Brilliant Fiction and the Curious Case of Our Lungs

I call this post Brilliant Fiction, not because I love making things up, but because I love examining the strange stories we tell ourselves about reality. Fiction is how humans test ideas before they become facts. But today I want to talk about facts, messy ones, half-known ones, the kind still drying in the sun.

Lately, vaping has been getting hammered in the press. Some of it deserved. Some of it lazy. The headline version is simple: lungs were made for air, not vapor. True enough. But humans have been putting things into their lungs since the dawn of fire. Smoke has always been a tool, a medicine, a signal, a ritual.

The ancient Greeks did not just burn incense for atmosphere. At Delphi, priestesses inhaled sulfurous fumes rising from cracks in the earth to enter trance states and deliver prophecies. These were not party tricks. They were spiritual technologies of their time. Long before modern anesthesia, people inhaled ether and other vapors to numb pain during surgery. Tobacco arrived later, changing the world and not for the better. It altered perception, sure, but it also hooked billions of people into a slow-motion disease.

Now we actually have the data. Tobacco causes cancer. No mystery left. The benefits are psychological, not medical. Relaxation, focus, ritual. All real, but so is the damage. The tobacco industry did very well. Humans, not so much.

Cannabis sits in a different lane. THC alters perception. It can relax you, expand your thinking, sometimes produce mild hallucinations or emotional insights. It is an intoxicant, no different in principle than alcohol or caffeine, just playing on different receptors. Useful in some contexts, harmful in others. Set and setting still matter, just like they always have.

Where things get interesting is the non-psychoactive side of cannabis.

CBD.

CBG.

CBN.

These cannabinoids do not get you “high,” yet people swear by them. Inflammation relief. Muscle relaxation. Better sleep. Calmer nervous systems. Right now most of this evidence is anecdotal, meaning real people reporting real experiences, but not yet locked into gold-standard clinical trials.

And that matters.

Because cannabis has been reclassified. Research gates are opening. Labs are running studies that were illegal ten years ago. Every week something new drops. Not miracles, not hype, just data trickling in. Enough to say this: dismissing cannabinoids as “just weed” is like calling aspirin “just tree bark.” History is full of plant medicines we mocked before we measured.

So let’s talk delivery systems.

Why lungs instead of stomach?

Why vapor instead of pills?

Why inhale at all?

Here’s the overlooked part: lungs self-titrate.

When you inhale vapor or smoke, your body decides how much is too much. You cough. You stop. You pause. The effect hits fast, and you adjust in real time. It is a feedback loop. Primitive, yes, but elegant.

Your stomach?

It absorbs everything.

You swallow a gummy or a capsule, you are locked in. Too much? Too bad. Now you wait. Digestion is slow, unpredictable, influenced by what you ate earlier, how fast your metabolism runs, whether you slept well. That is why edibles sneak up on people and knock them sideways. No feedback. No brakes.

Injection?

That is the fast lane. No buffer at all.

Hospitals use it because precision matters. But for casual wellness? That is a sledgehammer where a screwdriver would do.

So inhalation sits in the middle. Fast feedback. Self-regulating. Ancient tech wearing modern clothes.

Now here is the uncomfortable truth.

Vaping devices are not all equal.

Some are trash.

Cheap metals.

Mystery plastics.

Overheated coils.

Bad engineering.

Those deserve criticism. Heated oil passing through unknown alloys is not smart. The device matters as much as the substance. A ceramic path is not the same as a nickel coil. Temperature control is not a gimmick, it is chemistry. Burn compounds and you create new ones, some of them toxic.

So when the news screams “Vaping is dangerous,” the real sentence should be:

“Poorly designed devices plus unknown liquids plus no temperature control is dangerous.”

That is a different story.

We learned this with food.

With water.

With medicine.

Quality matters.

Humans have always used their lungs as a gateway. Fire taught us that. Ritual taught us that. Medicine taught us that. Abuse taught us that too. The trick is not pretending inhalation is new, it is learning how to do it intelligently.

Right now cannabinoids sit in a strange place.

Not medicine.

Not poison.

Not fully understood.

Like explorers at the edge of a map, we see shapes but not borders.

Are CBD, CBG, and CBN miracles?

No.

Are they useless?

Also no.

They are tools. And like any tool, they depend on context, dose, intention, and delivery.

Medium thrives on curiosity, not certainty.

So here is mine:

What if the real future is not banning inhalation, but engineering it better?

Cleaner paths.

Precise temperatures.

Measured doses.

Transparent materials.

We learned to purify water.

We learned to pasteurize milk.

We learned to sterilize surgical tools.

Why would we not do the same for what we breathe?

The lungs are ancient.

Our technology is not.

It is time they met in the middle.