And that's a bad thing?
What the DEA (a totally different governmental organization with different motivations and biases) thinks about marijuana is reprehensible, however.
Exactly. They have approved 3 niche pharmaceutical industry replacements. Meanwhile they have kept their head in the sand regulating the 26 state cannabis industry, and we have no universal standards for contaminants, potency, etc. beyond state imposed regulations.
The CBD industry, which has been commercialized in most states, is also totally unregulated.
If your product causes harm in any way—regardless of the benefits—you're going to have a difficult time getting regulatory approval. It will also greatly affect access to the product, as not everyone has access to good doctors, and most items that are FDA-regulated requires prescriptions.
For a product which is a superior, healthier option to cigarettes, it's a massive regulatory burden that could kill the business. I can't imagine anyone would defend that as preferable to the status quo.
Question stands, is that a bad thing?
Besides not everything FDA approved becomes a prescription medication. On topic; nicotine gums and patches as smoke cessation products are widely available as OTC.
In this case, we would certainly have to consider the potentially increased harm of non-smokers taking up vaping to assess the overall harm being done, but I see the merits of the basic argument at least.
The first nicotine gum, Nicorette, began as a prescription-only product in the US.
Long story short, I can imagine a lot of valid arguments pointing in every which way here.
Why do people have to stick their noses in things that don’t affect them?
There are countless products from weight loss to joint pain to "improve your memory" that sidestep the issue with those 9 simple words. I don't see why it would be any different for Juul.
Nicotine will count as an active ingredient, you can't just slap these 9 words to any random drug and just sell it over the counter.
I don’t think this is true. I can buy Nicolette all over the place without a doctors note. In the US at least.
Oh and it tastes like shit, to save the children.
I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but I'll just point out the observation that there are a lot of perverse incentives to keep the tobacco money flowing, public health be damned. Hell, remember back 2019 public health officials were running made-up 'e-cigarettes are causing lung injury' scare which turned out to be entirely caused by contaminated black market THC cartriges? SF still hasn't walked back their e-cigarette ban that led to a doubling of tobacco use by high schoolers[1].
To give an idea of where priorities are, the state of California does 10x the number of checks to make sure stores are paying their cigarette taxes as they do to make sure stores aren't selling to minors.
[1] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/...
https://vaping360.com/vape-news/105656/how-will-the-pmta-dea...
If that’s not enough detail let me know, I’m happy to dig up other old articles for you. This small business destroying charade by the fda has been well documented and publicized. Though not as well as the fear mongering about children juuling.
Why is that fear-mongering? My anecdotal evidence is that it's rampant with teens. Do you have any stats that are not anecdotal so I can educate myself?
They went back to cigarettes.
Mission accomplished I guess.
Furthermore it is much more socially unacceptable and awareness of the harms of cigarettes has never been higher.
Insofar as teens if eciggs were to become as hard to get as heroin tomorrow nicotine addition of teens all cause would be liable to decrease because your mom is absolutely going to know your smoking actual ciggs and have something to say in the matter.
I once knew an adult smoker who smoked about 1/2 a pack a day. She also didn’t want to smell like it, he had methods she employed that would leave absolutely no smell on her.
If your kid wants to hide smoking analogs then they can easily, just stand in front of a fan and wash your hands and face after.
What you say is correct you could certainly decrease the chances of being caught but on net out of 100 smoking teens 90 will end up getting caught trying to smoke real ciggs whereas hiding a non scented vape is so extremely trivial that the situation is reversed. 90 will escape detection.
There is a distinct difference between those two circumstances.
My wife when she was smoking would go all day without smoking only to smoke at home. Also one of my school grade friends was a smoker at 13 or so, and he only smoked at home.
Also vape’s have a smell, it’s just not as pungent.
What you’re really saying is you can’t watch your kid 24/7, you don’t trust them, didn’t teach them why smoking is bad and now you want everybody else to suffer.
I think the entire industry ought to be taxed out of existence like boiling a frog not because I want other people to "suffer" but because I don't want people to suffer.
I don't even know what to make of this. How many other things do humans do that are dangerous that we all have to pay for?
> They have clearly marketed themselves to young people who otherwise wouldn't have taken up smoking.
Why do you think this? Is it because of flavors? Do you not realize how many adults prefer flavored vape liquid? Or is it cause they ran commercials?
> I think the entire industry ought to be taxed out of existence like boiling a frog not because I want other people to "suffer" but because I don't want people to suffer.
So then you naturally try to force your opinion onto others. Why has society devolved into forcing others to do what we want? Do you think banning vapes will keep people from returning to cigarettes? Do you think addiction is just a switch one can easily turn on and off? You will cause more damage than good "taxing them out of existence like a boiling frog" (seriously wtf with that statement?) than realizing they are helping people and just minding your own business.
Because the only way to provide for the health of a society is with socialized medicine. Most of the civilized world has settled on this conclusion and even we have basically half and half.
In that context allowing people to be stupid as they want to be is ultimately allowing the stupid people to spend everyone's money.
Is this a country you want to live in?
Also we don’t yet have, and hopefully will never get, socialized medicine. Why do we prepare society by starting to implement the boot on the neck when we’re not even sure if it’s needed yet? Seems a bit assumptive and preemptive no?
Below you accuse stories about harm to children of "pushing an agenda"; might this be pushing one?
Basically, the wrong people were making money, and the regulators fixed that. Now the money is flowing to the right people and no one gives a shit that teen smoking rates went back to higher than they were before vaping. Harm reduced, a slow clap to our regulators.
People like to go to both extremes wrt. vaping - "but it creates new addicts" vs. "but it's effective tool for breaking addiction", forgetting about the biggest benefit vaping brings: letting smokers who don't want to quit to keep smoking, without risking lung cancer.
I'm definitely against marketing vaping to non-smokers. But I'm fine with converting existing smokers to vaping without any talk about quitting, because smoking e-cigarettes is strictly better than smoking analog ones.
I started smoking when I was 18 (2004), picked up some of the first vapes in 2009 (they were horrible), and finally stopped smoking in 2012. But I don’t want to stop vaping. I don’t like the modern mainstream ecigs like juul (I mix my own liquid and build my own coils on a dual 18650 battery device), but I’m just glad that vaping exists, because, if all my fruitless attempts at quitting were any indication, otherwise I’d still be smoking a pack a day.
[0] https://newsinhealth.nih.gov/2020/05/risks-vaping
[1] https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/wellness-and-preventi...
[1]: "Vaping Is Less Harmful Than Smoking, but It’s Still Not Safe"
[1] has some problems. It seems to be conflating the vitamin E acetate issue with vaping in general. ("However, there has also been an outbreak of lung injuries and deaths associated with vaping. As of Jan. 21, 2020, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) confirmed 60 deaths in patients with e-cigarette, or vaping, product use associated lung injury (EVALI).") The section on "Research Suggests Vaping Is Bad for Your Heart and Lungs" focuses on nicotine. Which raises your blood pressure. And not much else, according to other sources.
I think the evidence is out as to what, if any, are the harms of vaping. But it’s not arguable that it’s better for you than smoking.
[0] https://www.newscientist.com/article/2120440-switching-from-...
If impossible meat makes vegans start eating burgers, you can't just argue "well, it's still better than meat".
> I'm definitely against marketing vaping to non-smokers.
But this is the whole point, they do attract non-smokers. They should explicitly detract them instead.
This is magical thinking. Do we apply this requirement to healthier alternatives in any other market?
For example: I really like McDonalds fries, but I mostly don't eat them because they're unhealthy. However anecdotally some "heavy users" eat them 3 to 5 times a week.
Imagine if McDonalds introduced "Beyond Fries" tomorrow, equivalent in every salient way, but less unhealthy (say, baked potato-level healthy). Would anyone apply the standard above, calling for it to be _only_ a "fry cessation product" for heavy users, and expecting it to explicitly repel the abstaining-for-health-reasons users like me?
I can't see how it's even possible to achieve both goals at once. A healthier alternative to _anything_ is going to draw some former abstainers-for-health-reasons into the market. And smoking has a _lot_ of abstainers-for-health-reasons.
By all means let's call vaping a smoking cessation product, but I'm not sure it's reasonable to assume that we can have our cake and eat it too here.
Edit: sense
Attitudes around smoking in general are grounded deeply in magical thinking. People have been raised on anti-smoking rhetoric so deep, with such little cultural push back toward sanity, that it's tough for most people to think let alone discuss the subject with any objectivity.
But by that logic, smoking could be called a weight loss product.
Other people have a more complex definition, which precludes cigarettes from being considered a health product, despite their appetite-suppressing properties.
And it was! The difference is that smoking isn't really healthier than obesity, so it's not a very good way to lose weight overall.
No it’s not. Meat isn’t addictive. People don’t “quit” meat and develop a habit of impossible burgers. People don’t wake up every morning feeling shitty about enjoying meat.
I fully support vegan and vegetarian lifestyles. To compare tobacco to meat is foolish.
I do.
> but it doesn't do anything to get you off your nicotine addiction, which people usually mean by "smoking cessation product"...
OK but what does this have to do with expressing ourselves accurately?
How can a society allow marketing vaping as a healthier way to smoke without allowing marketing that makes non-smokers think vaping is a healthy way to smoke?
(Especially considering that the marketers are eager to market to non-smokers.)
It's all about power.
There are so many things it would be useful to quantify and compare:
Does anybody know the difference between the percentage of non-nicotine users who begin smoking cigarettes and the percentage who begin vaping? It sounds like the percentage for vaping is higher, but how much higher? Is it as much higher as the risk of dangerous health complications smoking has over vaping?
Never mind the question of why nicotine addiction is so dangerous it must be prevented on a federal level, but alcohol addictions aren't? How much more dangerous is nicotine than alcohol?
Important distinction: I didn't say anything about banning sales, just marketing, which we've already done for both smoking and alcohol.
> How much more dangerous is nicotine than alcohol?
According to the CDC, "cigarette smoking is the leading cause of preventable death in the United States...causes more than 480,000 deaths each year in the United States" while "excessive alcohol use is responsible for more than 95,000 deaths in the United States each year, "
https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/heal...
https://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/features/excessive-alcohol-death...
Edit: as for vaping specifically, the risks are not yet fully known, but some health authorities argue "a growing body of evidence shows that smoking e-cigarettes, or vaping, may be even more dangerous than smoking cigarettes".
https://www.nm.org/healthbeat/healthy-tips/emotional-health/...
Inhaling smoke is very bad for you. Lots of people die this way in fires. Like, you cut the victims open and there is soot in their lungs. So, no surprise smoking cigarettes is also a bad idea even if it's less bad than being in a literal burning building.
Nicotine is poisonous, but so is booze. There may be other things about vaping which are bad for you, but it seems pretty clear that the main problem is the nicotine, which is why people are doing it anyway, so, fine.
Booze has another important difference though: The ones drinking aren't always the ones dying. That can be because they're impaired while operating machinery (e.g. someone has "a few beers" then drives home, next morning they don't remember anything about how they got home, but there's a blood red stain on the bumper and someone else is found dead in a ditch) or they might just become violent and cause deliberate harm to others.
Would you agree that exposure to THC, in itself, causes serious lung injury?
(Yes, I know, vitamin E acetate (an oil) in cannabis vaping products was likely the cause of a number of cases of lung injury.)
Also, "An FDA analysis of e-cigarettes from two leading brands found that the samples contained carcinogens and other hazardous chemicals, including diethylene glycol, which is found in antifreeze." Diethylene glycol is also used as "a humectant for tobacco, cork, printing ink, and glue. It is also a component in brake fluid, lubricants, wallpaper strippers, artificial fog and haze solutions, and heating/cooking fuel" as well as an industrial solvent. This statement is largely meaningless unless you know how much is in there: "The U.S. Code of Federal Regulations allows no more than 0.2% of diethylene glycol in polyethylene glycol when the latter is used as a food additive. The Australian government does not allow DEG as a food additive; it is only allowed at less than 0.25% w/w of DEG as an impurity of polyethylene glycol (PEG) even in toothpaste." (Wikipedia)
The question was about nicotine; it is not generally the _nicotine_ in cigarettes that kills you. That's what keeps you smoking them (to a large extent) but it's not what kills you.
If you divorce nicotine from its problematic delivery systems, nicotine itself is a pretty good drug (albeit very addictive). It's potentially protective against diseases like Parkinson's and Alzheimer's, it's associated with weight loss, and it improves short term memory and attention.
It's also great in combination with caffeine, and it speeds up caffeine metabolism.
I first got interested in the nootropic properties of nicotine long before I took up the pen when I came across Gwern's article on it. In particular, the possibility of reinforcing habits using it was the biggest thing that made me look into it. However, he uses gum instead.
Juul is a product of one of those big tobacco companies.
These are conversations that belong in a physicians office. Advertising is a scam on both sides and destroys instead of creates value for humanity. Historians will look back upon advertising the way many look back upon slavery.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/12/health/juul-vaping-lawsui...
What's the lastname of this Society guy?
It's kind of hypocritical to wrap your personal wishes and desired in the veil of common good, care for others, etc.
Legislature would be its lastname, I suppose. As in [nation] legislature, [state] legislature, etc.
Alarmingly there are also many people, especially young people, who believe that vaping is safe, and if educating them is "consent manufacturing" then let's manufacture some consent on this issue.
This is precisely how I remember e-cigarettes being marketed when I first heard about them 10 years ago. I was a smoker then, so my ears perked up.
They clearly switched their marketing to target kids who didn't even smoke to begin with. 'Juul' was synonymous with teenagehood during the mid-2010s, at least if my recollection of IG memes from that time are accurate.
A young priest asked his bishop, “May I smoke while praying?”... The answer was an emphatic “No!”
Later, when he sees an older priest puffing on a cigarette while praying, the younger priest scolded him, “You shouldn’t be smoking while praying! I asked the bishop, and he said I couldn’t do it!”
“That’s odd,” the old priest replied. “I asked the bishop if I could pray while I’m smoking, and he told me that it was okay to pray at any time!”
I first heard it from an Alan Watts talk, but couldn't easily find the quote, so I used one from r/jokes, at ”https://amp.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/3q2h1a/a_young_pries...
There have always been products to battle nicotine addiction. They should compare this to those.
Or we could trust the adults who chose one product over the other to make those decisions.
Note: this came after initial warnings from the FDA years ago that they were going to ban the product unless.
I think there's a real attitude among a small number of non-smokers that quitting without some form of sustained suffering is "doing it wrong" and that addicts of any kind deserve pain to atone for the sin of being an addict. This attitude is extremely unhelpful and should be condemned along with all other types of moral puritanism in my opinion.
I was always confused about that particular part of smoking culture, it's got this mixed message of bad-boy persona and defiance yet it's very much a corporate curated habit. Nobody should have ended up addicted to nicotine, it was entirely unnecessary, and now here we are again even after all those lessons learned.
I am glad it's not nearly as harmful as cigarettes, but people are once again being sucked into an addiction in order to buy product and that stinks.
Juul and their competitors were genius product managers paired with irresponsible to the point of malevolent product marketers.
I would like someone to do a "Years of life saved" calculation that tallies the expected years save by switching smokers to vaping balanced against those who were attracted by vaping who eventually went to smoking. My guess is even with the new entrants the years of life saved would be extraordinary.
My understanding is entire high schools are getting addicted to vaping, where before smoking was a relatively minor phenomenon. I suspect vaping is causing multiple times as much harm as it is providing relief, especially since they target young people for new customers.
I know plenty of people that have never smoked in their lives that vape regularly. I actually don't know a single smoker that switched to vaping, but I think that latter part is rare and unique to me.
So, if I'm correct, I don't think it should be "years of life saved" but "years of life lost," and I'd bet it's astonishingly high since many of those high school kids will be addicted for life. Don't forget Juul got billions (not millions) in funding from the cigarette companies in exchange for 35% ownership, so it's all the same to them - addiction is money.
I will say that when those juul kids come to college, very specifically my college, they hit the reality that everyone there still looks down on it and that they're basically just broadcasting their "highschoolness", and then they realize how hard it is to quit. We had smoking at my non-smoking campus, just behind one of the buildings, but it was by definition not popular. Vaping existed but if you were walking around blowing huge clouds of cotton candy shit, people would both actively avoid you and look down on you. It was the culture at the time.
Disclaimer: I left a couple years ago, that was my experience, things could've greatly changed by now
To talk about "years of life lost" is quite off from what I know about it. And I never vaped, just smoked.
It gets a pass because of it's relationship with smoking, giving them a believable reason to keep the nicotine, but if I started putting nicotine in bottled water there would be a class action in a week.
We already know vaping causes popcorn lung. I suspect 1:1 between vaping and smoking that vaping is safer, but who knows? We won't know until we have decades of data about mortality related to vaping. It seems plausible that it increases lung cancer rates and we just don't have enough data to know yet.
https://www.cancertherapyadvisor.com/home/cancer-topics/lung...
Not true. The data we have shows that it was being caused by Vitamin E acetate, which was used by off-brand THC cartridges. None of the major nicotine vapes used this chemical.
Also, this attitude of "oh we don't know" could be extended to any new product anywhere, including the vaccines we are using now. All of the current data supports vaping to be significantly safer than cigarettes, so let's proceed with that data and if the data later changes, we can update our guidelines.
Otherwise, you are killing people in the meantime.
That's a different, less well understood respiratory problem. Some ecigarette liquid contains (or used to contain; it's banned in Europe but maybe not in the US?) diacetyl as a flavouring; that causes popcorn lung and various other problems.
Regardless, neither of these are a concern where not present, which they generally aren't.
What? I'm arguing vaping is more dangerous than not vaping. I specifically said I believe vaping is safer than smoking.
For what it's worth, I believe all drugs should be legal. I don't care if you want to vape or not. I don't care if you want to inject fentanyl into your veins or not. It's your body.
See the problem with this type of rhetoric? There have been tons of studies done at this point with regards to vaping. Everything shows it as being safer. This is not equivalent to the tobacco companies lying to the public. Juul never makes any claim as to their product being 100% safe, just look at the packaging.
On top of that, you also repeated a known falsehood that vaping causes popcorn lung.
My point is that repeating these arguments and casting doubt on vaping being safer further promotes these bans on vaping, which in turn will kill more people.
> I'm arguing vaping is more dangerous than not vaping.
There is no need to argue an obvious fact that 100% of people will agree with.
> There have been tons of studies done at this point with regards to vaping. Everything shows it as being safer.
I haven't seen them, but there were also lots of studies that cigarette companies touted to show how safe their product was until they could no longer deny it. And seeing as how those same companies just invested a shitload of money into Juul, it doesn't seem crazy to think they'd use the same playbook. We also have no reason to believe vaping isn't purposefully designed to get people hooked on nicotine only to later sell them another product like cigarettes or something else they later develop. In fact, there are studies suggesting exactly that (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6652100/). There are many ways vaping could prove to be more harmful than we can currently see because it's a relatively new product.
I get your point about vaping potentially being helpful by getting people off smoking if it's safer, but it's simply unproven. Like I said if people want to vape let them, but I'll wait for the data before concluding whether or not it's safer. I suspect it's more dangerous and I'm sticking to that until the data proves otherwise. Similar to how you suspect it's less dangerous and will stick to that until the data proves otherwise. The common thread is we're lacking data and neither of us can confirm our hypotheses.
In other words we disagree and it's impossible to know who's right until we have more data. From my perspective your stance is just as harmful as you perceive mine to be.
Not sure what you mean by this, but I think everyone should be vaccinated unless you have some health condition that prevents you from doing so.
The reason I'm making that comparison is that there is an ongoing public debate about vaccines and long-term health effects that use very similar arguments to yours. All of our current data shows that getting vaccinated is a better risk tradeoff than potentially getting covid. Just like all of our current data shows that vaping is safer than smoking. Both of the counter arguments center around "but we don't know what the long term effects are" and can be applied to both these new vaccines and to vaping.
Let's just agree to disagree.
Not implying that you wanna ban it, but that's the reason why I'm so in favor of it.
> Let's just agree to disagree.
Agreed.
We know that vaping fluid with a particular flavoring chemical caused popcorn lung. That chemical is now rare.
"The chemical that gave this condition its nickname is diacetyl. After workers at a factory that packaged microwave popcorn were found to have bronchiolitis obliterans more often than other people, some companies stopped using diacetyl as a flavoring. But it's still used in some electronic cigarette flavors in the US. Many e-cigarette makers state they aren't using this chemical in their products and its use in e-cigarettes is banned in Europe." (https://www.webmd.com/lung/popcorn-lung#1)
I think I'd want a citation for that. It's been a long time since I was in high school, but smoking was incredibly common (if reasonably well concealed) back then. I can see vaping as being somewhat more popular (if not "entire high schools"), but...
OTOH, being older, I have never met someone who vapes that didn't smoke before, and know several smokers who quit and switched over.
I was out with some friends and two people I had never met before, and they immediately hit it off on their shared habit. I guess that's kind of like the social aspect of cigarettes. It's an interesting thing to see, and it's less intrusive than cigarette smoke for sure, so to each their own.
Also, as a smoker, I've never "hit it off" with somebody because we smoked. Hitting it off with someone in the smoker's pit outside a bar is just shooting the shit with someone that's in a common area; folks that vape and vegans are very similar in that it's a major point of conversation, as if they've assimilated it as part of their personality.
All that being said, vaping is fine, but the uptick in high schoolers smoking (because it's still smoking under a different name) is a bit alarming; and will be interesting to see how that consumer pipeline changes as regulation of them changes.
> Should non-smokers pick up vaping? Probably not
Yeah, I imagine that its a lot better than smoking cigarettes, but still worse than not smoking at all. So for your father, its a benefit because its something he finds sustainable (I assume quitting would be even better, but maybe rather difficult), but for a non-smoker, they would do themselves damage (even if not as much as smoking cigarettes would). So definitely good for smokers, but maybe not the best for non-smokers (although I'd love to know how it compares to other common unhealthy things we do like alcohol or fast food)
I have heard some negative things about vaping, but I assume its like you say: the quality and health effects vary widely between the "juice".
In any case, regardless of overall "good" or not, it seems to be a benefit for smokers, so that's a good thing!
It saved her thousands of Euros and she is much fitter, and her breath smells delicious, haha. But she doesn't use big brands, she mixes her liquid at home and tries to lower the dose over years.
But every time she can't vape, because her machine broke, or she lost it, or whatever, she get's quiet angry and smokes a few regular cigs.
1. Buy a big boy vape, roll your own coils, maintain and clean it, the whole shabang. Or 2. Smoke cigarettes
I have seen many people choose option 2. The big vape systems are sometimes large, heavy, and clunky, require sometimes very publicly dis and re assembling a little contraption, carrying juice on you, lots of things that put fellow people off. Ive seen people be ridiculed for carrying around so much vape stuff. It kinda falls into the neckbeardy categories at least for my place/time, just because the first people to do it made it their whole lives and refused to talk about anything else, it got a reputation. It's both easier and less socially risky to just buy some cigarettes.
Though I will say smoking cigarettes is not without social risk. Typically women will heavily dislike the habit except for the ones that do it themselves. I've seen whole houses get addicted to cigarettes just because one person went out to smoke when they drank every weekend. I have never seen the same phenomena with vaping. Though I very nearly missed the target generation for things like juul.
Source: I’m friendly with a few people that have run vape shops/companies and got out because they can’t afford to lobby against Phillip Morris or comply with pmta with annual revenue in the tens to low hundreds of thousands of dollars. Blame Juul for the vaping crisis in schools, and shut them the duck down. Then let adults have their safer and less expensive alternative to cigarettes back. I’ll take cotton Candy clouds over cigar smoke every single time.
Apparently juul can no longer ship to private addresses in my state, so I guess I'll have to start looking at other alternatives or go to the tobacco shop to pick up refills regularly.
I'd like to step down my nicotine dosage gradually, but juuling is unfortunately not very conducive to that - only 5mg or 3mg, so I'll probably have to roll my own solution, which is less convenient so I worry about compliance.
In a separate but similar case, the same thing happened to me with marijuana smoking. I never had an issue with the 'smoke' aspect of consuming cannabis, but now that I have tried cannabis vaping products (e.g. precision heating dry plant material or liquid concentrates), I nearly gag when I try smoking it again and I am immediately aware of and irritated by the awful smell that clings to me afterward.
I would assume a significant difference in impact between putting flavor substances in your lungs and putting flavor substances in your esophagus/stomach.
I haven't ruled out that they were trying to target youth with their products, but having nice juice flavors is the furthest thing from a smoking gun, and yet it was presented as one.
People do make these arguments, and they catch on from time to time. There was a moral panic about alcopops in the 1990s in the UK [0]. They weren't banned by regulators but several supermarket chains stopped selling them.
The government increased the tax on alcopops several times, but in the 00s the big drink companies started promoting Swedish i.e. sugary cider. Now your 1990s alcopop has some ös in the name and 10% added apple juice.
(Referenced paper: http://tobacco.stanford.edu/tobacco_main/publications/JUUL_M...)
Juul bought ads on socialstudiesforkids, dailydressupagames, and collegeconfidential: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/12/health/juul-vaping-lawsui...
"In recent years, e-cigarettes have become a very popular stop smoking aid in the UK. Also known as vapes or e-cigs, they're far less harmful than cigarettes and can help you quit smoking for good."
https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/quit-smoking/using-e-cigarettes...
> I'd like to see more studies in this area and some more regulations on the "juice" for vapes.
Remember the media chaos when the "vaping lung disease" was making the cycle? This was likely due to the juice they were using. It contained vitamin E acetate and was found primarily in THC vape juice. Normal e-cigs have standard VG/PG, nicotine and food grade flavoring. And that's it.
https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/basic_information/e-cigarettes/s...
Poor behavior by Juul, marketing to youth, makes me wary that I’ll have this stopgap regulated away. I wish they’d stop bringing negative publicity to vaping as a whole. The temp ban on delivery doubled prices when they were only available in retail shops. I’m always concerned it’ll be taken from former smokers who want to quit.
The only issue I've had was with propylene glycol, a main ingredient of most juices, to which I've got a mild allergic reaction (it essentially gives me bronchitis). Your dad may have something similar, it's quite common.
Anyhow, all the FUD in the US about vaping, its cultural association there with irritating types, the rush here in the EU to tax it as if it was cigarette (it isn't), and the growth of corporate trash on top of it has been incredibly discouraging. It's putting a barrier in front of smokers for something that's for all intents and purposes the most effective medication.
That aside, the collective balance is: - how many cigarette smokers will switch (benefit)
- how many people will start vaping instead of smoking (benefit)
- how many people will switch from vaping to smoking (harm)
- how many people will start vaping but wouldn't have started smoking (harm)
Perhaps someone with expertise can explain the current state of research. IIRC I saw a study arguing that the beneficial effects were less frequent and vaping as an entry to smoking was shockingly prevalent.
The articles I saw (years ago) claimed that vaping was a gateway to smoking, but the data showed that vaping just replaced smoking for teens. That is, once e-cigs became available, the same amount of teens were doing one or the other, but more were using e-cigs than cigarettes. So, if the amount of teens doing one or the other remained stable, but e-cig use largely replaced cigarette use, I think you have to consider the teens using the e-cigs. If you removed e-cigs as an option, would they smoke cigarettes or abstain altogether? It seems to me that they'd be more likely (as a group) to smoke cigarettes.
Disclaimer: I switched from smoking to vaping in 2013 and haven't smoked a cigarette since. I use unflavored e-liquid for a few reasons, but, as I understand it, inhaling flavorings meant to be ingested is the primary health risk with vaping. Last I checked, this issue was still under debate.
I would be surprised to see that inhaling any kind of smoke or non-water aerosol is good for your lungs, so I'd expect at least a minor harmful effect.
This study, for example, claims increased risks for heart disease [1] (disclaimer: I'm not a medical doctor and cannot evaluate its credibility)
[1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40138-020-00219-0
However, by comparison, tobacco smoke is like "what if we could engineer the perfect lung assailant."
Tar causes inflammation, damages DNA directly, intercalates DNA and induces replication errors, collapses alveoli, and paralyzes cillia, making clearance of all those chemical assailants from the lungs even harder.
You want to classify sugar as harmful? It's physiologically addictive (go a few days without carbs altogether and tell us how it goes).
What about caffeine?
Caffeine is also addictive and if you drink enough, stopping gives you withdrawal headaches. But in my experience not drinking caffeine at all makes me just as alert as getting used to the daily dose I thought I needed before.
So yeah, I'd totally classify both as slightly harmful.
But some harmful things are worth the tradeoff if you can maintain a low enough dose (sugar or caffeine)
Vaping might have social and physiological benefits which outweigh the harm also.
Even the physical addictiveness of nicotine is not that strong when separated from the rituals of smoking compared to e.g. caffeine (where addiction is also massively affected by rituals).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicotine
> Nicotine is classified as a poison. However, at doses used by consumers, it presents little if any hazard to the user.
If you have a product that people enjoy using and has associated dangers, some people will use it anyway. If you have a second product that replaces the first product with less danger[1], more people will use it. That's simple economic reasoning.
The hysteria over vaping is largely a product of a puritanical mindset---the horror at the thought of someone, somewhere, enjoying themselves. People have made their peace with tobacco itself[2], alcohol[3], and marijuana[4].
[1] "Evidence so far indicates that e-cigarettes are far less harmful than smoking as they don’t contain tobacco or involve combustion. There is no smoke, tar or carbon monoxide, and studies looking at key toxicants have generally found much lower levels than in cigarettes. They do contain nicotine, which is addictive, but isn’t responsible for the major health harms from smoking." (https://www.cancerresearchuk.org/health-professional/awarene...)
"In September, a paper in The Journal of Clinical Investigation described mice exposed to e-cigarettes for 4 months, nearly one-quarter of their life span. Farrah Kheradmand, a pulmonologist at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, who led the work, says that, at first, "There was absolutely no emphysema, nothing" in the animals that inhaled aerosol from e-cigarettes. That finding jibes with earlier research showing combustion products are the cause of airway inflammation in smokers." (https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/11/how-safe-vaping-new-...)
[2] Ever seen one of the bans on the sale of vaping products associated with a similar ban on cigarettes? I didn't think so.
[3] Here's a toast to those who collect the statistics on the externalized costs of anything.
[4] Smoking marijuana has exactly the same dangers as smoking tobacco. (You do have a filter on that reefer, right?) The same particulates, the same "tar", and the same assortment of combustion by-products, right?
Nicotine salt is much easier to vape and feels less harsh. I.e I can easily vape 50mg/ml nicotine salt, while above 10mg/ml freebase gets uncomfortable for my throat. That might have been the reason for your dad coughing.
But I still agree, besides the salt/freebase aspect there can be different aspects of the ingrefients, each affecting health differently.
Custards, a popular group of vape flavors, was the main source of it.
The catch?
Diacetyl is also a byproduct of cigarette smoking.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.3109/10408444.2014.88...
The risk was not considered to be noteworthy among cigarette smokers and food workers who had higher exposure to the chemical diacetyl...
> Further, because smoking has not been shown to be a risk factor for bronchiolitis obliterans, our findings are inconsistent with claims that diacetyl and/or 2,3-pentanedione exposure are risk factors for this disease.
So basically... vaping causes popcorn lung = FUD.
- "E-Cigs are the greatest public health invention of modern times!"
- Oh wait! "Think of the Children™"
- "We need to full on demonize e-cigs à la '90s anti drug style!"
This is pretty much what went down. It was recognized as miracle, but the fear of kids getting addicted was too great. So instead we're going the path of full on propaganda against it, while kids get addicted anyway.
He smoked 4-5 packs of Benson & Henson Menthols/day.
He stopped when he was 64, but it was to late. He didn't die of lung cancer, but they just stopped working one night in his sleep.
He had some undiagnosed psychological problem that I believe added to his constant smoking?
I must have asked him to cut back a 1000x.
I don't like nicotine, but I'm glad these are still legal.
(That said, I had him go a doctor to check his coronary arteries. They were completely clean. I think the only thing that saved him besides good genes, he didn't eat much.)
This is a great story. But it can be legal and restricted -- prescription only, just like Nicorette gum was when it was first introduced.
> He had some undiagnosed psychological problem
There is definitely a correlation between schizophrenia and smoking. I dont know if there are studies on it, but ask any psychologist experienced with schizophrenics if they see that pattern.
Should non-smokers pick up vaping? Probably not. But in this one instance it was a good move for a smoker.
I'd like to see more studies in this area and some more regulations on the "juice" for vapes. The quality, and I assume health effects, vary widely between different juices. For example: I bought him a non-refillable vape by another company and he started coughing and complaining of soreness in his throat.
I also think the arguments against the flavored juices are hysterical/hypocritical given the variety of flavors of liquor one can find.
Disclaimer: I think all drugs should be legal.