Cindi Clark, from Pennsylvania, US, says her 34-year-old son Danny Clark tragically died after becoming a frequent vape users. Cindi issued a warning and said vaping is a ‘false sense of security’
A devastated mum was left in “complete shock” after her son died from nicotine poisoning after he switched from cigarettes to vaping. Danny Clark, 34, from Pennsylvania, US, had been vaping for a little more than a year when he suffered from a heart attack.
His mother, Cindi Clark, said that he had attempted to quit smoking by vaping more regularly in October 2023, but it became so frequent that he kept his vape on his bedside. At night, when he’d wake up, he would puff on his vape, using it every 10 minutes during the day.
Danny sadly passed away on December 12 last year. However, his family were left waiting for answers for three months. In March, the family received the coroner’s report which concluded that Danny had passed away from a sudden cardiac arrest caused by nicotine poisoning.
Cindi, 62, says that the combination of how often the construction worker was vaping, as well as the high 50mg nicotine content of the vapes both contributed to his death. She says Danny thought that vaping was the “safer option” and would be “p***ed off” if he knew that it would eventually lead to his death.
The mum-of-eight believes more needs to be done to regulate the sale of vapes and their nicotine content and now wants to raise awareness of the potential dangers it can cause. Cindi said: “Danny was a smoker from a teenager, throughout all of his young adulthood. 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.
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“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 says Danny’s girlfriend reported that he had experienced slurred speech and loss of balance the night before he passed away. At first the family were left questioning whether he had been drinking more frequently than they were aware of – until it was discovered how much nicotine was in his system.
Cindi said: “That was sitting on my mind that that was very strange but we had a long period of waiting. They did the full autopsy and we had Danny’s funeral. 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.
“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. It was only three months but it felt like we waited for forever.
“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 [before he died], 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.
“Ultimately he went to bed and it caused a heart attack. The coroner told me that most people with vaping think of lung issues – problems breathing or popcorn lung – but Danny didn’t have any of that. Even with smoking [cigarettes], his lungs didn’t look terrible.
“His girlfriend said that he would have it on the nightstand next to him when he went to bed so if we woke up [in the night] he would vape. Danny thought vaping was the healthier option. He would have been so p***ed off [if he knew it would kill him] and I felt the same way. It felt like we were cheated.”
Cindi believes people are no aware of the levels of nicotine content in vapes and is calling for tighter regulation on their sale. Cindi said: “It’s in such a pure form I think it’s so much more addictive than even cigarettes are. 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. There’s no regulation on that at all so people are basically just getting addicted to this thing and it’s toxic and they can just keep putting more and more and more in their system without any idea of what’s happening as a result of it.
“I think there needs to be more awareness around nicotine poisoning itself rather than just the lung issues vaping can cause. 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.
“I definitely think more needs to be done to regulate the sale of vapes. I can’t imagine for really young people who vape what they’re doing to their bodies later on because they’re just putting more and more in and they don’t even know. But something needs to be done about it. It can’t keep going on like this.”
