Yeah, but your source also says that vaping rates are up, outstripping any decreases in smoking rates.

>It showed that 27.5% of high schoolers had vaped in the past 30 days in 2019, up from 20.8% the year before. Meanwhile, teen cigarette-smoking rates dropped from 8.1% to 5.8% in the same time period.

This seems to support what the parent post is saying:

> E.g. instead of fewer people having very expensive cancer care, vaping could still cause some damage and incur costs across more people.

Agreed that is a completely different problem than smoking, but still worth discussing since it is so addictive.

What i often seen is the number of teens who have vaped in the last year compared to habitual smokers

Do you know how long smoking was around before we had actual evidence that it was harmful?

(Hint: The rough order of magnitude of the time is centuries.)

Case studies can't spot harm faster than the harm occurs. The main harm from smoking is a significantly increased risk of lung cancer and other illnesses which can take decades to show up. That's why even with modern medicine advancing over the last century it took so long to nail down the health risks of smoking.

I used to smoke, and now I vape. My lungs function so much better now that it’s easily discernible to me that smoking irritates lungs far more than vaping.

Now, you could argue that there's little evidence of nicotine being harmful aside from being highly addictive (although even then there would be an economic argument to be made), but if there is any harm, the addictive nature will make sure that harm is long-lasting.

Modern laboratory science is no help in figuring out fast whether vaping is harmful, because we don't understand how the human body works well enough to do laboratory tests that will tell us. So we're reduced to basically what we used to show that smoking was harmful: long-term data collection and analysis.

> My lungs function so much better now that it’s easily discernible to me that smoking irritates lungs far more than vaping.

Saying that vaping is less harmful than smoking (which is probably true) is a much weaker statement than saying that there's zero indication that vaping is harmful, so there's no reason to worry about it, which is the claim I was responding to.

I can't tell if media is ruining society or if society has ruined media.

I suppose you could make a case that it's not that bad, or that it'll not happen again, or that patrons of brightly-lit stores have lower risks.

Instead, you're making a case that this proves the safety of all vaping products not tainted with this specific ingredient. That was not very convincing.