are safe, please" so much as it is being concerned with researches assuming their expertise generalizes into fields they don't know much about, and not doing the necessary legwork because of that assumption. That's better for everyone in every scenario; if e-cigarettes are safer than cigarettes, then we don't get false positives on danger, and if they are a horrible dangerous thing then we don't waste time with study results that don't mean anything because they don't reflect actual use scenarios.
As an afterthought: One thing that was more dangerous about dripping was something that was indirectly associated with it, though; it was typical for a long time (2-3 years) to drip on an "unregulated" battery unit, one that didn't have automatic electronic cut-off switches if the device was running at an amperage dangerous to the battery, or that would shut off demand to the lithium cell in an undercharge situation. So there were some documented cases where the devices would short and cause fires/explosions, similar to when Samsung Galaxy cell phones were exploding in 2016, but a bit worse because the device might be inside your mouth at the time of the explosion.
Of course, "dripping" - dropping your homemade vaping mix directly onto heated coils - threw any this splitting hairs out the window. But common sense informed anyone they saw vaping for the first time that that massive cloud exhaled into the air couldn't be a "safer" thing.
I'm not sure if you have a full understanding of what dripping is - there's still a wick, it didn't necessitate homemade juice more than any other kind of e-cigarette, and users didn't apply the mix to an already-heated coil. If anything the point of dripping was that it was less, not more prone to dry hits compared to the wicking technology common in tanks when dripping became common, which was why people did it - as you hint at with the "giant clouds" thing, it let them apply more power without dry hits, which was sort of the point.
There was a short period of time a few years ago where it was very popular to use "dripping" as a scare-word in the news media - I think it sounded enough like slang associated with illegal drug use (like "mainlining" or "tweaking") that it was effective in convincing people it was something fundamentally different/dangerous/sinister, when it was just a different mode of soaking a piece of cotton with liquid.
Now, that knife cuts both ways - if dripping is not fundamentally that different than normal "tank" use was/is, then it's subject to the same weaknesses - I.E. if the formaldehyde problem was shown to be an actual effect at non-dry-hit voltages, you'd expect it to be a problem in both cases.
With all that said, this article is less about "think e-cigarettes are safe, please" so much as it is being concerned with researches assuming their expertise generalizes into fields they don't know much about, and not doing the necessary legwork because of that assumption. That's better for everyone in every scenario; if e-cigarettes are safer than cigarettes, then we don't get false positives on danger, and if they are a horrible dangerous thing then we don't waste time with study results that don't mean anything because they don't reflect actual use scenarios.
As an afterthought: One thing that was more dangerous about dripping was something that was indirectly associated with it, though; it was typical for a long time (2-3 years) to drip on an "unregulated" battery unit, one that didn't have automatic electronic cut-off switches if the device was running at an amperage dangerous to the battery, or that would shut off demand to the lithium cell in an undercharge situation. So there were some documented cases where the devices would short and cause fires/explosions, similar to when Samsung Galaxy cell phones were exploding in 2016, but a bit worse because the device might be inside your mouth at the time of the explosion.