The reason there was an uproar is that there's been a huge surge in vaping by kids. People have been working tirelessly, for decades, to lower the stats on smoking among teens and when they see vaping spread through high schools like wildfire you can see why they'd be pissed off.

>The reason there was an uproar is that there's been a huge surge in vaping by kids... vaping spread through high schools like wildfire.

The article directly contradicts this statement and says it's a myth (number 5).

>Our latest report found no evidence so far to support the concern that e-cigarettes are a route into smoking among young people. UK surveys show that young people are experimenting with e-cigarettes, but regular use is rare and confined almost entirely to those who already smoke. Meanwhile, smoking rates among young people in the UK continue to decline.

The article is denying that e-cig leads to traditional smoking. That isn't the same as e-cig usage going up among young people which is virtually undeniable. That also means the comparisons of e-cig being safer than cigarettes is less important for this group since they were unlikely to smoke without the existence of e-cigarettes.

Your argument is that vape using teenagers were unlikely to have smoked. I think it's hard to tell if vaping is diverting teenagers who otherwise would have smoked, or simply creating a new habit.

There are some intertwingled effects where increased vape use (and decreased smoker population) might be contributing to the unfashionability of smoking, both among teenagers and in society at large.

Perhaps we could compare teenage smoking rates in countries where e-cigarettes are banned / unavailable versus countries where they are available. I don't have this data or any studies to point to, but I would be interested to know more.

The evidence is pretty strong when you look at the data, https://www.motherjones.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/blog_...

I don't know what the facts are regarding whether e-cigarettes are some kind of "gateway" to real ones. It doesn't seem realistic to me but it's the kind of thing that should be studied properly before jumping to conclusions.

Having said that, the concept does seem very strange to me as someone who used to smoke and switched to vaping because it's better in every way. It tastes better (with so much more variety in flavors), it's not as harsh on your throat and it doesn't leave an embarrassing odor on your body that non-smokers will judge you for.

The only reasonable conclusion I personally could come to is that people are more likely to switch from smoking to vaping and very rarely the other way around.

Again, this isn't scientific. Also, kids shouldn't vape or smoke. Period.

_But_, if they do vape and get addicted to nicotine at a young age, I personally find it preposterous that they would switch to cigarettes for their nicotine in large numbers.

We actually have no long term evidence that vaping specific mixes is safe with regards to cancer and lung disease endpoints.

Maybe safer in a sense that normal bullets are safer to get shot with than depleted uranium rounds...

Even tobacco chewing is associated with (oral) cancer. Lower rates than smoking and lung cancer, but still. Could use some data on pure nicotine.

The submitted article is about the UK, where vaping seems to be limited to ex smokers.

That's not the case in the US where a bunch of non smokers, often young people, started vaping.

But if vaping isn't unhealthy, is it really necessary to reduce vaping by teens? The primary reason for reducing smoking is that it's a huge risk factor that leads to negative health outcomes and expensive treatments. If it's not unhealthy (in the sense of causing respiratory disease or cancer), while I would prefer teens not smoke, I'm not nearly as concerned about vaping (however, I don't think we have nearly enough data about the long-term safety of vaping to really say for sure).

We're talking about teenagers using and becoming addicted to nicotine. Nicotine is completely inessential to life. Nicotine addicts (smokers or vapers) don't show any benefit in life outcome from it. All it does is put a drain on their finances just to make them feel better every time they experience cravings, cravings which don't exist in non-addicts.

That may not actually be true:

https://www.tampabay.com/news/health/study-finds-nicotine-sa...

Did they weight it against coronary disease endpoints, of which we have numerous studies, some even with pure nicotine?

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4958544/

All case mortality is worse in nicotine users.

Even if vaping were 100% risk free (which I doubt) I think it's certainly better that we don't get kids addicted to nicotine (or any substance). The misinformation doesn't help things though, if kids are going to vape/smoke I'd much rather see them take up nicotine free varieties, I'm not sure why a non-smoker would take up the nicotine ones at all, maybe because companies like juul don't sell them. As someone silly enough to take up smoking as a teenager I think a non-nicotine variety would have had a huge change on my life.

I've seen some strange reactions from family about my vaping (which I've used to cut down smoking significantly). The hypocrisy award goes to my sister claiming it was dangerous and targeted at kids (due to the flavors), she said this while downing an alcopop drink and running one of those essential oil vapour machines in the house.

Nothing is risk free.

If you have a large population then any small risk means harm will be caused to a small number of people.

If people who start vaping are ex smokers we can balance that tiny risk against the huge benefits of smoking cessation.

We can't do that same balancing for young non smokers who start vaping, so from a public health point of view we'd want to avoid it.

The uproar surrounding vaping by kids was merited as I claimed at the bottom of my post. The surrounding hysteria and misinformation were not merited.

For instance - no kids shouldn't vape nicotine.

But parents also shouldn't be misinformed and think their kids could end up in the hospital and die after only a few weeks of vaping because they saw a headline about how vaping is killing people which conveniently leave out the fact that this was only a problem with black market THC vape juice.

Also, wasn't the THC illness related to a specific type of vape pen sold in the dark market? They called them "Dank Vapes" and I believe they were being promoted in some sketchy Instagram accounts.

Some more information here: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2019/09/27/7651511...

I'm not aware of the specifics but my general understanding is that there were at least a few black market sellers involved with that debacle. Basically unqualified "street chemists" saying "yo, if we add some Vitamin E to this solution it'll be fire!" Sounds like these "Dank Vapes" were one of the bigger offenders though.

Basically what was (and still is) happening is people are buying wholesale packaging (carts and boxes) off of Ebay and one of those Aliexpress-like Chinese sites (I can't remember the name right now) and filling the carts with some low end THC (usually pesticide filled) and then a bunch of fillers (vitamin e, etc) and selling them for $30-60 as $X brand. They'll usually tell you they got them from CO or whatever is near by when in reality they either have no idea where they originated or they're making them at home with god knows what.

They get them in bulk for stupid cheap, often with various names like Dank Vapes (which actually is a real company but IIRC they passed someones pesticide lab test but were still labeled low quality) or whatever else you can imagine, there's a /r/fakecartridges subreddit. Edit: I should mention, Dank Vapes is one of the most common counterfeit brands to buy from these wholesalers I mentioned. That's an immediate red flag on a cart.

So.. at this point I just wouldn't trust any carts unless you're buying them from a REGULATED shop and they're a well known brand or making them yourself. I had no idea CA/CO and I assume WA allowed unregulated/unlicensed stores or items to be sold but that's also a thing.

They'll can contain stuff like pg (propylene glycol), k2, pesticides, vitamin-e which damages your lungs, etc and who knows what else, their goal is usually to cut it down to a smooth moving and clear gold THC oil. I've seen some of these go through basically an arms race where dealers want you to keep coming back so they spike them with stuff that gets you more "high" - k2, etc. You can basically drive through any major downtown and see the effects of people on k2 "spice" which is a generic term now because the original ingredient, JWH-018 was banned in the USA a few years ago so now even "k2" is some umbrella term for just random chemicals you're inhaling to get tossed. Lots of addicts are using this stuff and when you see one passed out and covered in puke while going to lunch downtown often they've smoked some random "k2" variant. It used to be a somewhat decent chemical for people who didn't want to pop drug tests (Military, etc), it was literally a synthetic cannabinoid. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JWH-018

People have been flocking to use carts instead of flower because they're just super easy to deal with. You can smoke them just about anywhere, bars, bathrooms, etc and most people wouldn't even notice.

Hopefully this isn't a scary level of detail. Anyone who is doing this stuff already knows the process, hopefully this educates people who are STILL buying these random cartridges and they stop buying them. Do NOT buy what you don't know.

edit: There are people who make legit carts at home, I don't want to sound like nobody does that.

Without looking, I often see negative findings about vaping. In the past few weeks alone we have:

"Vaping changes oral microbiome, increasing risk for infection" https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-02-vaping-oral-microbiom...

"Vapers show chemical changes in their genome linked to cancer" https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-02-vapers-chemical-genom...

>The amount of misinformation on e-cigarettes/vaping nicotine has been absolutely infuriating.

I wonder if tobacco companies are behind most of the misinformation about vaping. While I'm sure most if not all of them have e-cigarette product lines, the margins have to be terrible compared actual cigarettes. Folks into vaping aren't buying their nicotine and flavors from these companies.

Profit margins are terrible compared to regular cigarettes. A pack can be manufactured for $0.06. You have a built in customer base with huge profit margins and massive brand loyalty. While tobacco bought into ecigs, they can't keep up with tech. As soon as smoking is technology, then the brands can be disrupted. Better to kill off vaping.

The closed systems that "Big Tobacco" are into - the stuff that sells at corner stores and gas stations, with prefilled pods/cartomizers - is incredibly high-profit. I'd look at the tobacco industry if the push was towards closed systems, but they seem to be largely singled out as the enemy.

There are two better places to look: the pharma industry and their collection of minimally-successful smoking cessation products; and governments that are looking at enormous revenue loss, especially those that have already spent funds from the Master Settlement Agreement. (It may be worth noting, as well, that the loudest anti-smoking orgs are also getting their funding from the MSA. Don't get me wrong, I'd like to see combustible tobacco disappear, but there are people of the like of Stanton Glantz who've rather enjoyed the funding, and who have demonstrably lied in their opposition to vaping.)

Big tobacco are investing heavily, so I doubt it: https://www.investopedia.com/news/which-company-behind-popul...

Like I mentioned in my post I dont doubt they have skin in the e-cig game. However the music industry is also heavily invested in online streaming but I'm sure they would all love to go to the days of $20 CDs.

Exactly. The big tobacco companies, while playing in the e-cig space, would MUCH rather see it go away. They completely own the tobacco market. They have a never ending stream of competitors in the e-cig space.

I've considered this. There's also a huge existing industry and lobbyists whose existence depend solely on the notion that smoking is bad. If everyone stops smoking and starts vaping, they've got nothing to do anymore, no one to get donations or funding from. They're incentivized to create a new boogyman to fight against (e-cigarettes) in order to remain relevant.

I'm thinking of organizations like Truth, D.A.R.E., that sort of thing.

That's all a bit conspiratorial though and I have no evidence to support it.

To be fair, while I agree that vaping is with current evidence probably better than smoking, given the relative novelty of vaping and lag in cancer I think we won’t know if there is a risk of lung cancer with any certainty for a decade or more (unless anyone can point out some evidence otherwise which I’d be grateful for).

To be fair, Juul is a spinoff of one of the largest marijuana vape companies (Pax), so it's not a total non sequitur.