Man who switched from smoking to vaping died of nicotine poisoning months later
Questions continue to loom over the cigarettes to vape switch as one man died 14 months after doing so.
Cindi Clark claims that her son Danny, who was just 34 when he passed away in December of last year, had smoked a pack of cigs every day since his teens but began vaping frequently in October 2023 in an attempt to appease his girlfriend and quit altogether.
Apparently, he'd be taking a puff every 10 minutes.
The evening before his shock death, Danny was suffering from slurred speech and loss of balance. He then went to sleep and never woke up.
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Cut to March 2025 and Cindi was informed by the coroner that Danny had died from a sudden cardiac arrest brought on by nicotine poisoning.
"Danny was a smoker from a teenager, throughout all of his young adulthood," recalled the grieving Pennsylvanian resident.
"You didn't really see Danny when he wasn't smoking - that was pretty common for him. He was a regular pack-a-day smoker. He tried to switch to vaping as a way of stopping smoking because his girlfriend didn't like the smell of it.
"His death came as a total shock. I received a call from my older son that Danny had passed away. It was a total shock - it was incomprehensible. All we knew was that he went to bed and he didn't wake up."
Cindi revealed how the combination of her late son's non-stop vaping and the product's 50mg nicotine content equally contributed to his death.
Prior to receiving the coroner's report, the family were wondering whether Danny had been getting heavily into alcohol and maybe that was the trigger.
"That was sitting on my mind that that was very strange but we had a long period of waiting. The medical examiner started really drilling into interviewing his girlfriend about all of his tobacco and vape use and asking her over and over again what it was that he was using - what the strength was and how often he was using it," remembered his mother.
"I couldn't understand why they were pushing in on it because they'd said his organs looked fine. It just wasn't making sense to me.
"Finally I got that call from the medical examiner that his blood levels of nicotine were so high that it was the cause of death.
"He said that the amount of nicotine was three times the level and he had suffered from nicotine poisoning.
"The impairment that he was showing were all signs of the nicotine being so high in the bloodstream that it started impairing his nervous system - he was slurring his speech, and he was having trouble with balance and coordination."
Cindi says the family feel 'cheated' as vaping is considered by millions of smokers as the healthier option, and she's now fighting for tighter regulation on nicotine content.
"Of course when you put anything in your body that's not natural, you know that you're taking a risk but I don't think the risks [of vaping] are spelled out as quickly as they should be. I also don't think that there's any kind of monitoring on all of the devices and the percentage of nicotine that they get in their system," she pointed out.
"It's a false sense of security - people think they're not coughing, or they don't have pain in their chest but people don't know what's happening in other areas. It can't keep going on like this."
Topics: Vaping
Dan Seddon