My father has COPD from over 50 years of smoking. I convinced him to switch to vaping and he's been using a Juul for a few years now. Awhile after the switch his primary care physician listened to his lungs and said they sounded a lot better. She said she because the science isn't in "I can't tell you to vape but I can tell you to keep doing what you're doing".
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.
I think if Juul was marketed as a smoking cessation product I’d have no problem with it. But it’s marketed as a lifestyle product and a ton of young people with no history of smoking have started vaping as a result.
Fun fact, if you claim to be a smoking cessation product you get the FDA at your door going "oh, so this is a medical product" and you're now obligated to prove that your product works as a medical cessation product, and requires a doctor's note to pick up. You can't market yourself as a smoking cessation product without getting the hounds of hell being unleashed on you by the regulators.
See marijuana if you believe regulators will actually listen to a preponderance of evidence. FDA/pharma executives are a revolving door, and therefore concerned chiefly with the health of pharma rather than humans.
There are (AFAIK) 3 cannabis derived products that the FDA has approved. Given the large cost required to get a new patentable drug through the FDA, it doesn't come as a surprise that no one's willing to foot that bill.
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.
> If your product causes harm in any way—regardless of the benefits—you're going to have a difficult time getting regulatory approval
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.
I think the implication is that a product can do some harm, while reducing the overall harm in the system. In this case, vaping might cause some harm, but it potentially reduces the overall harm by doing much less harm than cigarettes. I believe the comment is saying that, by pushing for regulatory approval, the product may never enter the market and would thus not be able to reduce the overall harm being done.
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.
There's an interesting tradeoff there. Getting through clinical trials to prove it works is expensive, though that's realistically more an annoyance to the company than a problem for the public. But once you have gone through all of that, you're probably looking at the product now being sold for a higher price (increased barriers to entry means more competition), and possibly only by prescription. Which might severely reduce availability to less-wealthy smokers. Which, I think at this point, is most smokers. On the other hand, that would also severely reduce availability to kids who aren't already addicted to some other tobacco product. So there's that.
Long story short, I can imagine a lot of valid arguments pointing in every which way here.
Also bad for the people who might benefit from the product even though it didn't help a statistically significant portion of people in an expensive clinical trial.
I wonder how many non smokers we have in this thread making decisions for others. If only we’d think of the children! Screw the adults struggling with nicotine addiction, they should go back to cigarettes or just quit (like they’ve been trying to for years).
Why do people have to stick their noses in things that don’t affect them?
*these statements have not been validated by the FDA
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.
These products can do that because they contain no substances that need approval in any way, so they are likely just food supplements without any active ingredients.
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.
They’re both incredibly expensive and laborious. Like millions of dollars per sku expensive. The fda has put all the good vape shops out of business and extortionate taxes are killing the rest as people revert back to cigarettes. The fda is actively hurting Americans by shifting these costs onto retailers which was a Coup d'état for big tobacco who had been completely blindsided by the success of startup vape companies.
> The fda has put all the good vape shops out of business and extortionate taxes are killing the rest as people revert back to cigarettes
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.
Here’s a good primer. I was a bit off, it’s not millions per sku, more like hundreds of thousands, but all the combinations of products also need to be accounted for and approved at great cost.
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?
Because the stories are pushing an agenda and ignoring the broader scope of the issue that is children using addictive substances. Conversations about children vaping should be had, but in comparison to the rate of other tobacco and nicotine use. If it’s really about the kids shouldn’t we also be looking at alcohol and other drugs like marijuana too as reference? I don’t see articles about the high school kids that start drinking, taking opiates, or smoking cigarettes and marijuana every year. These are expected behaviors, vaping is new, and the preponderance of evidence says is far less dangerous than smoking, so a lot of ignorant and easily frightened people got caught up in the rhetoric and forgot how to rationalize about new risks. The fear mongering about juul was little more than a perfect excuse to quash outcry over the ridiculous legislation against vaping products on the state and National level.
When I was growing up all the teens were smoking and drinking. Considering how bad we know alcohol and cigarettes are for a developing brain, I'm inclined to not panic over the newest trend.
Cigarettes are hard to covertly hit at school/home. They leave the person with a very distinctive stink. They are hard to buy online and damn near impossible for a minor to buy in person. With only 13% of adults smoking they aren't available to be swiped in most households and taxes in many places make those who do smoke liable to notice them walking out the door. Many places its about $10 a pack.
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.
> Cigarettes are hard to covertly hit at school/home.
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.
The overwhelming majority of parents are now non smokers and no schools are accepting of smoking. Smokers on average are addicted and would need to smoke some time during the school day and during their time at home.
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.
> Smokers on average are addicted and would need to smoke some time during the school day and during their time at home.
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.
What I'm saying is that on net allowing juul to exist implies that the entirety of society is harmed including the people who pay taxes for the medical care required by people's vices as has been true of the industry to which they are heir. They have clearly marketed themselves to young people who otherwise wouldn't have taken up smoking. I don't think this is something we can just fine and move forward. If I walked into a school and shot several of the children I would be universally despised and strung up if the people could get their hands on me but if I market a product which leads to excess mortality of millions down the way the connection is sufficiently indirect that it is deemed somehow acceptable.
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.
> What I'm saying is that on net allowing juul to exist implies that the entirety of society is harmed including the people who pay taxes for the medical care required by people's vices as has been true of the industry to which they are heir.
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.
> Why has society devolved into forcing others to do what we want?
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.
So then this devolves into no drinking and heath police. Too much sugar in your gum? Fine. Too many carbs, fine. Overweight? Fine. Drink alcohol, fine. Light incense in your house, fine. Don’t eat the required 3 meals a day, fine. Don’t eat the menu prepared by the health and nutrition czar, fine.
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?
Everyone’s pushing an agenda these days. I didn’t post that as an unbiased source, but as a counter argument to the unified front against vaping amongst the mainstream teleprompt readers. If you want an unbiased source for this discussion you’re going to have to have a bad time.
I'm a living citation. Was a small business owner, retail vape shop. Did fine for 5 years. Then the regulations to save the children and hit pieces in the news. All the small independent shops went under and now you can only buy the vuse, and juul, both owned by...you guessed it, the same folks who sold cigarettes.
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.
No. The only companies eligible in the PMTA License process for vape had to have been manufacturing in 2015 or 2016 when the FDA began its moratorium on new players entering the market.
But it's not a smoking cessation product. It can be used effectively as such, but it's first and foremost a healthier substitute to smoking.
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.
> letting smokers who don't want to quit to keep smoking, without risking lung cancer.
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.
You haven't really overcome your main addiction in that case though. I don't think that people colloquially interpret that as "quitting smoking" when that term gets used in this context, even if the meaning is literal.
When you quit smoking, you quit smoking. Vaping is not smoking. What's inaccurate is to insist that someone still smokes when they do not, because you insist on calling something that is not smoking "smoking".
I think people have mixed definitions, but I really think smokers just want to avoid the lung cancer and emphysema. It's not my place to judge them as failures because they don't meet my criteria of not being addicted to nicotine.
Nicotine is great, I would be incapable of functioning in society without it, and if the US Government makes it impossible for me to get a nicotine fix without giving myself cancer I will be tempted to turn to direct action.
If we accept that addiction is an evil in and of itself, social media addiction should warrant significantly more societal attention that nicotine addiction: it's much more prevalent, both in general population and among children in particular.
My understanding is that the proverbial jury is still out on whether vaping truly is less harmful to the lungs that smoking[0][1]. That would mean that vaping (instead of smoking) isn't necessarily a positive health outcome.
[0]: "Studies suggest nicotine vaping may be less harmful than traditional cigarettes when people who regularly smoke switch to them as a complete replacement."
[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.
It’s definitely a positive outcome when it comes to cancer prevention. The evidence is quite clear that vaping is way better than smoking for lung cancer. [0][1]
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.
> 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.
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.
I suppose in a very literal sense, if you replace addiction A with addiction B, you could say that B is an A cessation product.
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.
If you can drop 100+ lbs by smoking half a pack a day, I guarantee you'll be a lot healthier overall. Not saying you actually _would_ lose all that weight, but it's not like it's a binary between "smoking" and "not smoking". Frequency and amount matters, but the it's pretty much impossible to approach the subject in our society with any sort of objectivity or science.
> Impossible meat, likewise, is a meat "cessation" product.
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.
Ok, so it's a smoking cessation product if you take the definition strictly - but it doesn't do anything to get you off your nicotine addiction, which people usually mean by "smoking cessation product"...
A vape can be much cheaper than cigarettes and you get the benefit of not inhaling smoke and smelling like smoke. You can also begin reducing the amount of nicotine in your vape juice without reducing the amount of time you spend vaping. Most brands offer numerous levels of nicotine from something that's a little stronger than regular cigarette down to none.
Nicotine is the thing people obsess over, but there are far more harmful substances than nicotine in tobacco cigarettes (for example, radioactive elements Polonium-210 and lead-210), and there are MAOIs that make the nicotine in tobacco smoke far more addictive.
> I'm definitely against marketing vaping to non-smokers. But I'm fine with converting existing smokers to vaping
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.)
Related: Why is there talk about banning Juul from selling its products in the U.S. entirely, but no such conversation about banning any of the big tobacco companies from selling theirs?
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?
> Related: Why is there talk about banning Juul from selling its products in the U.S. entirely
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, "
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".
However note that's comparing smoking not nicotine.
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.
That last article says, "The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) suspects that exposure to THC, as well as a mix of THC, nicotine and vitamin E, an additive in many vape carriages, is causing serious lung injury."
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)
> 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,
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.
> How much more dangerous is nicotine than alcohol?
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.
Wouldn't be so sure about that. Nicotine alone has problematic effects on the heart and vascular system, especially since the addictiveness leads to constant admission. Vaping isn't all that great delivery system either.
That's really not true at all. Addictiveness in and of itself is not some hugely detrimental trait. Not to mention that nicotine delivered in vapor form is less addictive in the first place.
>Related: Why is there talk about banning Juul from selling its products in the U.S. entirely, but no such conversation about banning any of the big tobacco companies from selling theirs?
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.
Is it not already? Genuine question. In all of the coutries I'm familiar with, both smoking and vaping are illegal to advertise. Even alcohol in some cases, although more commonly it's allowed but strictly regulated (must be purely factual, no glorification, mandatory health disclaimer...)
Yeah but that kind of defeats the consent manufacturing illusion to say the actual entity instead of the vague "society" to brainjack people with presumed social pressures.
Presumed social pressures? There's plenty of very real social pressure against marketing vaping to non-smokers.
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.
> I think if Juul was marketed as a smoking cessation product I’d have no problem with it.
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.
This reminds me of the old "is it ok to smoke while praying/pray while smoking" question:
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 agree. If alcohol were marketed for heart disease reduction, I'd have no problem with it. But it's marketed as a lifestyle product and a ton of young people with no history of drinking have started as a result.
I completely agree with it. Vaping for young adults (that's the technical term for that) is a stepping stone for making the switch to cigarettes easier.
Someone who was involved with the early founding of that company has posted here before. It's as rotten as the cigarette companies. They're on a level bellow even consumer electronics OS vendors.
I can't speak for Juul but I credit my smoking cessation entirely to vaping. I've not had any nicotine since 2020, vaping or smoking!
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.
It may not be "doing it wrong" but different people work in different ways. I know one friend who tried to quit a couple of times by easing off with no luck. However one time they decided to just stop and it worked. They felt like crap for a week or two but then they were off it.
Whether easing off is more or less effective than cold turkey, and for whom, is a technical matter. GP is talking about something orthogonal: some people believe that breaking addiction requires suffering, so if you found a way to avoid it, you've somehow cheated, or hadn't really quit.
I'm not against people quitting cold turkey if that's what works for them, addiction is different for everyone and if that's the most effective way of quitting for a person then fair enough. What I'm against is non-smokers preaching that it's the only way as opposed to something like vaping when they're in no position to make such a claim.
I don't think anything along those lines but I am extremely disappointed that another generation is hooked on nicotine through vaping. You hear kids bragging about how much 'nic' they go through.
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.
Congrats! Quitting smoking is really difficult; I feel lucky to have kicked it myself. I started in high school, like many folks (especially in the southern US); and was on-and-off through college. A Juul really helped me power through times of stress without buying a pack of cigarettes. I remember e-cigs were initially pitched to consumers as a way to quit smoking, and I think it's unfortunate that part of the message seems to have fallen off. I think it was a huge part of tapering the dependence, for me.
Cheers! And yeah I started around the same sort of time in my life, about 17 years old. When I was at uni me and my mates bought vapes because around the time they hadn't been banned by most pubs yet so we could use them inside, West Wales is a bastard of a place to be a smoker in the winter! I was the only smoker at my current job when I started though, so I went on just the vape as not to be the only one reeking of cigarettes. Once the social aspect of smoking was gone it just became a bit of a shackle rather than a break for me so I decided to taper down and quit by the start of 2020 which turned out to be an outstanding move!
Ecigs are likely one of the most impactful public health interventions of the last 50 years. They provide a substitute that is less dangerous and pleasurable which keeps compliance high.
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.
> 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.
Yes, it seems like the elder generations are benefiting greatly from vaping but the "kids these days" are having huge issues with it. I agree that majority of a high school will just suddenly be all in on vaping, the social pressure is just waayyy too high in a place like that and a bunch of people get pulled in that wouldn't just cause a couple of the more influential ones picked up something they view as a toy, but that they can portray as a status symbol, at least within the high school.
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
It's still a product using nicotine to form addiction so that you'll be reliant on their product, it's an evil practice. You can vape without nicotine, and it's a great way to quit smoking, but that's not what's happening with all the Juul hype. It's just teenagers getting hooked on nicotine again because marketing has told them it was cool.
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 don't have as much data on vaping as we do for smoking, but this reminds me of what cigarette companies said for decades: "where is the data showing our products are harmful?"
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.
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.
> The data we have shows that it was being caused by Vitamin E acetate, which was used by off-brand THC cartridges.
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.
Well, there also incidents about 5 years of people making vape juice with Diacetyl, a food additive that gives a creamy buttery taste. Turned out that while it was food safe, bringing it to the temperature necessary for vaping did bad things to it and it also caused "popcorn lung"
> Otherwise, you are killing people in the meantime.
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.
"I suspect 1:1 between getting vaccinated and not, that getting vaccinated is safer, but who knows?"
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.
You're comparing vaping to getting vaccinated. You've clearly got an axe to grind.
> 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.
> You're comparing vaping to getting vaccinated. You've clearly got an axe to grind.
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.
I understand the point you're making but I don't think you understand the point I'm making. If it turns out vaping is a net positive for society then I will genuinely be happy that you were right and I was wrong.
I've seen countless people replace smoking with vaping and the massive benefits it has had on their physical health. So yeah, it pains me to see the push to ban the only working smoking alternative.
Not implying that you wanna ban it, but that's the reason why I'm so in favor of it.
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)
"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 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...
I suspect you are right about the age division, but would love to see some real numbers and studies about each side. Every study I have seen about the youth pushes your sentiment that "entire high schools are getting addicted", but when you look at the questions, they are typically very misleading and something along the lines of "have you ever tried a vape".
OTOH, being older, I have never met someone who vapes that didn't smoke before, and know several smokers who quit and switched over.
As an alternative to smoking cigarettes, it seems like a great choice. As someone fairly young who was still in high school when vaping started to pick up, the amount of people I know at my age (recent college graduates) that vape and picked it up as a habit without ever having smoked before is insane.
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.
I'm going to push back on the "less intrusive" than cigarette smoke; yes, vaping smoke doesn't stick to your clothes or on your breath, but that precludes the weird habit of vapers using the product where ever they darn well please because it isn't "smoking." The amount of times I've ran into a cloud of "banana margherita" is a bit ridiculous, and honestly I'd rather sit in a smoking section of a restaurant in podunk Wyoming than be randomly accosted by vape smoke, because at least with the smoker section I am willingly choosing to be there.
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.
> "I can't tell you to vape but I can tell you to keep doing what you're doing".
> 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.
But I really wonder if that happens frequently. Cigarettes really taste and smell awful. I discovered how terrible they really are only after I quit smoking. As long as e-cigarettes remain available, I doubt that many people would switch to real cigarettes.
Ive seen it go two ways, you start with the vape pod or all in one systems, get bored and you
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.
That was case years ago. Nowadays people just buy refillable tanks with disposable coils that perform on par or better with what an above average person can create. The devices are inexpensive when amortized over months-years depending on how well taken care of. 30-200 is the range for devices with the sweet spot around 60-100. Tanks are 20-50, but a lot of devices include them. Coils are about $2 or less wholesale/from China, and retail for 5-15/ea depending on how greedy/low volume the shop is. Coils last for 1-4 weeks. Juice costs about $0.01-0.04/ml to make and 60ml bottles previously sold online for $5ish, they go for 20-60/ea in retail stores including taxes. Yeah, $0.6-2.40 in product is being sold for 10-30x the cost to manufacture. At most half of that is tax, the rest is profit and funding asinine marketing or paying for lawyers and lobbyists to pull the ladder up. This ain’t about children, it’s about a cash cow.
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.
I quit smoking with Juul, and still use Juul - better experience and more convenient than smoking. I quit smoking because it was inferior to the juul experience AND had health benefits AND juuling is significantly less antisocial - it wasn't a challenge because it was better in about every way. Nicotine gum or previous generations of vapes didn't scratch the itch well enough, juul scratches the itch better.
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.
Anecdotal evidence:
My girlfriend has been smoking since she was 14. She had no motivation to quit, no matter how many times I annoyed her about it. After she switched to vaping, she can't even bring herself to smoke again because the smell and taste are much more obvious to her now, even with flavored cigarettes.
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.
Anecdotal, but all my friends juul'd in university (some quit some still use it daily). Probably about 30% of them at some point tried to quit juuling by smoking cigarettes instead thinking that the bad taste would deter them for smoking and therefore cause them to consume less nicotine overall. Needless to say that did not work and a few of them now use both cigarettes and juuls.
From what I've seen, as soon as their expensive-ish vape breaks or they run out of juice and there's a pack of cigs at the gas station for which they don't have to wait
> the arguments against the flavored juices are hysterical/hypocritical given the variety of flavors of liquor one can find.
I would assume a significant difference in impact between putting flavor substances in your lungs and putting flavor substances in your esophagus/stomach.
I think the argument they are referring to is the one that because there were tasty flavors, the products were targeting youth... as if adults do not enjoy tasty flavors. That's one way regulators rationalized bans on vaping products. No one is making similar arguments to ban tasty liquor.
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.
> No one is making similar arguments to ban tasty liquor.
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.
Some supermarkets not selling them didn't last very long.
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.
Somehow every anti-vape campaign I've seen that tries that argument only makes vaping look more desirable. "Flavors so good that kids don't find them gross" is a pretty decent draw.
The NHS actually recommends vaping to help stop smoking.
"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."
I agree that vaping is far safer than smoking 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.
The only person I know that vapes regularly has a persistent cough as long as she is vaping and goes away immediately when she stops. I don't think it is as safe as everyone is claiming.
I’m also a former smoker who switched to vaping as a step toward eventually quitting nicotine products. It’s been a huge improvement (I no longer smell / taste like cigarettes), and I hope it’s doing less damage to my body.
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.
I was a smoker for 14 years and vaping is the only thing that could get me off of it. And I do feel quite a bit better.
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.
Congratulations on your father's change of habit, I hope he continues to recover and has a long life!
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.
Isn't it also about the amount of harm or benefit for each?
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 don't know (not my area of expertise), but aren't there some reliable meta-analyses on the effects of vaping?
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)
Anything going into the lungs besides atmospheric air, and specific medications, is potentially inflammatory. At best, the VOCs (in vaping) do absolutely nothing in either direction. At semi-worst, they cause low-grade inflammation, and worst-case they cause chemical pneumonitis.
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.
If something is addictive (as in actually creating a physical and mental dependence on continued use in significant number of people) - why would you not classify that as harmful?
> If something is addictive (as in actually creating a physical and mental dependence on continued use in significant number of people) - why would you not classify that as harmful?
You want to classify sugar as harmful? It's physiologically addictive (go a few days without carbs altogether and tell us how it goes).
Yes, sugar is slightly addictive for some people. It's also slightly harmful. (Go sugar free and see how your dental health improves; dropping sugar / most carbs from diet is enough for me to get back to ideal weight)
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.
Pretty much. I've never smoked, and tried picking up nicotine at one point (via patches and gum) because it's one of the safest nootropic substances we know with a clear effect next to caffeine. (My tolerance was too low and in the end I couldn't be bothered to figure out the dosing).
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).
"I also think the arguments against the flavored juices are hysterical/hypocritical given the variety of flavors of liquor one can find."
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?
As someone who vapes and has tried out some different products. Atleast here in Europe Juul was the only "pre-filled" cartridges product which contains nicotine salt instead of freebase nicotine.
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.
My uncle was a lifelong smoker and survived lung cancer (in remission getting close to 5 years). He vapes now and seems to be doing a lot better. It seems preferable to cigarettes considering his odds of full cessation are basically zero.
Something as simple as saline is highly regulated by FDA (in US), so vape probably should be just as highly regulated. Potentially more so since it's use is continuous.
The 'popcorn' issue is pretty much linked to one artificial flavor... Diacetyl... anything that involves a buttery taste. Often found in microwave popcorn, hence popcorn lung.
Custards, a popular group of vape flavors, was the main source of it.
The catch?
Diacetyl is also a byproduct of cigarette smoking.
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.
- "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.
I wish this was around for a friend of mine. I might have been able to talk him into these vaping products. He didn't want the gum, or the patch.
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.
We spent decades trying to get rid of cigarettes and it worked and now we let this fucking Juul through the front door. It’s as if we haven’t learned a fucking thing in decades, and the fact that this founder is celebrated in Silicon Valley sickens me. He just found another opportunity to hook kids on nicotine for another few generations and now he’s a fucking billionaire. Fuck that guy.
Juul is the largest player in the game and were the first ones to use nicotine salts. There are many other companies ready to take their place (and they already are).
The only "option" is to ban vaping outright. But then you're also banning the best smoking substitute.
> The only "option" is to ban vaping outright. But then you're also banning the best smoking substitute.
That's not the only option. So much of the deserved vitriol against Juul is because their marketing and everything else about their product (e.g. fruit flavors) were specifically designed to get kids hooked.
Juul's marketing should be the poster child for the banality of evil.
Fruit flavors do not exist because of the need to market to kids. Go into any vape shop and watch as grown-ass men, one after another, buy vape cartridges with names like Unicorn Blueberry Smoothie. Children aren't the only ones that like tasty flavors.
As far as their marketing targeting children, I haven't seen any examples of that. Using millennials in your adverts does not equate to targeting children.
I'm not denying that adult smokers can enjoy fruit flavors, but at this point not even Juul is trying to deny their early marketing was targeted to youths.
None of the evidence in that whitepaper shows that they were targeting kids. They were targeting millennials (ages 24-40 now), like most other products out there today. Once they caught the attention of the media and anti-smoking groups, they made changes to lay low and actively avoid many of the usual advertising channels and approaches.
Minimalist design, tasty flavors, colorful ads, and using social media does not equate to targeting kids.
The kids aren't getting hooked on Juuls because of advertising. They're getting hooked on them because they give you a buzz and are convenient.
> Minimalist design, tasty flavors, colorful ads, and using social media does not equate to targeting kids.
Well, we clearly just agree to disagree. That article I think shows well how the early Juul marketing followed the cigarette marketing so closely, and there is voluminous evidence that cigarette marketers know you need to target young people because hardly anyone starts smoking after their early twenties.
1) I get the sense that millennials (such as myself), having not lived through the era of ubiquitous cigarette smoking, kind of recognize smoking as more of a legitimate life choice, live your truth, healing crystals, class warfare, can't judge, etc.
2) Juul, being run by a bunch of amateurs, will continue to operate in an extremely sloppy manner like this and go bust eventually, and Altria & Co. will be there to benefit from the mess in the end.
That's not me, but I can kinda relate conceptually. Constantly pumping anything into your body seems bad; to use your deadly sin adage, I'd call it gluttonous. Even a daily pot smoker, would likely not be smoking a bowl every ten minutes all day long. Sure those people exist, but they probably aren't looking down on nicotine users.
Totally I'm an advocate for 100% legalization of all drugs. Though with strong regulation for things like opiates, more as replacement harm reduction thing than it being something you can get at a liquor store (and you can probably argue similarly for alcohol looking only at a net harm + addiction lens, but that kind of proves the point in treating different drugs differently because of stigma).
If only we would work on the real health issues in this country (world?) and start looking at what is being put into our foods. We largely only went after smoking because of its externalities. There is no such thing as second-hand sugar, sadly.
I'm confused. The parent was complaining about solving smoking but letting Juul "in" and all the chemicals it introduces to people. I was merely saying there are far more and far worse chemicals in our food. That we should address chemicals in our food before we worry about Juul given the help ecigs have limited smoking.
> Scientism has become the state religion and companies are paying for indulgences.
I was unfamiliar with that term and googled it: it's described as "excessive belief in the power of scientific knowledge and techniques". I'm struggling a bit to understand how a belief in the importance of scientific knowledge and techniques equates to a religious mindset.
In an ideal world, I would absolutely prefer my government to make decisions based on facts and methods of finding out more facts. Currently, that's only one small part of our governmental decision making process, with the other notable parts being powerful special interests and public opinion.
Could you elaborate a bit on what exactly you meant by this?
I'm not who you replied to, but I've experienced this with some of my friends.
Some people believe in science. They don't take the facts and understand them, they just say "Science says this is true. Anyone who disagrees needs to be shouted down." They will shame people for expressing any doubt against a "scientific consensus". This is actually the opposite of science.
For instance, the Theory of Gravity. I know people who take it to be a law, even though science itself hasn't moved it into that category. If you dare to suggest that there might be some as-yet-undiscovered mechanism for gravity, they will literally get louder and louder until you stop arguing. They won't provide any evidence, they'll just keep saying the same thing over and over.
And it happens for this that are much less certain, too.
I think scientism is best summed up as the fallacious idea that science is a priesthood rather than a process. Some people really struggle separating the politically neutral idea of using the scientific method to inform policy with the politically charged idea that a scientific technocracy is a desirable state of affairs in my opinion, a problem that's only got worse in recent years.
Science is a powerful contributor to the sum of human knowledge, but it's absolutely not the only pillar of human knowledge and there's a lot of people who think that scientific advancement means we can just do away with philosophy, politics, and other fields like that altogether, as though one day with the right equations all of ethics or culture is just going to pop out of physics. These people don't just throw the baby but the whole nursery out with the bathwater in my opinion!
Thank you for answering. I agree that "scientific consensus" is an elusive thing in practice: interpretations change, new data comes in, sometimes it turns out data was held back or falsified. On top of that, what is consensus and what isn't is often distorted in the public view. There is no established quorum process (which is a good thing).
> For instance, the Theory of Gravity. I know people who take it to be a law, even though science itself hasn't moved it into that category. If you dare to suggest that there might be some as-yet-undiscovered mechanism for gravity
There is no scientific consensus on the mechanism that is causing gravity, at least not on the level you suggest. There is consensus on how gravity behaves, in regimes we can currently observe.
The problem with suggesting "some as-yet-undiscovered mechanism" is that you can generate arbitrary many such mechanisms, because there aren't good options yet for experimental corroboration. We all have favorite ideas for how gravity might work behind the scenes, and it absolutely is fun to speculate. But if your goal is to actually make a contribution, your need to come up with an idea that can be falsified.
In my opinion you are completely within your rights to make claims that contradict empirical findings or theoretical frameworks. There often are holes in our knowledge, and continuously re-examining established science is absolutely part of the process. Of course, the burden of proof is on you in that case. But science is absolutely meant to be a living process.
> Some people believe in science. [...] This is actually the opposite of science.
Adding to this, belief in science actually means believing in the _process_ of scientific discovery, i.e. believing that _eventually_ the "truth" will be discovered.
As you correctly point out, questioning the current consensus is a fundamental part of the process, but not all challenges to scientific knowledge are legitimate. Many (most?) concerns you hear in the mainstream media are not legitimate but based on logical fallacies, strawmen, ad hominem attacks, etc. I found this list [1] quite useful to guard against such unfounded attacks.
I don't think science is about "the truth", as the scientific process shouldn't allow definitive claims. Rather, there should always be an understanding that whatever is being said comes with a probability of being true. We can make a prediction and assign a likelihood the prediction will be accurate, but we can never say "this is the truth" using the scientific method. There are going to be things that are so close to true that they can be taken at face value, but science doesn't determine what that level is, that's a personal decision. It's up to the individual to determine what they accept as truth given the data they have, including nonscientific sources of information, such as expert opinion. Science has to reject expert opinion as a source of information, and yet the individual ( including scientists when not performing science) must accept expert opinion in order to live their lives.
Since is not about finding "the truth" as you put it, but it is about finding the current, most fitting truth. As circumstances change "the truth" also changes, as such science will never be able to find anything but "the current best bet".
The idea that science is about finding the "less wrong", rather than the absolute truth, is actually fairly recent, only really becoming mainstream during the 20th century.
Sure. I just don't think it's accurate to think science comes to a definitive conclusion. It is a process of constant discovery and coming closer and closer to the truth, but will never arrived at a final answer.
> They will shame people for expressing any doubt against a "scientific consensus".
Doubt based on what? This is the classic “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge”. The scientific consensus absolutely can be wrong on something, but people that read a few Facebook articles and think they’re argument holds any weight whatsoever deserve to be shamed. You want to question the scientific consensus? Conduct a study or get in a lab, have it peer reviewed. If you want to say “I think the major experts and accumulated understanding in this field are wrong ” then you are going to have to bring more to the table than some random doubts and suggestions.
> For instance, the Theory of Gravity.
Wonderful example. As almost every physicist has stories of people that send them their pet theories about theoretical physics models. Have they done mathematical models? Of course not. But they are sure their theory is going to crack this unifying theory wide open. Maybe ask yourself “if I disagree with all the experts, have they all misunderstood what I am seeing or do I not understand the subject as much as I think I do?” Shame is the cousin to humility.
A law in science isn't used the same as how you are using the word. A law isn't a really good theory. Laws are mathematical predictions based on data collected.
Often it's just an equation that fits some data for a range of values.
Almost all laws are found in the physical sciences. Some examples are: Ohm's Law, Universal Gravitation, Coulomb's law, and Kirchhoff's laws. None of these are perfect descriptions of reality.
"theory" and "law" are synonyms in science. the difference is that a law is a simple one line general statement (F=gMm/r^2) and a theory is fleshed out model with details.
"Theory" does NOT mean "unproven". That's "conjecture".
Gotta ask: is this gravity example real? You really have friends who have some sort of mystical commitment to the idea that gravity is somehow entirely epistemologically self-grounded?
Almost literally every physicist since Newton has believed that there is some sort of underlying theory which explains gravity. Its hard to imagine how anyone could get the idea that the matter was somehow settled.
Most people think we understand gravity better than we actually do.
To compare it to an actual hot-button issue, we know more about the mechanisms of evolution than we do about the mechanisms of gravity.
We know kind of how it behaves at various scales, but we don't know why it does. We don't know what makes gravity. Why do denser objects have more of it. Why is it weaker than other forces, yet felt on larger scales? Does it actually exist or is it an emergent property kind of like the centripetal force (or is it centrifugal, I keep getting those flopped)?
>For instance, the Theory of Gravity. I know people who take it to be a law, even though science itself hasn't moved it into that category. If you dare to suggest that there might be some as-yet-undiscovered mechanism for gravity, they will literally get louder and louder until you stop arguing. They won't provide any evidence, they'll just keep saying the same thing over and over.
What a strange example. Has this ever happened to you? Additionally, does General Relativity count as "an underlying mechanism for gravity"?
We have pretty reasonable models for how gravity might work.
A suggestion that there may be a yet undiscovered mechanism for gravity isn't useful to science. It's imaginative perhaps, but without a piece of math, or a suggestion for an experiment by which to test it, it's just science fiction. Ideas are cheap.
Anecdotally, I've seen this too. I think people look for something to believe in, and they take almost everything a celebrity scientist they agree with tweet or share as gospel without much scrutiny of the research. It's ridiculous
As a hypothetical example: "excessive deference to science" might occur when you have a global pandemic, and a government official says, "I am following the science. Therefore an attack on me is an attack on science." This official asks for exciting new emergency powers, and uses them to push through measures which coincidentally achieve policy goals he couldn't achieve before the pandemic. In the name of Science™, he tries to silence any dissent that says his measures are ill-suited to mitigate the pandemic, or unduly burdensome; maybe he even has an excuse to ban opposition political parties, perhaps because they are antivax (eww — but still) or just because they are questioning his power grabs.
(This is a hypothetical government official. Any resemblance to real-world government officials is coincidental.)
That isn’t deference to science. That’s just someone who can align himself to something and use it t to make himself untouchable. You see the sand thing with religion or nationalism. “An attack on me is an attack on our veterans!”
Not all science is good. You can publish papers which literally do not allow any valid conclusions to be drawn due to methodological errors. I suspect that's most of them since academics are judged by the number of papers they've published in impactful journals.
Just because science says something doesn't mean it's true. Truth must be verifiable. It's possible to easily and cheaply verify basic physical concepts like gravity. This inspires trust. Professors routinely reproduce physics in classrooms:
Reproducing some medical experiment is hard, expensive and time consuming. Once a study is published, a huge number of people will simply assume it is true. Very few will actually check the methodology of the study. Virtually none will attempt to reproduce it.
> Just because science says something doesn't mean it's true. Truth must be verifiable.
I don't mean to sound condescending, but if science as a concept 'says' anything, it is exactly that truth must be verifiable.
There absolutely are problems with how study results are weighted. Starting from the way the press reports on findings, up to and including the uncritical acceptance of questionable material by many members of the scientific community.
However, there is no workable alternative to the process of science, because defaulting to whatever people personally like and discarding any inpportune data is certainly not how we move forward as a civilization if we have any ambition to continue our ascent (and we might in fact not have that ambition, but I do like to pretend that we do).
Studies and data in general must be weighted. Sometimes the proper weight is zero. I see little other options but to continue stumbling towards improvement and knowledge. Acting on data will always be an imperfect process on a sliding scale, very few people would disagree with that.
Edit: I would also say that there is a distinction between the opinion that we're generally moving too fast and the opinion that we have severe deficits in how we weigh incoming data. Both of these can be addressed, although the solutions appear to be way easier in the former case. We need to be honest about which camp we're in though.
I want to agree here because this comment seems to be misunderstood.
In science as cumulative evidence, studies can in fact be harmful. If they are wrong or highly ambiguous, or if they make it hard to uncover errors, then they make it more difficult for future research to be correct.
The reasons include publication bias (rejecting studies with null effects and/or contradicting previous literature), p-hacking and so on.
That's why it is so important to apply rigorous standards everywhere: Transparency, data sharing, peer review, replication, pre-registration. In other words: There is no alternative to open science.
On the contrary, truth must be falsifiable [1]. The value of a theory is not in how easy it is to verify, but in how easily it could possibly be refuted.
Science is myopic by construction. Science does not consider what questions to answer, but rather tries to answer what can be answered. Science cannot tell you how to run a country or city. It can, at best, tell you how NOT to.
Over reliance on science as guidance has also lead to some of the darkest chapters of human history, like phrenology and its use to justify racial supremacy.
> Over reliance on science as guidance has also lead to some of the darkest chapters of human history, like phrenology and its use to justify racial supremacy.
Could you clarify this? I understand that humans committed terrible atrocities in the name of "racial supremacy". I also understand that the same people used science as a fig leaf to justify their actions. But you seem to be saying that over reliance on science lead to these atrocities.
I simply can't imagine someone saying "I like these people and normally wouldn't hurt them, but the scientific consensus is so strong therefore I will kill/maim/throw them into a concentration camp." It sounds more likely that the racist ideology was there first, which caused both the racist science and the atrocities both. In other words racist people wanted to commit atrocities and they manufactured excuses for themselves to do so.
But I'm far from an expert on human history, so please correct me if I'm wrong.
I’m not the person you’re replying to (and I agree with your) but thinking about your question the closest thing I could come up with is maybe lobotomies? Even then I’m not really sure about the chicken and the egg. Was it ever about treating the patient or was it meant to make caring for an “embarrassing” patient easier for the family by turning the patient into a shell of a human?
Also, unlike e.g. phrenology, I wouldn't say lobotomies were one of the darkest chapters in the history of mankind. Sorely misguided and tragic, but not that.
Eugenics was a mainstream science for a large part of the 20th century, not just amongst white supremacists, and was often carried out with "good intentions", as opposed to simply being a way to legitimise white supremacist ideologies.
Exactly this. Science has too much emphasis on the "now", on present knowledge.
Take 17th century science... most of it would be ludicrous by any standard today. Now imagine applying that science onto humans/society... Science as a tool to deal with present knowledge, should not be used solely to manage societies or human situations with irreversible consequences.
In your very last sentence there; you summed up what I meant. I don't know why you expect me to come up with a solution on how to manage societies in a comment section.
I don't think they expected you to come up with a solution to managing societies; I assume if you know of a better way to come up with reliable guidelines for running society you wouldn't have thought of it yourself. Maybe you could link to a book that contains the methodology that you think is better than science.
Dude, we (me and other commenter) are already in agreement. Other commenter summed it up pretty succinctly. So I just didn't want to start a flamewar on semantics, except for pointing out that I can't come up with a solution in a short form here.
I have a medium article in draft over 3 months on this exact topic. That's why my wording of the issue came out sounding more complicated. But other commenter saying "science alone" and me saying "using science solely" are basically pointing to same understanding.
There are many examples in history for the said situation leading to social catastrophes; see Malthus (or Thanos' ideology if you like pop-cult), or Darwinian take on managing societies. Some lead to racism, some eugenics etc etc.
Like the original commenter said; science is myopic and highly focused on the present body of knowledge available. But once we applied those results onto people and cause suffering, and 10 years later find some of those were wrong, we can not undo the human suffering.
There needs to be a balance; when science is treading closely to the human dignity, well-being, life in general.
> how a belief in the importance of scientific knowledge
You quoted it yourself: scientism is "excessive", or, more correctly, it treats scientists as authoritative sources of truths that should not be questioned. This form of blind trust goes against the scientific method.
Also scientism can make categorical error in the type of questions that can be answered e.g. journalists asking physicists about "god particles" and such
> I'm struggling a bit to understand how a belief in the importance of scientific knowledge and techniques equates to a religious mindset.
I think the poster refers to dogmatic mindset. Assuming that all religions are dogmatic is incorrect.
Scientism is a term popularised by Hayek that means the fetishisation of the institutions of science and a failure to recognise the role of uncertainty in scientific judgement.
In an ideal world, maybe. In the real world it means treating a study on 31 American undergrads as scripture (the studies that failed to replicate its result go unpublished), regulation based on a study sponsored by the regulated, or a diet recommendation for half a century based on a hypothesis that saturated fat causes heart disease.
This policy by science simply doesn't seem very effective. It largely provides cover for bureaucrats who can say that they followed science while doing what they wanted to do in the first place.
Sorry I missed your reply amongst the other comments.
> In the real world it means treating a study on 31 American undergrads as scripture
My opinion is that scripture shouldn't be treated as scripture to begin with.
> This policy by science simply doesn't seem very effective.
As a tool for making policy decisions, science gives you access to solutions that might work based on the evidence. Now, that evidence may be completely bogus, so there is no getting around the need for evaluation. But saying that data is a bad basis for goal-oriented action planning is a self-defeating position.
Policy by science is not a meaningful concept on its own, policy action requires a component we haven't talked about yet: a value system. Science can give you the data, but your goals determine what actions should follow. You're certainly correct when you say that politicians are getting some cover from improper data, but overall I find they seldomly hide their motivations.
> I'm struggling a bit to understand how a belief in the importance of scientific knowledge and techniques equates to a religious mindset.
The scientific method doesn't include the word "belief" at all. If you reduce it to belief, it's not science anymore, it's religion.
> In an ideal world, I would absolutely prefer my government to make decisions based on facts and methods of finding out more facts.
Science is a process, not a collection of hard facts. The only hard facts (or the claim of them more accurately) come from religion.
Science concerns itself with building speculative models that have predictive power, and trying to match observation with prediction of the models. Redundancy (peer review) is used to REDUCE (not ELIMINATE) errors. Social and cultural factors can result in false positives and false negatives in peer review.
That's it in a nutshell. The models don't reflect reality, they only reflect an approximation of aspects of reality in given contexts.
Anyway, the problem is that people do have a religious instinct. And when they're incapable of perceiving science with all its subtleties, they simply reduce it to a religion, which requires the belief that it's basically flawless, it provides hard facts, the best solutions, and that it's uniform (and any contradictions are just examples of "interests" corrupting it).
While politics are very corrupted and often result in incompetence rising to the top, even it weren't the case, those competent politicians have no single place to turn to to understand what "science" thinks on any given problem of society. Science isn't a guy, so it has no opinion.
I think scientism relates to beliefs that equate the current state of scientific knowledge with absolute truth and ignoring unknown unknowns and limits of scientific methods like statistics.
A common fallacy is that "absence of evidence is evidence of absence". For a government this might mean "There is no definite scientific evidence that substance X causes cancer, so we do not ban it.".
Should we ban everything until we don't have solid proof that they don't cause cancer? Not banning something isn't acting like the substance is benign, it's acting like we don't know.
There is a middle ground that exists only when you combine science with common sense.
Let's say a chemical X is used in baby food production. There are no studies that show that it is harmful, because no studies have been done yet. Many chemicals with similar structure have been shown to be harmful.
Scientifically speaking you would be correct to say that there is no evidence that chemical X is harmful. There is no way yet to accurately model the interaction of any chemical with your body without any actual experimentation. You can make an argument that chemical X might be harmful because similar chemicals are harmful, but that would not be science.
I would not buy that baby food with chemical X if given a choice. Best case I don't lose.
Finding conclusive evidence in science often takes lots of time to gather enough data because there are so many different variables to consider. So absence of evidence means a lot more when you have been looking for a long time and invested lots of resources.
I don't know what parent meant exactly, but I personally think that scientific methods are only useful for people who are smart/educated enough to interpret them.
There were so many studies for example about cancer along the lines of "eating apples reduces cancer by 5%" and then you see people start eating apples for this reason. Somebody wrote a paper to get a publication with questionable results and people blindly believe in the power of science.
Don't forget that a lot of the papers are also written in unintelligible scientific jargon and that scientists would massage numbers because their writings directly affects their job prospects and salaries.
Religion didn't necessarily start from being a highly politicised power-hungry beast it became in middle ages. Bible says a lot about being a better human being. So is science - the scientific method does allow us to learn new things; but academia is a political entity which is only going to be growing in it's power and thus corruption.
> There were so many studies for example about cancer along the lines of "eating apples reduces cancer by 5%" and then you see people start eating apples for this reason. Somebody wrote a paper to get a publication with questionable results and people blindly believe in the power of science.
This is the problem with interpreting results... you can set up a study witn n=100k people, and find out that people who eat apples die 5% less from cancer, correlation is shown, and somewhere in the conclusion "more research is needed to find exact cause".
In practice, people who eat more fruits probably take care of themselves better, eat better diet,... etc.
I understood the parent as people believieng in something, without actually looking at data itself, thinking about it, considering other posibilities, and of course, declaring others (opposers) as heretics... for example, spring, last year, my government (and our scientists, and probably yours too, depending on where you live) said that masks are useless for fighting covid, even detrimental, so "believers" called the people who bought and wore them fearmongering paranoics.... then a random saturday came, masks became mandatory "from monday on", and those same people called the "antimaskers" conspiracy-theorists and worse for not wanting to wear masks.
Reality is of course a mixed bag... cotton masks prevent you from spitting everywhere, but don't actually block a lot of virus in the air. Surgical masks were practically impossible to buy back then. Masks outside, away from people are useless. etc.
Science is a process for getting better (or less bad) knowledge. Eventually.
I think we all agree that many studies are flawed and/or wrong. But I also think most people agree that there is a realistic expectation that we will find out over time [1]
[1] Caveat emptor: With sensible scientific methods, see my other comment on this post.
Dividing the world into alleged institutions that produce facts, and institutions that don't is exactly what scientism is.
Querying public opinion is a method of determining facts, even special interests provide facts. 'Scientism' consists of what Feyerabend called 'methodological monism', believing in the notion that there is any privileged authority to 'speak facts'.
Someone who properly understands 'science' understands that the processes to produce knowledge are as dynamic as facts themselves. All efforts to produce some sort of privileged methodology produce bureaucracy and standardization that closes science off from avenues that can produce knowledge. Elevating this bureaucratic caste of scientists to political authority is scientism.
The problematic part is not the belief in science but in the absence of good science relying on or outright exploiting the things that resemble science. With bad science and statistics you can justify pretty much anything. When challenged simply say "Ah sorry, the science says so".
The problem is that there's facts and there's facts; if a company basically buys their way into a reputable journal and publishes peer-reviewed papers, are you trusting that as fact? I mean if you religiously believe in science / scientism, you would take the Word of a scientific paper as the Word of God, even if you should do your own research into the sources, citations, reviewers, and who paid for it.
I mean the current slew of flat earthers, anti-vaxxers/maskers, bleach eyeballers andsoforth also cite Science as their source - lending credibility to their arguments, making their thing not just emotional or gut feeling.
And religious people will take (parts of) the bible as a scientific fact as well.
I don't get why Americans target their own companies when it comes to vaping. A couple of years ago regulators banned all the popular flavors of Juul while other brands still have plenty of vaping flavors.
The flavor ban completely destroyed Juul as a company, and I would argue Juul is already dead, and more sinister products are taking its place.
Vaping (and Delta 8) markets are now ran by a bunch of Chinese companies now, and their safety standards are much lower than American companies.
With Delta 8 exploding in popularity, I would much rather prefer large and established American companies (such as Juul) making the product with American safety standards.
But after most of the Juul flavors have been banned, Juul is now an empty shell of a company compared to what it once used to be, while Chinese are still cracking out those flavorful vapes, but now they're also disposable (which is even more appealing to kids) so you throw out a battery and plastic shell when the cartridge runs out of vaping juice.
I miss the days of DYI vaping where you would have to build your own coil and cotton - maybe even mix your own fluid - and the whole thing was more akin to a hobby.
I have followed the story of e-cigarettes and can only say it's eye opening, its probably very symptomatic to how things are done. It went from innovators and communities to being large enough that the cigarette companies responded by a smear campaign, disinformation and panic, that was then used to regulate in a way that benefited only the cigarette companies. What a transparently corrupt world we live in.
The smell from vaping is not comparable and it goes away quick, at least if you are not using some fancy liquid. Even if it doesn't, it's no worse than the smell of kebab which people are allowed to eat indoors.
Vaping indoors for any length of time leaves a sticky residue over everything - perhaps either nicotine or propylene glycol residue. Even ignoring the air quality issues for people who didn't sign up for it, it's not completely impact free.
Maybe kebab also creates poor air quality and sticky residues, but in my experience people don't tend to eat kebabs continuously every 5 minutes through the day.
I'm all for e-cigarettes as an almost-certainly-better alternative to real cigarettes (banning vaping but not smoking is ludicrous to me) - but allowing using them indoors does have a real impact on everyone else. Perhaps some are discreet, but the cloud chasing guys ruin it.
I much prefer "funny smells" to regular cigarette smoke, be it for the smell of the cloud, the one it leaves on your clothes, or the aggressiveness of the smoke on your lungs.
in Connecticut beginning 1 OCT 2021 business will require no smoking in public spaces. I know it specifically targets e-cigarette use indoors. But believe it also means no smokers outside the front of the office, or outside of the bar.
> the cigarette companies responded by a smear campaign, disinformation and panic, that was then used to regulate in a way that benefited only the cigarette companies
That and the cigarette companies just bought into the industry. Altria (AKA Philip Morris) owns 35% of Juul.
I used to be a cigarette smoker who went to juuling and eventually "quit" (I still cave to a few puffs of e-cigs every month or so when I'm with someone that has one).
I agree if you have no intention to quit, juuling is much safer than continuing to inhale smoke.
But you might want to be careful using it as a smoking cessation tool. I smoked about 7 cigarettes a day but after I picked up juuling the sheer convenience of not having to go outside, being able to use it in bed, etc. got me up to 1-2 pods (equivalent to 1-2 packs of cigarettes) per day in nicotine consumption.
My lungs caught a break by vaping but my nicotine addiction was uncontrollable. I eventually used nicotine gum to quit and it was absolute hell. I suspect it would have been much easier if I wasn't so used to a constant stream of nicotine 24/7.
I have a similar story but with just non-juul vaping. I actually started smoking again to stop vaping because I was so heavily addicted to the high nicotine availability. At least with cigarettes you get a sick feeling if you smoke too much, but with vape I would sometimes just puff away until I would start jittering from too much nicotine.
Ended up just quitting cigarettes instead which ended up being easier after getting over the mental block that makes you think it's so much harder than it really is. Everyone's mileage varies though of course.
Before I start I note that I'm old enough to do what I want and I have no other habits/vices, but don't vape, kids ;-)
So I, a total non-smoker, started experimenting with nicotine a few weeks ago. First I tried gum which did nothing but give me an itchy throat. Then I bought a vaping device and some juices. Why? I think I'm low in dopamine (I am not depressed, though) and had read nicotine provides a temporary boost (until you get hooked) and I was intrigued to feel the difference.
I can't really tell what's happening. I like the taste and mouth feel of the smoke but the nicotine itself is a bust. Perhaps a very mild caffeine-esque feeling at a push. It hasn't proven addictive as it's been sat out in my car untouched for the past four days! Perhaps the nicest sensation is that of taking a truly deep breath.. but that feels just as good without the vape!
I remain intrigued what this means and hope to speak to someone medical about it one day. There's nicotine because it stings the throat if you hold it there (versus a zero nicotine juice) but whatever this amazing sensation people get has clearly passed my receptors by.
>I quite like the taste and mouth feel of the smoke but the nicotine itself is a bust. Perhaps a very mild caffeine-esque feeling at a push? It hasn't proven addictive as it's been sat out in my car untouched for the past four days!
As someone who stupidly started smoking later in life, that's pretty much how it goes. Nicotine addiction isn't like on TV where you smoke a cigarette or puff a vape and suddenly you're hooked. It's a slow process you find yourself doing more and more often until you realize one day, it's every day all the time.
I've also heard similar experiences from heroin users when talking about their path to addiction. A real negative of anti-drug/smoking education is the hyperbole used when describing how addictive and amazing the substance is. When the user tries it and finds that their first hit is kind of... underwhelming, at least compared to everything they've heard, it's easier for them to say "eh, I'll never get addicted. I can do this casually" until, whammo - they're hooked.
I'll add to that - I never found nicotine that addictive. Some grogginess, a little on edge, gone before you know it.
What's hard to quit are the motor memories/habits. Get in the car, reach for your ... wait no we quit that. You start realizing how many little habits you have that way.
This is the hardest part. This and being around people who smoke. You get used to those times when you have a smoke, or socializing with people who're smoking. Even just having your smokes in your pocket or something becomes one of those things.
If that's the case, I'll ditch the nicotine juices and enjoy the zero nic ones on a rare occasion then. The smoke/flavor part is amusing, but as a drug, I'm not seeing the appeal. Sugar or caffeine has a more noticeable effect.
I'm only speaking from my own personal experience. Everyone's different, bit i definitely found nicotine to be a slow building thing. I never found it all that great. Like you say, it's not much different than a cup of coffee or something, maybe not even as strong and that's almost why you don't tend to notice when it becomes a habit. It's really subtle.
I smoked a variety of tobacco products for years and never got anything out of it either, so it may be that some people just don't work with it. I quit trying long before vaping became a thing but I would expect similar results.
I did end up moving to dip (Skoal) however and that worked. It was never more than a minor buzz but at least it did something. For me it was incredibly relaxing. I quit dip years ago as well but I still find myself with urges to put one in while driving, and especially after meals. Highly addictive stuff and you don't even see it coming.
If you're thinking of trying it though, it is really easy to overdo it and end up dizzy or sick. This is especially true on your first dip. If you're going to try it, take a small pinch first! If you overdo it, lie down and take a nap and sleep it off.
Tobacco doesn't appeal to me so I won't be likely to go down that route, but it's interesting to hear your experience.
The only thing I've ever taken that's given me a true buzz plus relaxation is doxylamine which is a common OTC sleep aid in the US. The only problem is shortly thereafter it also knocks me out well into the next day so isn't exactly something to take with any regularity(!)
Interesting thoughts. Some back for you from an ex smoker:
I'm not entirely sure that the feeling would be described as amazing. When smoking Cigarettes I'd get a mild "buzz" nothing so strong as cannabis or alcohol in its effects, but noticeable. Probably something akin in strength to a strong coffee. I was unable to replicate that 'buzz' with a vape pen that I used while attempting to give up. However, I have to draw a difference between that feeling of buzz from the direct chemical effects from the feeling of relief of having your addiction fulfilled. The latter maybe the more extreme, the craving of nicotine is a near constant building tension that is released with that next cigarette.
Apart from yourself others have noted the meditative aspects of cigarette smoking. Beside the chemical addition aspect when giving up smoking you're losing a ritualistic break where you can spend a few minutes away from what you're currently doing, usually alone, to do a deep breathing exercise. This ritual is often a contributor to the difficulties in giving up.
As a nicotine addict I caution you against assuming addiction is not looming. In my experience the onset of nicotine addiction is sudden and consuming.
For some time, perhaps, you smoke or vape merely socially, experimentally, after a whisky at a party. Then, suddenly, perhaps after one too many the night before, ferocious withdrawal threatens. It is not a slow process, but a sudden toggle.
I will also add that in my experience a nicotine high only exists when consuming a large amount before you have developed a tolerance. I believe most addicts do not get real pleasure, either.
I think I'm sensitive to nicotine; ymmv on actual effects. If I smoke a cigarette, it gives me a dizzy buzz, nausea, shakes, sweats... and that doesn't go away even if I smoke regularly for months. I wouldn't call it "relief" of any sort. I usually quit after a couple of weeks, and stay off for years, but I've been addicted since I was in high school. My last stint was because I'd read that nicotine can moderate stress... but I've found that stepping outside for a quick walk and not smoking is even better.
Have unfortunately been a smoker on and off for a while. Am currently using a Juul and have successfully been winding down my nicotine dependence again. They way I initially got hooked was in college. I would not mix alcohol with your nicotine experience. You'll feel it much more acutely. I've also read/heard that people with ADHD are far more susceptible to nicotine addiction FWIW.
I have never smoked, but the impression I had was that sensation of relief happens after you become addicted. When addicted but not smoking, you feel withdrawal effects that are diminished in a quick surge upon smoking again.
I quit to smoke after 13 years of smoking. And I was a heavy smoker. I am a non-smoker for 10y now and will never smoke again.
No need for vaping or such.
I think if you substitute you do not catch your addiction at the root. Vaping is really the wrong way.
You need to get rid of the addiction.
My main point why it was easy for me to quit finally, I hated to be controlled by an chemical.
A chemical that has control over my brain? No way anymore!
I've destroyed this beast.
I am a free man!
The most harmful part of smoking is the smoke, not the addiction to nicotine. The critical thing to do is to get people off the actual smoke. However they achieve that safely, including with nicotine vaping, should be supported.
Nicotine is harmful for your mind more than your body. Every time the need to smoke appears, it replace everything you had in mind, to the point that the only thing you can think of is «Damn I need to go to smoke».
To me this is by far worst than any potential cancer risk.
(I smoked for 15 years and stopped 3 years ago, if that precision can add any value)
EDT: Juste to add that realizing this gives you motivation when you quit. And the freedom gained is also rewarding.
> To me this is by far worst than any potential cancer risk.
I think anti-smoking/vaping organizations should put more focus on this. I never realized how much this aspect of nicotine takes over your life.
Personally, my thought process was always something like: Lung cancer and all those other health effects are scary and all, but they're gonna happen decades from now, and I'm gonna quit by then so it doesn't matter.
Whereas focusing on the immediate effects of nicotine addiction and how it drives your day-to-day life, that's not talked about enough.
> Nicotine is harmful for your mind more than your body. Every time the need to smoke appears...
Right but you don't need smoke for nicotine - that's the point.
Nicotine is still harmful, but it isn't as lethal as smoke.
And more critically - smoke is dangerous to people around you, while nicotine is just your problem alone. If we can get people off smoke but still on nicotine, that's better for everyone.
> My main point why it was easy for me to quit finally, I hated to be controlled by an chemical. A chemical that has control over my brain? No way anymore! I've destroyed this beast. I am a free man!
I quit for seven years. It was one of the hardest things I’ve done. Starting again was the worst decision of my life, but I was in crisis at the time. Quitting a second time, with full knowledge of the first, is even more daunting. I’m happy to have something in between while I try to reduce dependence.
Saying that vaping is not a legitimate path toward reducing the harm of cigarettes is like saying there’s no use for the patch or nicotine gum. They’re better than smoking, even if a crutch.
That's wonderful, but be careful generalizing your experience to others. You don't know who is struggling with mental illness, executive control issues, ADHD, OCD, depression, etc.
Tobacco is more than nicotine delivery. It contains harmaline alkaloids, which among other effects, is a monoamine oxidase inhibitor. Quitting a cocktail of nicotine and MAOIs, while those stimulants are "treating" underlying conditions, is a way harder task.
For these folks, vaping is absolutely a step up, and allows them to wean off the tobacco MAOIs, especially in conjunction with treatment such as bupropion.
Yep -- this is how I use my vape, to reduce my overall MAOI intake. And I started smoking to begin with for the antidepressant effects (which it's surprisingly effective at).
Were I to switch to vaping alone, it would be far easier to quit, mainly because the nature of conditioning relating to a vaping habit (hitting my juul at my desk) is very distinct from cigarettes (going on the roof and having a smoke triggered by certain events). The latter is far more "attached" to specific event triggers and lasts a specific amount of time, while the former is a more "ambient" act with much less habituality attached.
n=1 is only a new data point. If vaping helps someone else then I'm all for it, if they can sub it out for smoking, it really does seem to be a better option if people don't use cheap ingredients and companies.
> But a Tuesday New York Times article on the subject contained a fascinating nugget midway through, which could be described as a buried lede (journalese for putting the most explosive part of a story in the middle of the piece).
I’m going to come down on the opposite side and say that a garbage journal that nobody reads publishing garbage research for money isn’t news. Though it is certainly a good example of why you shouldn’t believe something just because it is published.
It’s pretty hard to find a journal with an impact factor below 1 considering how frequently scientists cite their own work. Heck just look at the special edition papers and see how often they cite each other.
Edit: but I also don’t want to argue this point too much because impact factor is not a good measure of the quality of a journal
Nature Scientific Reports has 5-year impact factor ~4.5 and it's very low quality megajournal with tendency to publish junk science. The peer-review is designed to be very low quality (scientific importance is not criteria for example).
It depends. I haven't looked at them but good meta-analyses have rules for what to include that might preclude those studies. Were there even experiments or just general reviews?
This seems to be just standard procedure for any company operating in a health related sector. Maybe the scale is different, but any competent regulator would be aware of these types of relationships and should be adjusting for selection bias in their evaluation.
This is all fair game for Juul, and merely serves as a distraction by the media. Modern capitalism enforces no moral responsibilities on companies besides enriching its shareholders. The academic system has long been exploited by these same players and left standing as a shell.
> Pretty much all the articles take the Juul party line that e-cigarettes help convert smokers away from combustible tobacco products, and thus aid public health. Pretty much none of the articles mention that Juul and other vaping companies make their money by attracting countless new people to nicotine addiction.
Well maybe it's because Juul bought the journal or maybe the researchers found no correlation between Juul's profits and public health.
This has been a hot topic of research in the public health community, and from more legitimate researchers there is still a lot of debate. However this kind of move is striking in it's similarity to the known tried and tested maneuvers of the tobacco industry to undercut public understanding of the risks with their products.
This is the 21st century equivalent of attempting to disprove the links between smoking and cancer.
It's similar but not what I'd call equivalent, because the risks of smoking and vaping are different and differently understood in their respective PR battles. The science is still out on how safe vaping is in the long term, but apart from liquids having certain additives like diethyl that are known to be unsafe now, it appears to be reasonably safe.
The undercutting of understanding the risks of cigarettes was happening when the risks would have been blatantly obvious to researchers, unlike with current vaping products. So while the PR technique is similarly appalling, the context is different.
I mean, yeah they're a smoking cessation tool which has been taken up by non-smokers, like any other drug with somewhat recreational effects out there.
Vaping for fun can be done without nicotine, though. They could place some more visible stickers that say "Smoke only nicotine free - same fun, no stupid addiction!" or something.
And locking e-cigarettes behind a prescription would just make people continue smoking the freely available tobacco products. Nicotine patches failed to gain wide adoption in part because of that.
Any source for that claim? I can only say from the personal experience that people I know and I used to be addicted to nicotine (not only in tobacco products)
Vaporizers are extremely useful as smoking cessation tools. Juul is not really configured correctly for this purpose. You have to give your customers control over the nicotine content, there need to low-nicotine and nicotine-free options.
But yes, the hysteria over flavors is uncalled for. Flavors are useful. If you don't prefer the taste of your vape to the cigarettes, you're not going to switch.
When I switched to vaping, I specifically chose the fruity flavors to disassociate tobacco from nicotine. It seemed to work, because I quickly found myself becoming disgusted with the smell of burning tobacco. So much so that my drunken-bummed cigarettes would be extinguished after only one or two puffs, and even then I was risking physical nausea. Having access to flavors was a huge part of my success with ditching tobacco.
The amount of juul pod junk under my feet in my city seems to be growing exponentially year over year.
At least cigarette butts are biodegradable!
They should be forced to make these things out of cellulose or a similarly biodegradable product as their consumers are going to treat them as butts and just chuck them on the ground when they're done.
Disposable vapes are gaining in popularity, and some of those disposable vapes even come with a USB charger (even though they're not designed to be refilled without fluid).
This means every time someone is done with the vape, they throw away much larger piece of plastic (compared to Juul pod).
When comparing the price-point of a refillable vape (or Juul), disposables are around the same price or cheaper, without the hassle of getting fluid on your hands.
Disposable vape buyers tend to ignore the price of refills is cheaper than buying a whole new vape, so most of the clientele are kids.
Disposables are also very popular for products such as Delta 8 - since Delta 8 has higher price point compared to Nicotine - the disposable plastic is just a marginal part of the cost.
>When comparing the price-point of a refillable vape (or Juul), disposables are around the same price or cheaper, without the hassle of getting fluid on your hands.
That's only true of the device. JUUL pods contain 2ml and a 4 pack is ~$20, about the same price as a 30ml bottle of juice for refillables.
The journal is: "American Journal of Health Behavior".
Why did they agree to this? Why aren't they afraid of damaging their reputation? I'm not an health researcher or medical professional, but I would think if I were one, I wouldn't want to publish in this journal afterward, take seriously articles written in it, or be associated with it. They lost three editorial board members at least. Maybe AJHB will be an example that $51,000 isn't worth trashing a reputation that took decades to build.
> Juul’s dominance dissipated around the time that over a thousand people contracted a mysterious vaping-related sickness in the fall of 2019, and state and federal regulators started to investigate the company’s blatantly obvious marketing to teenagers.
Surely as hell I support investigating marketing to teenagers but in this case it would seem to me more adequate if they would rather investigate the cases of the sickness and find out what exactly was causing it. I even doubt the sick were using Juul.
I think the case was closed on the vaping sickness, as it was attributed to black-market THC vapes using vitamin E oil to thicken their otherwise diluted distillate to give the illusion of a higher quality product. It's too late for the PR damage to be undone to vapes in general.
Really? Where there no such problems with conventional liquids? I'm not aware about any cases which didn't involve VitE/oil but would prefer to be sure there were now such cases known to anyone and cite some credible sources for his. Occasionally people would bring this topic up and I want to respond "that's all about vaping vitamin E in black market THC oils, just stick to PG+VG from reputable vendors" but don't feel credible enough.
Wait, as someone overseas who hasn’t seen any of the Juul advertising what are some of the examples of them “blatantly advertising to children”? Is it just the fact that they are making flavoured nicotine products or has it been more nefarious than that. As an adult I kind of like some of the flavoured tobacco products from smoking shisha (argile, hookah etc) and they have had flavours forever and not been in the spotlight to marketing to children?
Juul has sabatoshed their product. I quit smoking using the Mango flavor (now banned in the USA). I moved onto Virgina Tabbaco flavor which did the trick. About 6 months ago, all the pods started tasting like laundry detergent (Batch codes JJ25SA20A and forward). I had a few of the old to compare with. Waited 6 months now and bought another pack and it's still horrible. Now I buy mango pods from Russia. I hope that option lasts.
A little more R&D into the ingredients of vape products could have eliminated or reduced so many of the health concerns.
I really wonder why industry didn't do that. No industry wants their own products to be banned or legislated about by regulators - and paying a few more scientists to find replacements for ingredients that cause lung cancer would seem like a no-brainer.
Juul was bought by big tobacco a few years back, and then like magic state representatives in a bunch of states all started to get lobbied for a vape tax that was very beneficial to pod based systems like Juul, and Vuse(also owned by big t) and that's how I went out of business.
I can’t read this stupid website on my phone. The content keeps shifting up and down for some weird reason, and like every other bloated website it asks me allow cookies as soon as I visit it. So frustrating......
The article tone itself indicates what it is just a continuation of Juul smearing campaign on Philip Morris grants. Not to be confused with Juul grants which are bad.
That photo of the Juul advertisement with the huge government-mandated warning
> „This product contains nicotine. Nicotine is addictive“
made me wonder…
Maybe social media needs the same?
> „This Facebook product contains dark patterns and is engineered by a team of psychologists to maximize time spent scrolling the news feed. It is highly addictive.“
Cigarette smoking is so harmful, in addition to the reasons cited by other comments, because you are inhaling burnt matter. Vaping doesn't involve this.
Big difference between inhaling a heated liquid vs combusted solid. And yes the nicotine is mostly harmless. I rather enjoy my nic addiction with good black coffee.
Your citations don't back up your claim that "the main reason smoking causes cancer" is polonium 210. They just note that polonium 210 is one possible reason for smoking causing cancer. From your [1]:
> Do these doses lead to lung cancer? It’s hard to say, especially since the effects of polonium are only part of a wider range of damaging consequences caused by inhaling cigarette smoke. But animal studies certainly give us cause for concern.
Moreover wikipedia cites two articles saying:
> In contrast, a 1999 review of tobacco smoke carcinogens published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute states that "levels of polonium-210 in tobacco smoke are not believed to be great enough to significantly impact lung cancer in smokers."[224] In 2011 Hecht has also stated that the "levels of 210Po in cigarette smoke are probably too low to be involved in lung cancer induction".[225]
Neither of the two sources you cite the presence of radioactive polonium as the main carcinogenic effect, just FYI. It is a contributing factor, but there are about 70 different compounds in tar that are known to be carcinogenic, one of which is radioactive polonium.
Although interesting, tobacco is not primarily carcinogenic via this mechanism. Smoking related cancers harbour DNA damage resulting from chemical carcinogenesis, not radiation.
> So Marlboro buys 35% of Juul and now Juul is advertising recklessly and inviting an e-cig ban or heavy regulation. Interesting
Marlboro know they're above consequences for their product safety, and they've done this kind of thing before, so they're going to do it no matter how unethical it is.
How much polonium in cigarette smoke versus a campfire? It says polonium occurs naturally in the soil and air. How much polonium then is taken in as a baseline? Other commenters mention radiation is not the factor that causes cancer in smoking so why does this CDC article even exist?
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.