It makes sense to me that their business specifically would be impacted here by corona. With Juul use being impacted with the lack of social outings/nightlife eliminating many social use cases. Anecdotally, most consumption I've seen has been within contexts which have since been restricted.
As well, given people's concerns about keeping their lungs healthy, I imagine 'discretionary' consumption of vapes would be down as well.
Anecdotally, the few vapers I have spoken to have, actually, substantially increased their consumption. At home all day, nothing to do, vaping is something you can pair with anything else. This has been corroborated with casual conversations with a local vape shop owner; they've never done better business, at least until the actual "shut your in-person shops down" a couple weeks ago here. People want to stock up, and they're consuming more.
People quitting with the goal of keeping their lungs healthy may have an impact, but you could similarly move up the "addiction" chain and reasonably say that there's got to be a decent number of smokers who are looking at this coronavirus as the sign from god they needed to begin quitting. Juul, and vapes in general, are that next step.
My suspicion is that this has little to do with the coronavirus, and more to do with lingering effects from the government pressure months ago. Juul stopped production of every decent flavor they had. Even long time Juul users I know have moved on from Juul and on to other products. They're, in essence, the lightning rod of the industry. Kids don't vape Juul anymore; they haven't for months. They're on cali bars, or even devices like the suorin air. Are those going to get the same pressure Juul did? Probably not. The zeitgeist has moved on.
All part of the plan following their acquisition by Altria (Phillip Morris). Altria already had the IQOS in development and the vape companies were eating into their customer base. By purchasing Juul Altria could publicly act as a vaping proponent while working behind the scenes to maintain Big Tobacco’s control over nicotine. Small, bathtub style operations locally cranking out custom vape juice flavors had to be shuttered. Enter the rash of negative press surrounding vaping and government intervention in the market (vitamin E acetate as the carrier for illicit THC and CBD vape juice was the ultimate culprit, not “e-cigarettes”). The small operations are not able to afford the expensive licensing required for each flavor, and states really aren’t interested in giving up the future money from Big Tobacco, against which they’ve issued bonds. This is a long play made by Altria, and watching it come to fruition has been amazing.
You can easily make your own beer at home, yet I doubt AB InBev is worried about that. I don't think DIY hobbyists are relevant to companies operating at this scale.
> Altria Group, Inc. (previously known as Philip Morris Companies, Inc.)
The distinction you're making is meaningless because it's all the same group of assholes. They decided to play cute tricks with their branding because the general public came to recognize them as assholes. It's no different than the mercenary company 'Blackwater' rebranding itself to 'Academi' after it became notorious.
> It's no different than the mercenary company 'Blackwater' rebranding itself to 'Academi' after it became notorious.
Wow, I'd totally missed that. Going full 180 from the comically evil-sounding Blackwater to the modern and vaguely nerdy Academi, complete with hipster-friendly spelling variant, sounds like something straight out of a comedy sketch.
How does this affect employees who have options but have yet to fully vest? Under standard terms, can they sell their options immediately assuming the have cash on hand and there is a market?
> Under standard terms, can they sell their options
Under standard terms, options can't be sold, ever. Shares that were purchased from options that were early-exercised and have not vested can be forcibly repurchased at the company's choice (not employee's choice) upon termination. Shares that were purchased from options that had already vested can only be sold if there's a secondary market at that moment, but presumably Juul is not laying off a thousand employees at the same time as it's raising external money, so no.
I'm quite confused - how were shares exercised into stock before they vested?
Aside from that weirdness a share in a company is yours and I'm quite skeptical you could be forced to sell it back to the company - what _is_ common is that the grantor will reserve the right of first purchase. If you decide to sell your vested and exercised options to a third party (say a random friend) you cannot legally transact that without first offering the companies the ability to purchase it at the price of their choosing.
The result of this is that vested and exercised shares are usually a terrible idea in nearly every scenario - except when that action might result in some tax benefits from long term investment[1].
1. Some jurisdictions waive capital gains taxes on sales of stock if the shares were held for a "long" time usually several years.
I think you're confusing vested stock with "fully vested options" which is quite understandable as the terms are terrible... I may be wrong as I have the most experience with Canadian options but I believe in this scenario some vested options of a non-fully vested option grant were exercised? I.e. you have a vesting schedule of 100/year for five years and on year two exercise 180 options to buy - that wouldn't exceed the quantity of vested options that are available to buy though.
Do I have this right or am I misunderstanding the scenario?
Edit: Apparently the Canadian portion is important - US options are wack and work totally differently to normal options!
> you have a vesting schedule of 100/year for five years and on year two exercise 180 options to buy - that wouldn't exceed the quantity of vested options that are available to buy though
Not quite. Say one has a vesting schedule of 100/year for 5 years. Early exercise would allow one to "purchase" 500 shares on day 1, with the caveat that they be returned if the vesting schedule isn't met, e.g. if the employee leaves on day 2.
> US options are wack and work totally differently to normal options
"Normal" options, European-style options, make up the minority of instruments described by the term "options". Stock options are negotiated instruments. They vary wildly from case to case.
Certain amount of consolidation occurs in different jurisdictions as a result of tax codes. But in a global scheme, early exercise is entirely normal for employee stock options.
I think a bunch of the replies are missing out on the "why". Somewhat simplified:
Employer: Welcome aboard. You get 1000 shares vesting over 4 years. They're currently worth $1 per share, which will be your price no matter when you buy them from us. You can buy the ones that have vested at any time until you leave, but you can't sell them until we've gone public.
You: Great!
Employer: You know, there's a tax trap you could fall into when you leave, whether that be before the 4 years are up, or after. If we haven't IPO'd yet, but we've done a series C at $10/share, you will surely want to buy them as you leave. But you can't sell them yet, and the kicker is that the IRS says that the act of buying them for $1,000 when they're worth $10,000 means you have a $9,000 profit in the transaction, and they'll want to collect taxes on that (say, $3,000). And you may not have the cash to manage that. Even if you do, and then the stock craters later, and you've already paid the taxes, you don't get a refund of the $3,000 in tax the next filing season; rather, you get to subtract $3,000 from any other stock gains you have (in any subsequent year), should you be so lucky. Oh, and even if we have gone public by the time you leave, if you want to hold onto your shares, you've still got exactly the same problem: pay tax now, be out the cash, and lose big if the stock tanks.
You: Fooey.
Employer: But! Have we got a deal for you! It turns out that the IRS says it's fine if you kind-of buy your shares from us now, for $1,000. (Frequently at startups: We'll even give you a bonus to cover it!) Then, when you leave after 5 years, it's a no-op as far as the IRS is concerned, and you can hold the shares until you want to sell, and at that point you have a gain that you pay taxes on, which you can certainly pay out of your cash profits!
You: Super!
Employer: The only thing is, if you leave, say, after 3 years, really you would have only vested on 3/4 your shares, so what we'll do is only hand you 750 shares (that you vested on), and a $250 refund of the rest of the $1,000 you gave us.
It is detailed in the Employee Stock Plan. I believe it is often the share price on the date of grant (yes, when you started; yes, it is a good deal for the company). Nobody reads the Employee Stock Plan however, and companies can behave pretty poorly (but legally) as a result.
hmm... so just to be absolutely clear: employees who purchased shares before the excercise date will actually lose money if the company forcefully repurchase it back
There are some terminology confusions here possibly. Usually options have three associated dates: grant, vest and exercise.
The grant date is when stock options are granted to an employee - this is usually the first time the employee will have heard of their access to the options but if they are fore-warned of the options before a formal grant and schedule is release then they may be ineligible for any immediate vesting (generally immediate vesting triggers must happen after the grant date). The vesting date is when an option becomes eligible to exercise - on that date the grantee receives the ability to purchase shares in the company according to the strike price laid out in the options grant. Lastly you have the exercise date, that's the date on which you actually exchange some cash for some real shares in the company - after this point those shares are you personal property and are fully owned by you with no obligations to sale (though obligations around the manner of sale usually remain) - a company could declare bankruptcy but you can retain those shares forever.
Just as a note - I'm not a lawyer or an accountant, none of the information above should be construed as financial or legal advice and might just be wrong... if you're actually dealing with an options grant speak to a lawyer.
> The company shall ... for a period of three months from such date to repurchase all or any portion of the Unvested Shares (as defined below) held by Purchaser as of the Termination Date at the original purchase price per Share (adjusted for any stock splits, stock dividends and the like)
You wouldn't lose any money, they'd basically reverse the early exercise.
I used to think that, too. Then I read this post[1]. JUUL has more nicotine than a cigarette and there’s less friction to using it: a 10 second hit instead of a 10 minute cigarette and there’s no need to find a lighter or go outside. It also doesn’t really smell so it’s easy to use discretely.
All of that adds up to people who think JUUL is safer or can help them quit but it actually gets them hooked even more.
It’s like trying to cure a coffee addiction by switching to a shot of espresso. It might look like cutting back but it’s really doubling up.
What you're missing is that nicotine is harmless on its own; in fact, it's commonly used as a "nootropic" (cognitive enhancer) [0].
The true danger of smoking cigarettes is not the nicotine - that's simply the vessel by one gets addicted. The true danger is the tar and other carcinogenic by-products of inhaling a combusted tobacco plant.
Anecdotally, I started smoking cigarettes as a university undergraduate. I used Juuls (and other e-cigarettes, both disposable and refillable) to help me quit, and I'm now nicotine and tobacco free.
When I smoked cigarettes, I would wake up every morning hacking my lungs out. I smelled awful. I couldn't engage in cardiovascular exercise for longer than a minute.
With e-cigarettes, my coughing went away and my lung capacity returned to approximately normal. In fact, I competed in two Spartan Beast races while addicted to e-cigs.
Juul is an awful company for marketing towards children, but it's no exaggeration to say that e-cigarettes saved my life.
Neither is caffeine, but no one is up an arms about teens blowing their part time wages on $6 lattes and ruining their teeth. Maybe because SBUX is publicly traded?
> JUUL has more nicotine than a cigarette and there’s less friction to using it: a 10 second hit instead of a 10 minute cigarette and there’s no need to find a lighter or go outside.
They chose the nicotine concentration to mimic the delivery of a regular cigarette. Not less or more, but the same.
A pod will deliver the same amount of nicotine to a user as 20 cigarettes.
A 10-second hit is nowhere near the same as smoking an entire cigarette. It has the same feeling as an equivalent drag on a smoke.
In this same article, the tobacco-powered sources of nicotine use are down this in 2019 to 5.8 for high school students. It's up to 2.3 for middle school users, though.
e-cig (nicotine and some liquids to make it a vape) is up quite a lot; but, it looks like children are not converting from e-cig use to tobacco use, which was a fear that I had when I was earlier considering e-cigs.
My fear was basically that if enough people start using e-cigs and want to "graduate" to tobacco use, then over all tobacco use will increase. That does not seem to be happening in high school students.
It's definitely not good that a quarter of highschoolers are indulging in a highly addictive substance; but, I think there are other means of managing that than making the product illegal or tasteless.
Only if you count vaping as equal to "smoking cigarettes". The link you shared shows that smoking among that cohort in 2019 was the lowest it has ever been.
They targeted children with their flavors, colors, branding and advertisements. They are responsible for countless teenagers getting addicted to nicotine.
I couldn't care less about anyone who helped make that happen. Scum of the earth.
Where is the evidence that kids were explicitely targeted? Kids can't buy these unless some adult consumer or a shop clerk is breaking the law. Flavored vodkas aren't treated with similar scorn, but you know 14 year old kids are getting faced off of blueberry smirnoff and not rye whiskey.
>>The Food and Drug Administration on Monday came out swinging at e-cigarette giant Juul over a variety of its unproven safety claims and startling marketing practices—most notably saying without evidence that its products are safer than smoking traditional cigarettes and giving presentations directly to kids in schools—in at least one alleged case, without teachers present or parental consent.
The were speaking directly to students inside schools. Kids. They were telling them that their products were safe. You don't see toy companies doing that.
Now, I'm not saying it's safe. I'm not saying Juul didn't market unethically - just "vaping is better than smoking"
And if you can accept this overwhelmingly clear evidence - the cynic in you might ponder why there's an outrage over vaping, whilst cigarettes are still happily sold/taxed/lobbied.
The addiction to nicotine is nothing to scoff at, but they were taking a page out of the big tobacco brands' play book. The same people that go after Juul and disregard regular tobacco brands is something, seeing how they are just doing what big tobacco has always done. There are a lot of people angry over those kids being targeted by Juul, but fail to see big tobacco next door, causing as much, if not more damage due to the nature of their product. Both should fail, but I would rather have an ecosystem of Ecigs(for adults) vs the waste and carnage that big tobacco has done for decades.
> they were taking a page out of the big tobacco brands' play book
Indeed. Note Altria's large investment in Juul.
However, much of Juul's innovation was figuring out how to evade tobacco laws and regulations such as bans on advertising and flavored tobacco products (e.g. by claiming to not be a tobacco product) and how to escape much of the stigma associated with tobacco (e.g. by making something that looked more like an Apple product and less like a cigarette.)
Evading legislation and industry regulation is a powerful business strategy while it lasts - consider Airbnb (avoided hotel tax), Uber/Lyft (avoided taxi medallion limits), Paypal (avoided bank regulation) and cable companies (avoided telecom regulation while providing phone service.)
I'd say it's more akin to, "He flipped the switch to divert the train from running over 3 people, although the other track still had it running over one person."
As an alternative - vaping flipped the switch to divert the train from three to a single person - Juul flipped the switch later down the line to make sure it still hit three people anyways.
I don't follow -- how did they cause more harm to existing smokers? Are you saying that a Juul is more dangerous (or even equally as dangerous) as smoking -- or that there's evidence that nicotine in and of itself is harmful? I don't think either has evidence to suggest it's true.
Oh sorry - they continued the trend of lowered harm to existing smokers, but they also developed a lot of new customers.
I work in a company with a lot of coops and just in the past three years a lot of the folks we've hired on have a nicotine addiction - there are more people in their twenties that vape or smoke than people in their thirties or forties.
No, it's not really akin to that. This isn't a trolley experiment with only two tracks; they could have chosen to not market their product to children.
They targeted them at young adults -- it turns out that kids in high school typically emulate college kids. Who knew? Go to any college bar and you'll see kids -- naive children -- smoking outside. A lot of those kids use Juuls instead now.
If targeting that demographic inherently means that highschoolers will look at them and think they're cool, does that mean nobody should ever target that demographic? Harm reduction only applies to the 30+ crowd?
edit: I also don't think that it's really fair to say that they advertised towards children. The worst they did was push some colorful and fruity flavors. I guess only children like sweet things, and once you turn 18 you can no longer like mangoes?
No, Juul openly and deliberately advertised to children. It used to run ad campaigns featuring high-school age models vaping, and as recently as last year paid hundreds of high-school age "influencers" to peddle their products.
Just to be clear -- when you say high-school age, you really mean 18 year olds, right? And coincidentally, that's also college aged, right?
What's the argument here? That they should have casted 40 year olds for their marketing campaign? Or that they should have casted someone in their 20s instead of an 18 year old? The former is ridiculous and the latter doesn't make a difference. Natalia Dyer is 25 years old and plays an 18 year old in Stranger Things.
Just to clarify - regardless of whether they cast someone 18 or 17 - they were intent on casting young adults in advertising - this wasn't an effort on their part to make sure 40 year olds are aware of a way to safely quite smoking, it was a deliberate effort to hook new consumers since... even within the range stretching up to 20-23, those potential customers will be conversions from non-smokers in all likelihood.
It shouldn't be legal to market tobacco products at all. Juul knowingly and deliberately marketing to kids is further proof of that, as if any more were needed.
> They targeted them at young adults
This is literally the same bullshit the same industry was spewing when they were advertising their cigarettes with cartoon characters (e.g. the cartoon camel.)
This is a very tired point I see very often when discussing the morality of people who provide value to society.
If Juul's service was solely and specifically helping people get off cigarettes, great. It's not though, is it? They sell nicotine to minors. If they cared about doing good, they would simply not sell nicotine to minors. By this judgement I can group the executives at Juul into villians and not be 'reductive' about it, because it's very clear they make profit off of evil when they don't have to.
I'd also not like to see the argument that they aren't technically 'selling' juuls too minors. We're way past that point; it's super obvious the advertising is made up in such a way as to facilitate profits from minors. Just because it goes through a 3rd party doesn't eliminate blame from Juul, who remember have taken no steps to prevent children from smoking them.
Juul became massively popular because it hit much harder than typical cheap gas station vape pens of the time and the pods came in around the same price as a pack of smokes, or cheaper. Vaping has been around for over a decade and there are plenty of smokers that never considered it a viable alternative because it was a huge investment -- only to find out that it didn't hit in any way comparable to the way that a cigarette would. Juul changed all that.
Juul and similar salt nicotine vapes are only way to get a cigarette like nicotine buzz without having a leaky pipe bomb in your pocket where you have to regularly use ohms law to change your coils.
If you wrap your own coils and you don't throw it on your ohm meter before throwing it on your battery mod, idk what to tell you. Even if you've done it 100 times it takes 1 second to make sure you have good contact between your wraps like you expect. I used to do this dude.
I feel bad for lower level workers there. Anyone who had options to work elsewhere I have no mercy for. Anyone in the product team responsible for the ideation of marketing to children, can eat shit.
They're the only major brand that allows smokers to easily get mega doses of nicotine. It isn't much of a quitting aid if it only strengthens the addiction.
I'm not sure Juul in particular contributed all that much to that. Other vaporizer companies had already made great strides on that front by the time Juul came on the scene. It seems like their USP was marketing toward children.
If they really had an altruistic mission, then it was their responsibility to protect that mission, and they blew it. Pivoting their product to target kids was their own choice, and they are responsible for the consequences that were obvious to everybody.
A more straightforward explanation is that the altruistic mission was always fake.
"the potential for harm reduction for adult smokers while combating underage use."
<<insert photo of all the yummy flavors available>>
If their mandate was really harm reduction they could do that with a "plain" flavor; that's how we stop the kids in my house from eating all the yogurt.
Adults like yummy flavors too. This “flavored products are for kids” is utter nonsense, designed to vilify a new entrant and distract from the continued functioning of the tobacco industry. Smoking kills half its users.
It is one of the great tragedies of our time that tobacco companies got vaping lumped in with smoking and its harms, when it is at least two orders of magnitude safer.
"The memo accused Juul of knowingly marketing products to teens by holding programs at schools and camps and recruiting teens as "Juul influencers.""
"The hearing's testimony included claims that a Juul representative once visited a high-school classroom and told students that Juul e-cigarettes were "totally safe," according to a memo from congressional investigators."
That doesn’t explain why cities like SF have banned all flavored vapes. Not just juul brand. It clearly is the flavors that people are taking issue with, this marketing thing is just a footnote. So much so that I almost never even hear this incident referenced.
SF doesn't need to ban flavored cigarettes because the federal government already has. SF banned flavored vapes because the federal government hasn't (yet.)
"plain" flavor vape cartridges would not have gotten me to quit smoking.
Fruity mango flavor did. The idea that only children find flavors appealing is asinine, and you should feel shame for participating in a moral panic that is leading directly to cancer and death.
What I, a consenting adult, choose to do for recreation and stress relief, is none of your goddamn business, and I suggest you butt out of it.
I have to admit that I felt a visceral anger reading parent's comment as well. I quit smoking via e-cigarettes and via Tooti Frooti, Tiger's Blood, Fruit Loops and a dozen other "tasty" flavors.
A parallel could be made to childhood obesity. Yes, soft drinks contribute, but with parent's logic, all flavored soft drinks should be made illegal in favor of, well, 'plain carbonated water' flavor. Yum! Won't somebody please think of the children!
To be completely objective, cigarettes are dangerous because the concoction of chemicals that generate the smoke lead to lung cancer.
Vaping mostly just gives you the Nicotine hit, which doesn’t have the same dangers as tobacco smoke. Of all the vices I ever picked up, vaping has the smallest footprint in terms of character change while consuming it, and long term health consequences.
We probably need more studies on standard Nicotine consumption, as it may be in the same class as caffeine dependency:
When some (alleged) offense is committed, intent matters. So the question is, when the company came up with those flavors and marketing, who did they have in mind? Do they have Powerpoints showing that middle-aged executives love them, or did they explicitly, knowingly target kids?
> If their mandate was really harm reduction they could do that with a "plain" flavor; that's how we stop the kids in my house from eating all the yogurt.
frankly I don't know whether the people at juul had malicious intentions wrt teenage vaping, but I really resent the line of argument that offering enjoyable flavors implies targeting children. this is actually one of the main things that makes vaping a viable substitute for me and many other people. if they only made plain vapes, I would probably just go back to smoking.
Why does yummy booze flavors in arms reach of your toddler in the gas station aisle get a free pass, but juul pods with a surgeon generals warning kept under lock and key behind the shop clerk are targeting children? I can't comprehend these mental gymnastics.
I'm not a CEO, but there are a definitely company names that would get suspicion points from me on a resume, and Juul is one of them. I'm hiring for many things, but they include user focus and a sense of ethics. If somebody is willing to profit from making things that are worthless or harmful, that's not somebody I need to work with.
I personally don't have a line. As I said, someone working at a dubious place means I'll start out more suspicious about their ethics. Good people sometimes end up in bad places. But I'll definitely be interested to see their answers around non-technical topics and I'll pay special attention to how they behave in the practical parts of things.
And I don't think this is about my particular ethical code. Any company I work at is going to be focused on delivering value to users, not harming them. Creating value for others is fundamental to commerce, so it makes good business sense to hire people who care about that.
Facebook is a tool used by hundreds of millions of people to connect with their friends and family. Google is a search engine and video platform. Amazon sells everything. AWS underpins a large portion of the internet most people use today. Uber provides taxi and food-delivery services.
Unlike Juul, what these companies do isn't inherently evil or exploitative.
That's... naive. Facebook and Google are platforms for behavior modification. Their products are designed to be addictive so you spend more time on them than you really want, subjected to a barrage of tactics to get you to buy things or change your opinion on something.
Nothing about Facebook or Google is inherently addictive. People use Facebook and Google as tools. Hundreds of millions of people around the world use Facebook to keep in touch with old friends and family that don't live nearby, and even (right now) nearby friends and family that they can't safely visit in person. And if there's too many unviewed posts in your queue, you have the ability to easily control which friends you get posts from, and the type of posts you see, and even the type of ads you get if you want to mess around with that. I haven't seen anything on Facebook that tries to get me to buy things or change my opinion other than ads, which is the whole point of ads and is something endemic to modern society and isn't unique to Facebook. If you have a problem with ads, go back 100+ years in time and shoot the NYT editor of the day for introducing the concept to the world.
I don't know what it is about Google that is supposed to be addictive so I'm not even going to try to respond to that part.
There are lots of things that are fine in some situations for some people, but addictive in others. I'd be interested to see your data for your claim that Facebook isn't addictive. But there's no reason it couldn't be; things like gambling are very much addictive without having to inject anything.
Also, because we made a mistake decades ago doesn't mean we aren't allowed to complain about or correct it now. Cigarette smoking is a fine example of that. It was a mistake to start, but now that we better understand how bad it is for people, we're slowly ending it.
One, I really don't. And two, you're the one making a positive claim that it's not addictive. If you don't want to back your claims, I can certainly live with ignoring them.
One, you really do need to show Facebook is addictive since you're the one arguing that it needs to be "corrected" from what it is now.
Two, I'm not making a positive claim that it's not addictive. I'm saying that it's not inherently addictive like an addictive substance that physiologically changes your brain and neurochemical pathways (i.e., nicotine). I fully accept that Facebook is addictive in the same way as video games, exercise, food, or sex, in that it generates a dopamine response.
Aren't tobacco products already illegal to sell to children? Why is the blame on the manufacturer for making a product that adults like when the real issue is retailers selling nicotine-containing products to children?
The manufacturers have known that kids are the only viable market to speak of. If it's anything like tobacco, vanishingly few people start as adults.
Kids get them from other kids, at school. This was also the main source of alcohol for kids before the drinking age was raised to 21. My mom taught high school, and noticed that fewer kids came back to school drunk after lunch after the drinking age was raised.
The tobacco industry has repeatedly demonstrated it's willingness to break the law and market their bullshit to kids.
Edit:
> Internal documents produced to the court in Mangini v. R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, San Francisco County Superior Court No. 959516, demonstrated the industry's interest in targeting children as future smokers.[6] The importance of the youth market was illustrated in a 1974 presentation by RJR's Vice-President of Marketing who explained that the "young adult market ... represent[s] tomorrow's cigarette business. As this 14-24 age group matures, they will account for a key share of the total cigarette volume - for at least the next 25 years."[7]
While it is true tobacco smoke contains many carcinogens and toxins that are the likely sources of many cancers, there is evidence that nicotine itself promotes tumor growth and proliferation.
Nicotine also accelerates atherosclerosis and vascular disease.
The parent comment asked for a citation, so I added a citation which is peer reviewed and discusses some of the very points made in the grandparent comment. There are quite a few more peer reviewed papers on the topic.
So then I guess the next question is if it's worse than caffeine or sugar or alcohol; and, if that's enough to require legislation to regulate what people put into their bodies.
As for sugar, that's an interesting debate. Sugar is pretty bad for you. The short answer seems to be that sugar kills more people than tobacco and nicotine and lots of other things. But sugar comes in many forms and is hard to regulate, I guess. It's a tough one for sure.
Alcohol is legislatively regulated by requiring labels on the box and limiting age of consumption. Tobacco has legislation of the same, as well as advertisements.
Potentially. What would be the harm in further regulation? I feel there is no benefit to a lack of regulation. But that's just my opinion. If my legislators were to ask me if I thought we should have more regulation on nicotine advertisement, I would say yes. Which is what we have legislators for.
Caffeine is relatively benign compared to nicotine. Nicotine poisoning[1] really is a thing. Also, the LD50 dosage of caffeine is ~150-200mg/kg while for nicotine it’s in the range of 0.5-1mg/kg and for children it’s much lower, at 0.1mg/kg. Given these numbers, nicotine is a far mor pernicious substance than caffeine.
> Also, the LD50 dosage of caffeine is ~150-200mg/kg while for nicotine it’s in the range of 0.5-1mg/kg and for children it’s much lower, at 0.1mg/kg. Given these numbers, nicotine is a far mor[e] pernicious substance than caffeine.
What? That doesn't follow at all. You want to compare the LD50 (and other effects of consumption) to the amount normally consumed, not to the LD50 of some other substance. "LD50 is 1 mg/kg" is completely meaningless if you can't consume more than 0.005 mg/kg.
Let’s make it simpler. If a toddler weighing 5 kilograms ingests a cup of coffee, the risk of death is minuscule. But if the same toddler were to ingest a single cigarette (I.e eat it), the toddler will almost certainly die without timely medical intervention.
If you read the Wikipedia page I’d previously linked to[1], it has this quote: “58% of e-cigarette calls to US poison control centers were related to children 5 years old or less.”
I’d personally witnessed a tragedy like this in my neighborhood many years ago, and because of that, I don’t let people come with packs of cigarettes into my house, because I’ve got a toddler.
It doesn't really matter if an addiction kills you or not, the question is whether the dependency is strong enough to take away from other activities in your life.
Addiction is generally a result of some failure in a person's social life and social structure that negatively impacts them to the point of developing a coping mechanism.
“Think of the children” is almost always cover for a lack of a rational argument.
In this case, it is distracting from the fact that, compared to smoking, the harm from vaping is so ridiculously tiny as to be deemed “harmless” on that scale.
Smoking kills half of its users (seven million smokers a year dead), and additionally kills OVER A MILLION non-users each and every year from proximity to smokers.
Your hate is misplaced. This is the pinnacle of whataboutism.
Is taking up vaping bad for youth that are under the age of 18? Is taking up vaping bad for adults over the age of 18? And I do mean, when they otherwise were not smokers? If so, has Juul actively tried to market their products to non-smokers in any range? Have they actively tried to inform the public about the potential harms of starting to vape when you are otherwise a non-smoker?
There is no doubt that Juul is safer than a pack of cigarettes. But Juul can't make it as a start up selling to only smokers who want to reduce their risk of death, as has been seen by their sales numbers. They are actively marketing to groups of people who are in zero current harm from first hand nicotine. And nicotine does harm those people. Here's a peer reviewed article just to make the point.
There is no evidence whatsoever that the harmful effects of nicotine cause even 1% of the damage caused by the harmful effects of inhaling combustion byproducts. This is irrelevant, and is just emotional spillover from the decades of repetition of how bad smoking is.
(In some ways it’s like people trying to ban rifles that cause ~700 deaths per year in the US while small caliber handguns cause >11k.)
Salty fried foods are a bigger public health issue right now than if every nonsmoker took up vaping.
I am not sure what the evidence is of nicotine vs inhaled combustion byproducts, but I do agree that the effects are far less. I don't find my questions irrelevant though, even though you have glossed right passed all of them.
The other examples you have are a false equivalence. We can certainly say that nicotine sellers have an obligation to explain the effects of their products and also say that there are bigger public health issues right now. I certainly would not imply that nicotine is the largest public health issue right now. But we can deal with so many things at once.
Cigarette smoking among schoolchildren was already on a heavy downward trend for decades until Juul made it "cool" again. In fact there has been a slight increase in recent years, as teenagers start with Juul and then take up cigarettes.
They have helped a ton of adults quit or reduce smoking, which is great, but they have also explicitly targeted kids via presentations in classrooms, paid underage Instagram influencers and lots more. There is no requirement to excuse the second because of the first.
There are plenty of kids who vape who would have never smoked because of the smell it has on your clothes. Now they're addicted to nicotine anyway and who knows how they're going to deal with the long-term repercussions of inhaling a bunch of hot PG and other crap.
How do they target kids any more than bubblegum vodka in the gas station? I never understood these arguments, implying these flavors are for kids. I've never even seen a juul advertisement to begin with.
I love flavored juul and I'm an adult, the tobacco and menthol flavors are ass and I know a few people that have fallen back to smoking or chewing tobacco when they could no longer get their mango juul pods.
What are the actual impacts of nicotine on the body? I thought most of the harm came from the other carcinogens in cigarettes and tobacco rather than nicotine itself
And that is equivalent to getting them hooked on drugs? Are you saying a toy company marketing toys to kids is equivalent to what Juul did because they both targeted children?
> None of those other companies specifically target kids with advertising and subversive grassroots efforts to try to get them hooked on [their product]
I didn't intend to equate it to drugs; and, admittedly, I didn't fully read that last sentence.
Apple doesn't pass out private investment prospectuses to Hollywood celebrity teens in an attempt to build grass-root youth influencer support for their tobacco products.
Apple makes headphones that work well for listening to music and they just show you that.
Juul sells products the sole purpose of which is to deliver oversized doses of nicotine to users. It doesn't even matter if the marketing is bad, the product itself was exploitative and intended to make users addicts if they weren't already.
All of the other company may have products that have negative aspects but none of the negative aspects are considered deliberate features of the product.
Among smokers juul is about the only vape that size that delivers a cigarette like hit. Those little blu vapes? Poor draw and not strong enough to make a smoker switch without vaping a ton or supplementing with a patch. If you are worried about vapes with too much nicotine, look at the people blowing plumes of steam from what looks like a pipe bomb. A big hit like that could make you fall to the ground if you didn't have a tolerance, encountered that first hand.
In order to quit, you need to train your body to want less nicotine, since that is the addictive part. Juul delivers the same or more nicotine as a cigarette. It is not intended to be a product to help smokers quit smoking.
As well, given people's concerns about keeping their lungs healthy, I imagine 'discretionary' consumption of vapes would be down as well.