Good for Iceland that their teenagers don't smoke as much. But there is little information for other countries in there.
Smoking is going out of fashion pretty fast in USA too.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2016/12/13/teens-d...
1. Using various policies, Iceland has been able to strongly reduce the amount of substance abuse in their country.
2. Other countries suffer from substance abuse as well
3. The article notes that the method is mostly data driven. This implies similar methods should apply to different countries.
How do you come to the conclusion that the information presented in the article is not applicable to other countries? Why would a racial dissimilar, larger and heterogeneous population not benefit from a data-driven approach to limit substance abuse?
I'd go the opposite way: because the populations are larger, noise has less influence on the data-driven approach and tests can be accelerated.
With that can't do attitude of course things will never get fixed in the US.
End the drug war is a simple solution to all of America's drug problems. American politicians and prison-industrial-complex likes drug addicts. That is why USA has a drug problem.
Source?
Yes, Smoking traditional tobacco is going out of fashion pretty much around the world. It's been replaced by the increasing popular E-Cigarrettes / "Vaping", which is also Tobacco and poses the same health risks as traditional tobacco.
Especially very prevalent among-st Teenagers and young people. Heavily marketed by Big Tobacco as "Safe".
Sources:
1) CDC: Tobacco Use Among Middle and High School Students — United States, 2011–2015: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/65/wr/mm6514a1.htm?s_cid=mm...
1) England: Smoking rate continues to decrease while vaping gains in popularity http://www.vapingpost.com/2016/09/22/england-smoking-rate-co...
2) The good news is that cigarettes are out these days. The bad news is that tobacco is still in. http://www.teenvogue.com/story/vaping-tobacco-popularity
I'm sorry, what? It may pose health risks, but I have not seen anything remotely resembling evidence it poses the same health risks as smoking or chewing.
This is wrong, and absolutely harmful information to spread. Cigarette smoking causes cancer through burning tobacco plant matter, a process that releases a variety of toxic chemicals. Vaporization of e-liquid does not burn tobacco plant matter, and thus doesn't have the same issues.
E-liquid is basically nicotine, glycerol and/or proplyene glycol solute, and flavoring. Nicotine replacement products aren't associated with cancer risk. The solute is much the same stuff as in asthma inhalers. There isn't really good research for the flavoring, but it's generally ingredients that are recognized as safe to put in food.
Overall, vaping is likely at least an order of magnitude safer than smoking. Probably two. That's not anywhere near "the same health risks as traditional tobacco." I'm personally more worried about spending lots of time near busy roads. If a policy causes X more people to vape per person that no longer smokes, X would have to be at least 100 for me to think it's a net negative.
Nicotine replacement products aren't associated with cancer risk
Current NHS advice puts vaping at 95% less risk than smoking, which is to say an increased risk (5% of the smoking risk), compared to not vaping.
- https://www.nhs.uk/smokefree/help-and-advice/e-cigarettes
- http://scienceblog.cancerresearchuk.org/2009/04/24/can-nicot...
- http://www.nhs.uk/news/2009/04April/Pages/NicotineGumCancer....
- http://www.cancer.net/navigating-cancer-care/prevention-and-...
The NHS advice is interesting, thanks for contributing it. It's a good sign that I'm on the right track - I put it at "one to two orders of magnitude", or to use the same units, 1% to 10% of the cancer risk of cigarettes. The NHS is likely biased towards saying things cause cancer (because incentives - nobody causes a ruckus if something they thought causes cancer is safe, but everyone gets way riled up if something the NHS thinks is safe causes cancer). So my updated belief is now that vaping causes less than 1% of the cancer that smoking does, per user.
This is what's really wrong, and absolutely harmful information to spread.
Your source for all these claims you are making about Vaping being "Safe"?
The NHS estimates that vaping is no more than 5% of the danger of smoking.
(https://www.nhs.uk/smokefree/help-and-advice/e-cigarettes)
Heavy smoking is roughly the equivalent of losing somewhere between one and three healthy years of life.
(https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1361023/)
Combine the two estimates at their most conservative, add a tad of fudge factor, and heavy vaping use will at worst cost you two months of healthy living. People regularly make worse tradeoffs than this - obesity, amount and recklessness of driving, playing professional American Football, and many others are likely worse.
Whether or not that counts as "safe" is up to you and your risk tolerance, of course. As a non-smoker, that's safe enough for me to try vaping to see if nicotine a stimulant worth using.
Conflating tobacco with nicotine is also a bad move.
The Big Tobacco and Vaping Lobbyists have tons of "blog posts" and "research" news that "debunk" all the bad things about Vaping and Smoking.
Required Viewing: Astroturf and manipulation of media messages | Sharyl Attkisson | TEDx https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bYAQ-ZZtEU
Nicotine and some flavors are dissolved into food-safe glycerin. Then that mixture is raised to a temperature where it becomes a gas, but not a temperature high enough for it to burn. Then it is inhaled.
If you compare that to smoking--- a cigarette actually _burns_, and during that oxidation process it'll make thousands upon thousands of variants of chemicals. And because they've been oxidized, they're more reactive.
I'm not saying vaping is safe. But I'm saying that it's obvious that it's safer than cigarettes.
You should also check out this. I am open to the idea that vaping might be _as bad_ as cigarettes, but currently the evidence shows that they're way better, and can be a good tool for quitting. https://www.gov.uk/government/news/e-cigarettes-around-95-le...
Agreed. Saying something is 'safer' than something else, doesn't make the original thing 'Safe'. Vaping causes Cancer, so does Tobacco smoking. All of you are saying "Vaping is Safer because it isn't AS BAD AS smoking Tobacco". Agreed. But another way of saying is "We think Vaping is Safer because it causes Cancer in 20 years, whereas Tobacco smoking is will cause Cancer in 10 years"
Does vaping cause cancer in 20 years?? Or are you just postulating an example?
Arf. Arf.
D-O-G W-H-I-S-T-L-EIt doesn't do the community much good to pull punches, if that means putting a diplomatic muzzle on valid points and opinions that contrast with a preferred norm.
It is neither rational, nor fair, nor explained. It materializes from thin air, lands on anyone that awakens a even but pang of discomfort in another user, and smears all words irrevocably, and dispassionately.
You might catch a downvote for being vague. You might catch a downvote for mispelling. You might catch a downvote for trying to be funny, and succeeding, but because you've offended the faceless humorless. Even an obsequeous comment will be downvoted for spinelessness.
Few honest comments actually work on HN. Almost all HN comments need to be slippery, many require a fecetious concilliatory bent.
You really can't win when commenting. Not anywhere. Someone out there will find a reason to slam you.
Anyway, I've stopped karma-whoring. And even though I possess the capacity for downvoting under other accounts, I do not use that power.
Admittedly, it means I no longer play into the ranking algorithms, and I can't feed into any persona reputation, but the power to freely disagree, and to add voice to other people's (otherwise silent) downvotes, or contradict downvotes when I feel they're wrong, is the more valuable feature any forum can offer.
Maybe it fulfills other needs and my glandular, gutteral response to people who "are wrong on the internet" overrides the ego of being preened and revered by the community, but the way I see it someone needs to fill this niche. HN has a serious echo-chamber problem, and the prevailing wind needs some yelling into.
The first is the voluntary tendency people have about providing their IRL identities. For some this is largely optional, for others, less so, for example when a celebrity is participating as themselves. Real identities means there's some skin in the game for at least some people, requiring a heavier hand in moderation. This part can only be augmented so much, and requires individual users to self censor, disengage, and conceal their own identities when posting an unpopular sentiment. Humans being what they are, this reality will never go away.
The other is the karma system, and this can be changed. And karma really is an unnatural ranking value, since one can pick up on inconsistencies after enough lurking. Whether it should change (or be changed) is arguable. If it's as harsh as it seems, and the effects are that chilling, it may just be an expression of actual human behavior. In which case, it's an early warning alarm, and an analog for what goes down in face-to-face meetings, but remains unspoken. We may not like echo-chambers, but they take shape in the real world too, in which case every social circle carries a shelf life that can probably be quantified by the manner in which this feedback loop widens and deafens its participants by jamming all signal with a noise that drowns out everything else.
I'd hope that last part isn't true (being slightly depressing as it is), and that tweaking the numeric validation could tune the ambient personality of the community's behavior, such that it doesn't drift into irrelevance. It sounds easy enough, but maybe poor execution would warp and deny certain aspects of reality, to produce yet another fiction with unintended consequences.
Anyway, I'm just gonna keep doing whatever.
http://px.hagstofa.is/pxen/pxweb/en/Samfelag/Samfelag__menni...