Five Pawns response to Cloud 9's Diacetyl and Acetyl propionyl tests

Yesterday I wrote about the test results Cloud 9 Vaping published showing incredibly high concentrations of Diacetyl (DA) and Acetyl Propionyl (AP) in Five Pawns' e-juices. Five Pawns have responded to all of this on their blog, and they have issued a Cease and Desist. I recommend reading their response here. The test results published on Cloud 9's blog is no longer available there and have been replaced by the following text: "The information relating to specific products withdrawn from sale as part of our testing/due diligence processes has been removed pending legal advice."

Five Pawns now link to several tests done of their juices and the results are very different from what Cloud 9 published. The tests they've published show very low or non-detectable amounts of DA and the highest PA result is 910. The Cloud 9 tests showed numbers above 2000 for PA. So which tests should we believe? Honestly I don't really know. The Cloud 9 test results seem almost to high to be true, but on the other hand Five Pawns would benefit from a lower number. That being said, I'm left with a feeling that Five Pawns' own tests (which are also done by independent labs) seems more in line with what I'd expect looking at the Vaporshark tests. In any case I think Five Pawns make a valid point when they state the following:

There is currently no standardized or approved methodology for testing e-liquids.  That needs to change.  We want to assure our retailers and customers that Five Pawns is 100% dedicated to working to develop a standard methodology by which all e-liquids can be tested and held accountable.

I also got an interesting comment yesterday saying that the Cloud 9 tests also differs from tests published by Mystic's own tests. Another interresting thing that might indicate that Five Pawns are actually working to reduce the amount diacetyl to a minimum is that their 2014 tests showed detectable and in one case (Perpetual Check) quite high amounts of diacetyl, while the newer tests show none or very low amounts.

For PA, Five Pawns' tests still shows quite high numbers, but Five Pawns are saying that they don't see this as a problem:

Further, we feel that efforts to translate industrial exposure limits to vaping exposure limits are flawed. It is clearly not the same.  If this were true, one would expect a population of individuals becoming sick from vaping, but this is not the case. There are no known publicly documented cases of anyone having respiratory issues related to vaping AP or diacetyl at the levels currently in e-liquids.  Many websites and blogs discuss this exact issue.  We are confident that studies and future data will show inhalation from vaping e-liquids should not be compared to industrial exposure limits.

Well, I'm not an expert on these substances so I don't really know, but I suspect neither are Five Pawns, so I find it kind of strange that they could be so confident. Is it really worth taking the risk? And wouldn't it take quite a while until we would see long term effects of vaping DA and AP? I have to agree with what Dr. Farsalinos said about the matter in an interview:

My suggestion is not to use Diacetyl or Acetyl for any reason. The only reason that you would use them is that it tastes better than the Diacetyl and Acetyl free liquids, aside from this there is no reason for these ingredients to be contained in e-liquid. It isn’t worth the risk. Everyone can decide for themselves, I’m not here to implement or enforce any decisions, it’s a personal decision. We need to educate the users with what we know about Diacetyl and let them decide for themselves.

The way I see it, until more research is done, proving that AP is harmless in e-liquid... or not, we are taking a risk vaping it. The good thing about all this fuzz is that awareness is raised which might lead to more research on the issue being done soon, and we as consumers are able to choose whether or not we are willing to take that risk. Because there is alternatives without DA and AP, some of them already very popular.

I see a lot of people angry at Five Pawns in forums, and in a way I understand it. I don't think Five Pawns is handling this in the right way, threatening to sue, which in my opinion just makes it look like Cloud 9 hit the nail bang on. But on the other hand we don't know all the details here either. We don't know what communication, if any, Five Pawns and Cloud 9 have had prior to the first results getting published. I think publishing such results without talking to Five Pawns first would be wrong as well. I can think of reasons why Cloud 9 would do that actually, seeing how much goodwill Vaporshark earned by publishing the results. But again, we don't know this, so there is no point discussing it.

As I said above, I think Five Pawns has a valid point in that "there is currently no standardized or approved methodology for testing e-liquids", and I really hope this will lead to the industry starting to working on good standards and methods for giving us test-results we can trust. As of now I get the feeling you can send your e-juice to different labs and get very different results back, which means it's difficult to trust any of them (but that doesn't mean that none of them are correct). I'm also hoping that we'll start seeing more research done on the effects of vaping these substances soon.