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Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

The logical fallacy is on the side of anti-e-cig arguments here. It's moving the goalpost from talking about smoke to talking about nicotine. And yes, you're probably better off not ingesting nicotine than ingesting it, but if you do ingest nicotine, you're significantly better off getting it from an e-cigarette than from a standard one. Also, dose matters; I don't recall studies showing that pure nicotine is harmful in the amounts usually consumed (addiction being created by its interaction with other substances in tobacco smoke).

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Did the goalposts not move first with the implied argument that "we ingest this all the time, ergo these things are safe?". They aren't containing just those chemicals.

I'm saying I don't want to breathe any of it I don't have to second hand, and the argument that I breathe liquid smoke at concerts or Christmas festivals is beside the point.

Forget addiction in users who decide to smoke it, nictotine a neurotoxin and exhaling it to people who don't want it in public places is inconsiderate.

> I'm saying I don't want to breathe any of it I don't have to second hand, and the argument that I breathe liquid smoke at concerts or Christmas festivals is beside the point.

It's not, it's about magnitude of danger and pointing out it's not a kind of danger that's worth worrying about. This is the rational approach; contrast with media fear-mongering that likes to point out "a connection" between X and some illness, without mentioning how insignificant the connection is. Or, in this case, without noticing that you ingest the exact same thing in similar amounts from different sources, and those sources somehow aren't considered bad for you.

> Forget addiction in users who decide to smoke it, nictotine a neurotoxin

So is water, when overdosed.

> and exhaling it to people who don't want it in public places is inconsiderate.

I totally agree with that! But let's call a spade a spade - it's inconsiderate, not dangerous.

You have zero rights to harm my health.

So, it's not that bad is simply not a defense. If you want nicotine ware a patch, chew gum etc. If you want some other crap in your lungs, do it somewhere that does not impact me.

Are you telling the same thing to every driver that drives past you? To every person that breathes near you? Or to God himself, for creating the Sun that spews way more UV than you need for healthy existence?

There are countless things that are "not that bad" and yet shown to be linked to various diseases. We don't care about them because that's the very definition of danger being not in any way significant.

If someone is driving a SUV down the sidewalk I would probably call the police. The EPA is legally empowered to deal with air pollution, sure we carve out exceptions for the common good, but the default is not dump whatever you want into the air.

Yes, but for better or worse[0], smoking is considered common good. Here we're talking about replacing smoking, which is clearly very harmful, by e-cigarettes, which are maybe somewhat but insignificantly harmful. The cost-benefit analysis of that alone[1] should convince everyone to cheerfully advocate for them.

In the course of this discussion thread, we've jumped from the danger of e-cig vapor (which is nil) to the danger of pure nicotine (which is also nil) and now we're talking about pollution. Can't we just agree that those are three separate issues (two of which are non-issues, and third isn't really discussed by people right now)? So far everything is showing that e-cigs are a neglible hazard to smokers and their surroundings. We should be happy we've found a good alternative for the decades-old problem, instead of trying to destroy it by overblowing its negative effects by orders of magnitude.

[0] - Googling just now, I found that there are reasons for considering cigarette smoke an air pollution - http://epi.yale.edu/the-metric/considering-smoking-air-pollu...

[1] - I haven't seen any analysis about potential of e-cigarette smoke becoming a significant pollutant; it most likely won't be in terms of particulate matter, but maybe the smoke itself is bad for atmosphere. I don't know. But even if, that's a discussion about environmental impact (and a one that no one is having right now), not about direct health effects.

> danger of pure nicotine (which is also nil)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicotine_poisoning#cite_note-L...

"An accidental ingestion of only 6 mg may be lethal to children. [16]"

So, safe as long as you ignore the dead people?

Please read the entire article to see why this is a non-issue. Can't access the paper to determine just how old the "children" are in this study, but given that you absorb only 1 mg of nicotine from breathing in smoke of a 12mg-nicotine cigarette[0], I'd again treat nicotine poisoning as something not relevant to smoking in the real world.

[0] - http://www.electroniccigaretteconsumerreviews.com/how-much-n...

You get 1 mg of nicotine directly. The other ~11 to 19 hang around. In areas with minimal ventilate the dosage can ramp up.

aka second hand smoke is not limited to other people.

What area are you in that you are worried about airborne nicotine building up to fatal levels? If there is that little airflow, you should be more worried about suffocation.

Do you also apply this sense of morality onto yourself and the damage you might cause other people? Because in that case, get. the hell. off. my planet.

It's only the right thing to do.

Safe, as long as you're not boiling down a pack of cigarettes and precipitating out all of the nicotine in order to then deliberately poison a child, yes. Pure nicotine is absolutely lethal. It's also hard to come by unless you make your own - which you'd only do if you wanted to poison someone.

I was directly quoting someone that said Pure nicotine was safe which it is clearly not.

"If someone is driving a SUV down the sidewalk I would probably call the police"

That's just obnoxious.

"the default is not dump whatever you want into the air."

Lol. Pass the news to industry. And seriously, with your attitude, you should be living a 100 miles away from the nearest car.

> Or to God himself, for creating the Sun that spews way more UV than you need for healthy existence?

but if the Sun had less UV, you would see its texture map all tessellated.

> You have zero rights to harm my health.

> So, it's not that bad is simply not a defense. If you want nicotine ware a patch, chew gum etc. If you want some other crap in your lungs, do it somewhere that does not impact me.

Dude, the health-impact of getting worked up about this is already magnitudes more than the health-impact of the thing you are worried about.

It's one thing that there are studies showing nicotine is a harmful substance (which isn't even quite as straightforward as it seems), it's an entirely other thing to quantify the risk of exposure to an occasional whiff of e-cig exhaust, in the context of traffic pollution, fireplaces, incense, air fresheners, people farting, or investigating where a burning smell comes from.

The latter 9 times out of 10 involves burning plastic, which going near to instead of away from, for a minute, just to check, is way super more stupid harmful to your health than actually taking a full drag of an e-cig. I owe my life to people that weren't afraid to do that (still insignificant) damage to their health, which is a million times worse than the perceived harm you are whining about.

Hell your presence on my planet is already more damaging to my health than you catching a whiff of e-cig. So nothing personal but kindly maybe get off it. That, or learn how to rationally deal with very very tiny probabilities (it's not intuitive, but also not that hard).

It's not beside the point-- when I vape, there is no nicotine, it is literally a human smoke machine.

Your anti-nicotine crusade is attacking people who aren't using nicotine, without making the distinction.

There is no crusade. However, most people who are vaping into public airspace are in fact using nicotine with a very high degree of correlation -- this is not something many people do just to taste 0-nicotine air flavors. This started off by saying "vaping is probably safe, because similar things are used for special effects at concerts". In this case, there is at least one factor not included in those concerts - the drug most people are obtaining through vaping.

They say "this is safe", while ingesting a particularly evil toxin that is lethal in very small quantities (like a drop or two will make you violently sick). Yes, there are other toxins, but ... again, this is perfectly avoidable and nobody has any business making others who do not choose to be exposed to it.

People should have the right to not come in contact with that.

> a drop or two will make you violently sick

can we please stick to the facts?

a drop of nicotine will kill you. it's easily more than the above stated lethal dose of 6mg.

and before you think that proves your point, it actually just proves that you can't properly keep orders of magnitude apart.

if you consider "a drop or two" as "very small quantities" then I have some news for you: there's essential nutrients your body needs to survive, that would be lethal if you ingested "a drop or two".

how much mg nicotine is there in a whiff of second-hand e-cig smoke?

how much whiffs are there in "a drop or two" of nicotine?

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