Ideally, you'd get all the addicts to move to e-cigs, and everybody else to not use either one. Not that I have any brilliant ideas how to accomplish that.

It should also be noted that abstinence only sex ed usually involves many outright lies, such as that sex outside of marriage is objectively immoral, that waiting until marriage prevents STIs, vastly exaggerated figures for the risk of disease and failure rates of birth control, etc. Whereas smoking is actually dangerous, and "don't smoke, it'll greatly increase your chances of getting these various horrible diseases" is actually truthful.

All I ever see is picture of black lungs, messages of certain cancer and death. To me, this is like those people who have pictures of dead fetuses for their anti-abortion message. It's extreme, and sets of red-flags in my brain.

I fucking love smoking. It gives me a way to chill out and unwind for 10-15 minutes. It's great for my mental health, because I won't do it in my house... I have to get away from the computer, I have to stop what I'm doing. It gets me away from everything.

"Light and intermittent smoking carry nearly the same risk for cardiovascular disease as daily smoking.... In addition, the risk of ischemic heart disease in light-smoking men and women aged 35 to 39 years who smoke 1 to 4 cigarettes per day is nearly 3 times that of a nonsmoker."

http://circ.ahajournals.org/content/121/13/1518

There's nothing wrong with taking a calculated risk, but it is a risk.

I expect it's still a significant health risk, but I've never seen studies on people who don't smoke daily.

How the damage happens is not important, but consider the possibility of slowly accumulating effects because of a slow rehabilitation potential.

Me too. I haven't had a cigarette in over a decade, but I remain hopeful that modern science will find a cure for cancer and other smoking-related diseases during my lifetime, so I can resume smoking again. This probably sounds nuts to non-smokers and I won't bother explaining it any further.

As an aside, I am one of many who tried e-cigarettes when they came out because they were very convenient, and ended up quitting. They were new and not banned anywhere yet, so I could 'smoke' even more. I never liked smoking indoors and do not like the stale tobacco smell so they were great. For reasons I don't really understand my tobacco habit gradually tapered off and I no longer smoke anything, but I do miss it.

I think I have heard this from a couple of e-cigarette using colleagues: once the switched to e-cigarettes stopping became easier.

(One of them explained that he used weaker and weaker refills until it was basically just water. I guess at that point it just feels stupid.)

First of all, I envy you. You're a "chipper" and make up about 5% of the population of smokers. I on the other hand am in the Majority. It's either zero or a pack a day. The black lung photos didn't contribute to my cessation. Instead I had to grow up and decide I didn't like feeling like garbage. That said, If the black lung applies to that 95% of us that can't stop at just one, it's probably the right message.

5% source: http://articles.latimes.com/1996-09-18/news/ls-44883_1_heavy...

Though I think the true implication is "don't have sex until an impulse comes along to do so, that is strong enough to completely drown out the voice of your superego in your head. And then—if the impulse really is that strong—the 'proper' order to do things is to get married to that person, and then have sex with them."

Getting back to the original topic, we need to know more information about the other additives in e-cigs as well. There are kids at my child's high-school that smoke non-nicotine e-cigs supposedly because they like the taste (they come in fruity flavors).

If the risk profile for cigarettes is just barely too high for a non-smoker then e-cigarettes may be the last 'push' Although this does require some assumptions about why individuals start smoking cigarettes in the first place.

In any case, it seems like much of the e-cig debate comes down to this. Those in favor see it as an alternative to cigarettes for smokers. Those against see it as a way to get non-smokers to consume tobacco.

I expressed skepticism that burning random chemicals and inhaling the resulting smoke is healthy. Good to have some evidence to back that up.

Why? If it doesn't have health costs, there's not much reason you should care. This study isn't even on the same planet as measuring health costs.

To the first order of approximation, nicotine addiction is bad for your health because it causes you to burn and inhale plant matter, the common delivery methods of nicotine are horribly unhealthy but if you're talking about nicotine as such (for example, through a transdermal patch) then it doesn't really have significant adverse health effects.

Everything in it is evidenced by as much research as they can get.

https://www.surgeongeneral.gov/library/reports/50-years-of-p...

I agree that it's a bad idea to take nicotine in any form unless you need to, but it seems that nicotine is one of the less harmful parts of tobacco.

For chewing tobacco it's probably not the nicotine that's causing cancer, but all the other stuff.

But more to the point, there was little reason to believe it would cause cancer in the first place, compared to any other random compound. Its association with tobacco is a wash, because other compounds, like aldehydes, are completely sufficient to explain the carcinogenicity of smoking tobacco.

For analysis of nicotine as such, you can refer to the known side-effects of nicotine dermal patches; they're well researched, approved by FDA, etc - the place of application can get skin irritation and itchiness; overdose of nicotine can get dizziness, headache, rapid heartbeat, and nausea (same as for too much nicotine through other means), but they're not known to cause cancer or other significant damage despite being used by very many people over very long time.

Just like a light hit on the head would increase awareness, but increasing the force and repetition of the hits on the head is not well advised, when the effect wears off after overuse - to say nothing about the immediate effect of getting hit.

The perceived short term benefits are only secondary effects. And with regards to nicotine, all the arguments in favor are to be treated as extraordinary claims.

I wonder how the testing methodology works.

Nicotine also has benefits - most notably, it is a stimulant. The question is what tradeoffs you are making by consuming nicotine.

https://www.gwern.net/Nicotine

I'd suppose other chemicals in traditional cigarettes fill very similar roles.

Imagine you want your house to smell like coffee. So you heat a baking tray until it is white hot. Then drip coffee onto the tray (don't actually try this). Much of the coffee will be vaporized with the water in it providing a nice aroma. But some of it will be in direct contact with the tray and will burn and have a nasty smell. The hotter the tray is, the more the coffee gets burned and transformed into not-coffee. E-cigs are like that, except one doesn't notice the nasty aroma of the accidental chemicals.

Same goes for almost everything.

And in that cotext such dismissive reaction makes sense to me.

That agreement isn't working very well, lots of sellers will sell to people who say "I've never smoked".

It's a shame, because that's the kind of thing that could force more regulation.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-39523857

> The Royal Society for Public Health (RSPH) said 87% of shops were knowingly or unwittingly prepared to sell e-cigarettes to people who have never smoked or vaped.

The whole idea seems kind of pointless. If someone want to vape, let them.

I think there's been a little bit of research showing some young people moving to smoking from vaping.

The authors' title, as it appears in the journal the study was submitted to is "Automated 3-D Printed Arrays to Evaluate Genotoxic Chemistry: E-Cigarettes and Water Samples" (see http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acssensors.7b00118).

The "E-cigarettes ‘Potentially as Harmful as Tobacco Cigarettes’" title comes from "UConn Today", a university news site.

Just to be clear that the academics didn't choose this silly title.

Based on your above comment, it sounds like you think that they tested for nicotine specifically. They did not. From the press release:

There are potentially hundreds of chemicals in e-cigarettes that could be contributing to DNA damage, Kadimisetty says. Rather than test for all of them, the UConn team targeted three known carcinogenic chemicals found in tobacco cigarettes. They then loaded their device’s microwells with specific enzymes that would convert those chemicals into metabolites. If these chemicals were in the sample, the test gave them a reading for genotoxicity. If the chemicals were not present, there would be no reaction.

Based on that paragraph, and other sentences throughout the press release, my interpretation is that their findings are that e-cigarettes are potentially as harmful as cigarettes. Some of the comments in this thread make it sounds like the researchers showed that just the nicotine in e-cigarettes is as potentially harmful as just the nicotine in cigarettes, but that's not my reading.

E-cigarette liquid, at it's base, has two chemicals: propylene glycol and nicotine.

Anything other than that is a flavor additive, or a smoke volume additive (glycerine). PG and Glycerine are extensively studied and safe for human consumption, PG is actually used in nebulizer treatments for people with asthma.

Furthermore, a proper e-cigarette doesn't cause a chemical change in the liquid- it's only a physical state change. That precludes the oxidation reactions that characterize tobacco smoking.

So my skepticism is really tweaked by this article. Yes, someone could potentially add hundreds of flavoring chemicals. Definitely room for a problem there, so address that. The essential cigarette is only two to three chemicals.

http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acs.est.6b01741

A successful vaporization requires temperatures of 150-200°C with a max of 250 for self-experimenting enthusiasts.

So when these studies include the chemicals caused by pyrolysis, they're not studying realistic e-cigarette use.

A good analogy would be studying the consumption of improperly distilled alcohol that included methanol- EXCEPT you wouldn't be able to taste the methanol in bad liquor, and you'd absolutely be able to taste burnt e-liquid.

Which of course doesn't mean it is good for us but I think establishes that the danger from that is probably less scary than that sounds

While I'm not sure what temperature these devices target, what I know is that the researchers found that longer into a usage session the coils became hotter and produced larger quantities carcinogens.

My understanding though is that while e-cigarettes do produce carcinogens, they produce less quantities than regular cigarettes do.

I guess you had the link to the survey ready and just forgot to paste it. Would you find that again, please?

So, yes, I agree: this warrants much further study. I have not come to any conclusions, but I have updated my priros. But, independent of that, I felt some comments in this thread were misrepresenting what the research did.

I went to an 80 year old's birthday party recently and he has been smoking since WW2 or thereabouts. His advice - get a pipe and buy tobacco from a proper tobacconist. In that way he avoids all the chemical horrors of regular hand rolling tobacco. Normally this stuff has flavours in it, stuff to make it burn and stuff to keep it moist. The difference is huge.

My advice to the government is to ban adulterated tobacco products so only dry rolling tobacco is for sale. Then to apply a minimum age to buy tobacco with this age rising one year every other year. In a relatively short period of time tobacco will become as rare as pipe smoking is.

Pipe tobacco isn't that much "safer", either.

So even if I smoke 30% more than I used to I'm probably consuming significantly less harmful chemicals in the end, including nicotine. Which means it will probably be easier to quit vaping than cigarettes, especially as I could taper the nicotine percentage from 6mg -> 0mg over a period of time without adjusting behaviour.

I knew a friend with a much, much worse smell allergy where a smell of the right color dye would cause seizures and possibly kill them.

On the other hand I hardly ever felt any vapour smell from e-cigarettes.

Also... Smoke is a mixture of gas and solid materials, while vapour is a mixture of gas and liquid.

I think using precise terms in a debate brings extra clarity into it, so instead of inventing poetic proxy terms, like e-smoke, let's just use the more commonly understood word "vapour" instead.

http://www.jneurosci.org/content/25/38/8593

To combat this, tobacco companies put some sugar on the filter tip and I believe better tobacco in the very tip of the cigarette, this way the first hit is better than all of the others.

It might just be the placebo effect that makes it taste better after, but who cares?

I read a study showing that the absorption rate of nicotine is about half through an e-cigarette, because of other chemicals in normal cigarettes that increase the rate.

Ultimately, like smoking, using e-cigarettes is smelly and unhealthy. Regulators aren't going to allow for them to be presented as harmless because they aren't and science isn't going to ignore the harmful effects because they do exist. The only reason e-cigarettes are not banned in all the places cigarettes are is because the rules are about burning tobacco and politics makes it difficult to change the rules.