E-Cigarette Maker Juul Labs Is Raising $1.2B | Hacker News Reader

E-Cigarette Maker Juul Labs Is Raising $1.2B

bloomberg.com

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I wonder how good it is for public health if Juul is able to grow this market. Do the health benefits from cigarette smokers switching to e-cigarettes offset the young people who never would have dreamt of smoking cigarettes heavily, but regularly use Juul?

I had no idea how pervasive Juul was for college students until my sister told me that multiple people were "Juul-ing" in all of her classes. Highly recommend this New Yorker article to understand the cultural phenomenon: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/05/14/the-promise-of...

Absolutely not good for public health long-term. Their recruiter reached out to me last December and it was a hard no for me based on what I understood about the industry.

People use them for starting to smoke just as much as stopping and they are also heavily used for non-nicotine products as well. I don't hold any moral judgements on the brand, or customers, but I was not going to spend my effort helping that become a bigger company.

Kudos for the ethics.

Tobacco kills 7 MILLION PEOPLE A YEAR

You confused your personal morality, which seems more based on "would this rule benefit everyone applied universally" with the question you were asked, which is of the "does this provide the greatest good to the greatest amount of people" variety.

It's _possible_ that in the end, ecigs are not a net positive for humanity. But that is a belief without firm proof. They could be twice as addictive, but if they kill only 1/3 of us that cigs did, they'll be a net benefit. And 1/3 the lethality of cigarettes seems to be a drastic overestimation of their harm from the evidence we have right now.

I made my own assumptions and came to the conclusion that this was net negative not net positive.

I guess we will find out in 30 years.

Well I am interested in what other features you considered in your analysis (not to disputed them, just curious about what elements spoke to you).

You, in fact, conflated the original question with a essentialized, worst case scenario that shoehorns a multivariate determination into a binary proposition. There are, after all, other methods of smoking secession beyond nicotene alternatives.

In fact, there are some methods of quitting an addictive substance that work by actually stopping the ingestion of the addictive substance in the first place.

Nicotene alternatives are akin to advertisers recommending you to take a break from Facebook when it's too overwhelming, instead of just deleting your account entirely, like a person with self control and agency might do when products and services continually make you regret ever starting to use them in the first place.

You misunderstand what is really bad about cigarettes. It isn’t the nicotine, but the tar (the burning of it). Heck, nicotine gum has long been used as a safe smoking cessation aide. Not to mention it is present in many new works vegetables.

Getting rid of the burning tar is a HUGE win for smokers, healthwise.

(1) nicotine gum is used as a weaning assist, not an ongoing alternative

(2) you chose to overlook his point that vapes are also an on-ramp to smoking, not just an off-ramp.

(3) people really oversell the whole “vape isn’t combustion” bs. Both the solvent and the flavors form toxic aldehydes when vaped, and their long term safety has not been assessed.

The only reason you could want a smoking-cessation product to not be available is because it causes big tobacco to lose money. Why are you telling lies that other people have to be paid to tell? Why are you doing it for free?

No, reasons to not want a supposed smoking cessation product to not be available - which by the way, wasn't a position I was taking - is because it has other harms, and the magnitude of those harms has to be weighed against the magnitude of the harm of smoking.

Nor did I lie; nor did you have a single lie to point to.

And suggesting that I'm a paid shill - or worse than that, an unwitting shill - without even having grounds on which to criticize what I said is both a value-less contribution to this discussion, and well below the HN standard.

Welcome to the Oppression Olympics, where there are always exactly two points of view.

Back here in the land of analog spectra, there are people who are concerned that an addictive product wildly successful with teenagers is generally problematic, regardless of what it is displacing. Astroturfing with crocodile tears exacerbates these concerns.

It is possible to acknowledge a problem, and, at the same time, criticize suboptimal solutions as kicking the can down the road, while maintaining the general goal of solving the problem.

Stop foisting binary propositions upon your interlocutors.

I, in fact, possess no such misunderstanding. I can certainly appreciate that holding the tar up as the boogieman, to give coverfire to nicotene, makes good marketing material for up and coming businesses looking to disrupt established tobacco companies. However, there is a faulty assumption in your copy. And that's to defang addiction as a problem, and to anchor all of the negative effects of smoking to the respiratory system.

Of course tar is bad for lungs. It turns out that products such as tobacco can have multiple health hazards. I do not besmirch people for improving the health of others. I simply detest marketing that acts as if addiction is something to strive for.

I tried to quit smoking with earlier vapes and failed because I wasn’t really addicted to the nicotine at all. I eventually figured out how to quit, but it was the burning plant matter that had me hooked more than what you can get in a bunch of tomatoes.

The really bad thing about cigarettes is that it harms other people. If people want to exchange a little bit of their future for some pleasure now, then I don't think that's so bad. Some do it with alcohol, some do it with adrenaline rushing activities, some with sugary desserts, or unhealthy sitting and lounging around habits, etc. Everyone's just trying to get that hit of dopamine or whatever in their brain. But just do it without causing inconvenience to others, as much as possible.

e-cigs have been proclaimed as between 95 and 99% less harmful than smoking, by some health charities.

If these figures are well grounded in evidence then... probably yes.

Oxycontin is likely a safer drug than heroin. That doesn't mean we should be working on growing the Oxycontin market on the assumption that every new user is someone who might have otherwise used heroin.

Methadone is safer than heroin and is widely used in substitution therapy.

Either way, the bulk of health damage from smoking was from the complimentary products of burning. You ain't getting lung cancer from nicotine.

I am not aware of any doctors that would recommend using methadone permanently and and it is only legally available to be prescribed for ongoing substitution therapy by federally certified abuse recovery centers. So my analogy still stands. No one should be actively campaigning to grow the methadone market the way that people are for e-cigarettes.

The metaphor is somewhat flawed, but methadone is unfortunately often considered a life long way to manage an addiction.

You'd be wrong. Opiate maintenance with suboxone or methadone is often understood to be a lifelong thing.

AFAIK any MD can write a script for methadone.

Only for pain, not as a part of detox/treatment. Source: https://www.deadiversion.usdoj.gov/faq/prescriptions.htm#rx-...

As far as I remember you are getting cancer, although at a lower risk, at least accordingly to some study posted here in the past that I can’t pinpoint right now.

Here's one :) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4553893/

Actually, you just might get cancer from nicotine.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4553893/

If being addicted to Oxy was 95-99% less harmful than being addicted to heroin, I think we'd be OK with a small rise in Oxy users as heroin use fell off.

But as these are not in any way analagous to the current situation, it seems silly to talk about them.

Is it better to have 10 kids smoking traditional cigarettes, or 1000 using Juul? But perhaps that's a false dichotomy. My worry is that by creating new addictions, we will end up with 1000 using Juul AND 100 kids smoking traditional cigarettes.

I don't see how anyone gains from this, other than Juul's investors.

Given the existing socioeconomic patterns of smoking [0], I think this is the most likely scenario. Given a Venn diagram of people who smoke (low socioeconomic status) and people who "Juul" (high socioeconomic status [1]), the overlap in users is likely quite small.

It doesn't seem like they're cannibalizing an existing market, as much as they are forging a new one.

[0]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22092035 [1]: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/05/14/the-promise-of...

Your worry is unfounded, apparently. So far there's no evidence of e-cigs being a gateway to regular ones.

One thing that bugs me about ecigarettes is that the flavoring chemicals are totally untested. Vegetable glycerin is essentially harmless and is even used in asthma inhalers, and nicotine is way less harmful as well. However it's already been shown that certain flavoring agents like a particular butter flavoring are harmful (https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/11/e-cigaret...). I know a couple "juice" makers and they basically just throw in random flavoring chemicals that are meant to be ingested.

It's possible to get unflavored e-cigarette juice, and when I was using an e-cigarette (i switched to gum) i tried to get it as often as I could. But it's really uncommon, most shops don't even have one, and the one i went to was often sold out.

Actually it recently was discovered that the metabolites of nicotine itself are a likely carcinogen, so not quite so harmless.

The 'popcorn lung' bit is BS. There are no known instances of ecig users contracting it. People also fail to mention that the levels of the chemical in question (diacetyl) is >700x higher in traditional cigarettes.

I'm not much of a conspiracy theorist but I have to wonder if tobacco company PR agencies have anything to do with the proliferation of that particular talking point.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4553893/

High schools too, it's amazing how many kids use juul. I think a lot of them aren't even aware it's nicotine.

They know, they don’t care. It was hard enough to convince people, especially kids, that smoking was bad for you and that was with something that made you hack up yellow slugs, and stank. I would guess that convincing people that vaping nicotine is harmful decades before the harm is readily apparent, in ways that are not well studied will be essentially impossible.

Juul is just the perfect intersection of portable, concealable, and apparently consequence-free. Kids will use it, and I don’t see a way around it. Good luck to the poor little bastards.

There is startlingly little evidence that pure doses of nicotine are harmful without smoke.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4553893/

Everyone in here is caught up in the physical harm of smoking. Celebrating moving from cigarettes to eCigs. I'll admit that's important. But for me, most of the harm cigarettes have (and also eCigs) is not how bad is it on your physical health.

Legitimate question - if most of the harm of eCigs is not on your physical health, what is it?

It's the mental addiction. The physical health is not really something you deal with every day - usually doesn't get super serious until you get older. But when you are addicted to smoking (cigs or ecigs), it changes you. It interferes with how you live your life. You are now thinking about smoking a lot, when the next time you smoke will be. You will be doing something and then you will think "I wish I had a cigarette" and then that will consume you until you find one. You are less productive because of this. You are less in the moment because of this. You become controlled by the addiction. To me this is much more serious. You might die 10-20 years earlier, sure, that's bad, but if you aren't living to your greatest extent right now, I think that's much worse.

I actually think ecigs are worse than normal cigarettes for this reason. It's now socially acceptable to smoke them, easier to smoke them (you can just hop into a bathroom stall and take a hit).

In my personal experience, vaping does not feel very addictive at all. I used to be a heavy smoker, using 3-4 hand rolled cigarettes every hour unless I was somewhere I could not smoke. I'm now a heavy vaper, I vape all day every day, but it feels more like something I do because I enjoy doing it than because I need to.

When I was a smoker, running out of tobacco would induce panic attacks. Every minute spent on an airplane or at the movies I'd devote most of my thoughts to longing for the moment I could have a smoke again. When short on cash, I'd prioritize tobacco over food.

As a vaper, I have on multiple occassions forgot to bring my vaporizer (or charger, or e-juice) when travelling and gone without for days with no problems at all. A bit annoying perhaps, but no more than forgetting to bring my headphones before a flight or something like that, certainly not even close to the cravings I'd get when I couldn't get hold of my precious tobacco during my smoking days.

There's obviously individual differences at play here, but if someone came to me complaining about their horrible vaping addiction I'd have to restrain myself from not going all Bob Saget in Half Baked on that poor vape junkie... ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LEberTUvrsE )

I've never smoked, but I agree with you on the vaping not feeling very addictive. I vape all day while I'm working (I work from home), but I don't take my vape with me when I leave the house, and while I occasionally have a thought like, hmm, a vape would be nice right now, I never feel driven to vape or deprived without it, even when I'm out of the house without the vape all day.

What is it?

Is nicotine bad for you? I thought it was just what made cigarettes addictive, and all the other stuff is what made them unhealthy. Happy to be proved wrong -- I'll let some eCig friends know ;)

The main problem with nicotine is that it increases your risk for heart disease. It’s also somewhat carcinogenic.

It's also extraordinarily addictive. That's an ethical problem in and of itself.

That’s a great article, and rather eye-opening.

Juul may help cigarette smokers get away from tobacco, but wow — stories about teens and young adults taking Juul hits every 10-15 minutes are something else. That’s just plain addiction, taking them far beyond the threshold of diminishing returns, even for caffeine-like self-medication.

There’s definitely a lot of money in creating addictions... this can’t be a long-term, net good to society the way it’s heading now.

Kids taking Juul hits every 10-15 minutes are not driving and are not drinking alcohol, so there is your public health benefit already, mostly in the former.

If you're gonna be opposed to some fidget spinner infatuation on "think about the kids" public health concerns, start at what actually kills kids.

If you're going to pick something to say "Kids doing X don't drink a drive", vaping would probably be pretty low on that list.

> start at what actually kills kids

Sounds like you’re categorically ignoring whatever negative things don’t directly kill people... well-being encompasses a lot more than not dying.

And when I was in school half the kids smoked cigarrettes. I have no idea what the numbers are, but you have to consider that fewer kids are using tobacco, which is a good thing.

Well, it depends.

As far as I remember, the vehicle is propylene glycol. It isn't biologically inert, and I'm not sure how much work has been done to study buildup within the lungs or combustion products. Combine that with dodgy sourcing allowing metal contamination.

It seems more or less the definition of trading the devil you know for one you don't.

There are a lot of studies about inhaling PG in the context of smoke machines (in bars, generally). It reduces lung function, but not permanently. No more serious harm seems to be indicated.

Also, PG has been used in ventilation systems as an air sanitizer for decades. Not a 1:1 comparison given the massively increased volume papers get, but it's something.

There's literature back to the 1930s about workers inhalation of VG and PG vapour in volume in an industrial setting. From memory, there are consequences but not associated with the chronic degenerative health conditions associated with cigarette smoking. An examination of the molecular biology of VG and PG suggests its quite difficult to find bad things they would do that would be associated with the chronic degenerative health conditions associated with smoking.

False dichotomy. Tobacco smoking was on a downwards trend before vaping anyhow (it just plain stopped being “cool”) so clearly you don’t need vaping as alternative to reduce tobacco usage.

My younger brother, over 18, is rather fond of his Juul and I don't quite understand why. My parents smoked while raising my sister and I, which I believe contributed to our fascination and addiction to cigarettes; but they had quit long before having him. I've worked my way off but after seeing what vaping has done to my brother from what appears to be social (peer) pressure, I'm not certain if it has provided any net benefit to this point.

To be honest, nicotine has cognitive enhancing effects. Nicotine alone does not have detrimental effects (aside from vasoconstriction, but it’s a stimulant); the main risk comes from the unknown effects of long term exposure to inhaled chemicals like propelyne glycol/vegetable glycerin.

These chemicals are approved as food additives, though.

> Nicotine alone does not have detrimental effects

I think it’s normal to consider dependency and major withdrawals when stopping as pretty detrimental effects, whether or not any other symptoms are involved.

Not that everyone is bothered by that, but folks needing to vape every 10 minutes have a severely lowered quality of life (or the risk of having one), in my opinion — if only because their habit gets in the way of other things, or perhaps they forget their pod pack and have an incredibly bad day. I think that could be a whole lot worse than not having one’s morning cup of coffee.

Not to mention the very questionable morality of selling a product engineered to hopelessly addict your customers.

I never heard of this Jool-thingy before, but when I was smoking I switched to e-cig for a while and after a couple of month I had to stop altogether because one night I managed to smoke the equivalent of 2 packs of cigs in something like 4/5 hours. After that night I didn’t smoke for 8/9 months I think because the effect that it had on me was so awful. After some huge stress at work I started again and after a couple of years I finally stopped for good, I hope. Now it’s 3 years that I don’t touch a cig or an e-cig, and I really hope that the new generation doesn’t fall on the new and glamorous nicotine trap, although I’m not really optimistic...

I'm not sure how you'd manage to "smoke the equivalent of 2 packs of cigs in something like 4/5 hours". Firstly you're not inhaling any combustion products, so that's not equivalent to start with. Secondly the absorbance of nicotine from ecig vapour is much lower than when nicotine is inhaled in the form of smoke such equivalence is not really measurable.

I was a heavy smoker, 2 packs a day, Juul was the only thing that helped me quit. Nothing else worked.

All I know is that I vastly prefer hanging around people that vape vs smoke. I am middle aged and wasn't that familiar with it but started running events with older teens and young adults with vaping being somewhat common (small fraction overall). For some events a dozen people go outside to smoke and then come back stinking the entire place up. Vapers on the other hand just take some puffs in the room and no one even notices or go out and come back smelling normal. Of course the highly scented or large clouds are annoying but not what most vapers I know do. Not sure how "juuling" figures in here but wanted to share my experience. Growing up annoyed with a mom who smoked and generally hating it, vaping has been a bit of a relief as compared to cigarette smokers.

For those who don't know, Juul is the inventor of the "salted nicotine" vaping trend which makes the nicotine spike much faster in the bloodstream than earlier vape juice, which is more like cigarettes. They have a patent but it appears to be ignored by the vape industry as "nicotine salts" are widely available (added benzoic acid). The nicotine level is also much higher, allowing for lower wattage devices and smaller vape clouds, and a harsher hit that more closely resembles smoking. I think this technology is great if it can reduce the harm of smoking and get people off of cigarettes.

As someone who quit a 17-year cigarette habit for vaping starting in the early-ish days (2011, and it's come so far since then), nicotine salts might be the answer to those who relapse from trying to quit via vaping because it "didn't feel right."

Quite frankly, the narrative to smokers who want to quit from vapers who have has been "it's different, but be patient"; if a closer analogue gets out there that closes the gap on attempts versus quits, I really think there's a no-lose situation.

Is it really any better than smoking? I believe nicotine itself is the carcinogen, correct? Not just the ash and other byproducts of burning...

No, nicotine is barely a carcinogen and is essentially on the same level as caffeine in terms of danger.

My impression is that nicotine is "essentially" harmless but caffeine is actually harmless, maybe even good for you (kind of like a glass of red wine a week).

Try taking a whole bunch of caffeine pills, definitely not harmless.

The dose makes the poison and tablets are about the only way you could overdose on caffeine. Your stomach will be telling you to stop long before you get to 40 cups, which isn’t enough for a healthy adult to overdose on.

They said the same thing about cigarettes decades ago, proving it with “scientific” studies.

And when it's mixed with benzoic acid? (the 'salting' process mentionned)

From Bing:

Is benzoic acid a carcinogen?

It is considered safe only at less than a .1% concentration in a finished product (Source) When benzoic acid and vitamin C (ascorbic acid) or citric acid are present, under the right conditions of heat and light, these two ingredients can combine to create the known carcinogen, benzene.

Yes it's quite a lot better than smoking.

Vaporization of juice is better on your lungs compared to inhaling smoke and tar. Less to get clogged. Nicotine itself has been shown to be significantly less addictive combared to Tobacco. Theories for this typically involve the fact that there's more than just nicotine in tobacco. There's a chemical in tobacco smoke, the name escapes me at the moment, that acts as an MAOI, reinforcing the effects of nicotine.

This isn't to say that nicotine is harmless. Rather that the consumption of nicotine via vaporization is Less Harmful compared to smoking tobacco.

Honestly saying that nicotine is far less addictive in e-cig rather than cig seems like a BIG BIG lie. At least speaking from experience.

There are a lot of people who weren't smoking at all starting to vape as well. I would consider that a pretty big lose.

Why do you assume they wouldn't have started smoking in absence of vape?

Higher amounts of them are starting to vape than the rates of smoking would predict.

I'll take you at your word (a source would be nice) but I fail to see how that is a bad thing.

You fail to see how kids getting addicted is a bad thing?

Do you have any evidence that it is?

citation?

I'll just throw in that I am one of those people who didn't smoke cigarettes but have attempted vaping multiple times. Cigarettes are gross, they stink.

I've always stopped vaping after not too long due to issues with the ejuice tanks or just not feeling like doing it anymore.. but I actually picked up juul a couple days ago because I do enjoy that occasional 'nicotine rush', so trying this again =p

I may be an idiot, but I'm also a stat. =)

Why? There’s no way nicotine inhalers are as harmful as drinking alcohol. The research on nicotine’s health effects qua nicotine is about as strong as that for caffeine. The long term health effects are small and ambiguous.

The negative health effects from smoking are from inhaling burning plant matter, overwhelmingly. If we go from the current rate of smoking to 100% of adults vaping the health effects on a population level would still look good. Smoking is really bad, vaping is new, stupid and may in the long run have some negative effects on your health but we don’t have any strong evidence it does.

Never heard about those 'nicotine salts'. Had the same problems coming from cigarettes (30+ a day) to vaping, that is, in stock juice nicotine content is just too low.

All it took was self-prepared mixes, higher in nicotine, very low in aromas and those tobacco-like, vg/pg mix just as I like it.

Came out about fifteen times cheaper than the off-the-shelf juices. Compared to the cost of cigs, even not counting health effects, vape is about two orders of magnitude cheaper.

Now I dare someone tell me that 30+ 8mg cigs a day are somehow less harmful than ~8cc of vape.

> I think this technology is great if it can reduce the harm of smoking and get people off of cigarettes.

I think this was the initial hope for e-cigs, but reality has turned out differently. These things are leading to a whole new generation of nicotine addicts at a time when smoking has fallen to all time lows in the US. Juul particularly is getting kids hooked that otherwise would have never touched tobacco, and they're getting a lot of heat over their advertising tactics now.

Getting everyone off very poisonous deadly substances is a fair tradeoff for getting new people hooked on something as dangerous as coffee.

E-cigs didn't destroy the kid's market for traditional cigarettes, though. When I was in high school (right before vaping took off), smoking was only "cool" for a small subsection of the school. For everyone else, it was a stupid thing and kinda trashy. I'm guessing that the set of high school aged kids who would have picked up cigarette smoking if not for vaping is really quite small.

So, we worked for decades to eliminate cigarette dependency, made huge progress, and now kids largely don't smoke. And then vaping came along, and a company is receiving billions from investors to get kids addicted to nicotine.

Vaping is healthier, but I can't think of a conceivable reason why this is a good idea.

Is there really evidence of an uptick in kids smoking traditional cigs due to vaping?

Even if there was, traditional cigarettes are on their way out, and what we are left with is something as dangerous as coffee and a bit more expensive.

Because the entire human experience shouldn't be an exercise in neurotic min/maxing and risk avoidance. I'd rather live in a world where people occasionally smoke or gamble or have unprotected sex than one where everyone is driven by Type A obsession with health and money and living forever.

If a kid picks up a nagging but ultimately harmless nicotine habit, is that really the end of the world? Given what we know so far about vaping and its safety, I'd say you could make an argument for the pleasure of flavored nicotine outweighing the annoyance of addiction.

As someone who smoked cigarettes and then quit by switching to vaping and weaning myself off, I can give anecdotal firsthand testimony that quitting vaping was much easier than quitting cigarettes. It's hard to say if some new vapers would have been smokers or not, and I agree that really none of it should be legal. But while any nicotine is legal, my personal experience gives me the opinion that vaping is a product which does indeed provide harm reduction.

Right, and your personal experience would probably be the same as other _pre-existing_ smokers trying to quit, and it would be providing harm reduction if it worked for you.

But doea the harm reduction to pre-existing smokers outweigh the increased uptake in youth populations?

I can provide anecdotal evidence that it’s no easier to stop vaping than to stop smoking. Should we make a poll on HN?

I'm not able to accept this without decent evidence. There's some pretty clear psychopharmacology related to burning tobacco that is absent for ecigs. Specifically one of the byproducts of burning tobacco is a compound related to early anti-depressants - a mono amine oxidase inhibitor. The effect of this compound seems to be to potentiate the addictiveness of nicotine. That is move its addictiveness from O(n) similar to caffeine to greater than heroin (citations available). This is why the buzz you don't really get a buzz from ecigs that you get from cigarettes, and also why people who are using ecigs to give up smoking should initially start with a very high nicotine concentration (i.e. as high as they can tolerate) to saturate their system, so a relapse to cigarettes does not give any satisfaction. Additionally at low doses typical of ecig use, nicotine seems to be about as harmful as caffeine. It's the byproducts of combustion that seem to be the real problem.

I doubt we will see much research on the potentiation effects of tobacco on nicotine, since broadly it seems as if tobacco is "on the way out", so to speak.

However, there is quite a bit of research available [0, 1] that suggests that an addiction to one substance can prime the brain's neurological pathways to more easily become addicted to a second, unrelated substance.

By reducing the use of addictive substances overall, it might produce some decrease in addictions to more damaging substances (i.e. meth, heroin, etc).

Of course, the same argument could be said about alcohol or caffeine, and I don't think we're likely to see those go away any time soon. However, I think that's a false dilemma fallacy, as we're much closer (in % of population, at least) to reducing the use of nicotine than either of those.

[0]: https://harvardmagazine.com/2000/03/deep-cravings.html [1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/nn1578

How many years of cigarettes smoking and vaping did you have? From what you write it seems to me that either you never smoked for years both of them or now you started vaping and you want to believe in what you write. Sadly the things that you write are extremely dangerous for all the young people that start vaping.

I was never able to give up smoking long term until the vapes turned up. Then a persistent decades long problem disappeared overnight. Funnily enough my tobacco habit got entrenched when I was in a job that allowed me to deal with it’s boring aspects by voraciously reading lots of psychopharmacology literature.

I managed to break a seventeen year old cigarette habit by switching to vaping (after dozens of failed attempts either going cold turkey or with nicotinine gum/snus), and have now vaped exclusively for almost seven years. In my opinion his comment is 100% spot on.

> Sadly the things that you write are extremely dangerous for all the young people that start vaping.

Got any evidence for that assertion? Just saying it doesn't make it true, and the big problem with this research area is there are two different powerful groups (tobacco copmanies and public health policy makers). So the entire literature needs to be treated with great care. David Nutt, the british addiction specialist is a sober, sensible guy, and I'd go to what he has to say about it as a first port of call.

> Juul particularly is getting kids hooked that otherwise would have never touched tobacco

Do you have evidence of this? From what I've read (the report I saw last had data in 2016), e-cig use is way up but general tobacco use among youth hasn't significantly changed.

Bing "benzoin acid carcinogen":

Is benzoic acid a carcinogen?

It's pretty incredible how fast Juul took over the market. Even a year or two ago nobody I knew really vaped or smoked. But now Juul has basically made vaping popular. It's super easy to get, lightweight, and amazingly effective (i.e. addictive). I watched my friend go from never smoking a cigarette in his life to getting a Juul, to having serious stress and mood swings if he couldn't find his Juul. If he lost his Juul, he bought a new one immediately, no matter the price.

He should have just contacted support and asked for a replacement. The actual device itself is actually quite simple and cheap and despite selling it for the price they are selling it for, they'll ship you a free replacement in a heartbeat because it is so cheap for them to manufacture.

Aside from that, what bothers me with Juul and makes it possible for a competitor to potentially usurp them, even after the momentum they have behind them is how inconsistent the pod quality is. Let alone leaking, the pods degrade really quickly and juice sometimes seems to disappear. The liquid changes color and develops dark filaments even after less than a day passed since taking it out of its packaging.

Very dubious about the long term health effects of e-cigarettes. Unfortunately, a startup can move much faster than proper regulation.

I hope I'm wrong.

E-cigs have been on sale for like a decade now. What kind of regulations are you hoping for?

Hopefully regulations that spell out the dangers of nicotine addiction (which are non zero) and which protect children to the maximum extent possible. Take a leaf from Canada’s new Cannabis Act, which is incredibly harsh on those who sell and distribute to minors.

Stuff You Should Know recently put out a podcast vaping [1] that provided some insight on the subject. The conclusion was that better than cigarettes slightly worse than doing nothing.

* [1] - https://www.stuffyoushouldknow.com/podcasts/is-vaping-really...

I have heard that you can’t find a stall to save your life at my kid’s high school because they are all constantly being used by Juul-ers. One has to wonder whether this is a good idea, hooking kids on nicotine, even if it’s free of smoke.

I've never been a smoker, but I do like vaping. Nicotine is a useful chemical when it's not accompanied by all the junk that comes with burning adulterated plant matter. I self-medicate with it for ADD. It helps me focus, more than caffeine does alone. I used to use the lozenges that are advertised for smoking cessation, but I switched to vaping about a year ago.

That is a nuance that a lot of people are missing.

Nicotine is highly addictive, but in itself does not kill you (at the amounts smokers/vapers are intaking it).

What kills you is the delivery mechanism. We have plenty of data for how the "burning up dried tobacco leaves" delivery mechanism kills you. However, currently, we have very little data regarding how propylene glycol does or does not kill you in the long term. That is the big open question when it comes to vaping.

after almost 18 years, i quit smoking and vaping altogether a year ago and i couldn't be happier now. it feels great to be finally free from smoking. i used to think smoking is good for relieving stress, but after i quit, i realize, it was smoking that created the stress every couple hours for me to light up another one.

My concern is more about the young age of many of the new users and the perception that vaping is safe. While I don’t doubt that vaping is much safer than smoking, I am not sure if I want to see 13 year olds vaping given it appears to be just as addictive as smoking.

What is Juul doing that led to such resounding success compared to all the other ecig makers?

1. Simple to use pod system eliminated the headache of using DIY devices where you buy the e-liquid, cartridge, and battery separately and fill your own cartridges.

2. Salt-based nicotine provides increased nicotine absorption and juul patented that. It's literally more addictive.

3. It blew the competition out if the water. The other ecig devices offered at convenience stores were underpowered, poor performing, and obviously low effort.

4. Distribution. Getting into convenience stores and gas stations was pivotal to their success but arguably the product quality drove distribution.

5. The device is sexy looking. It's a fashion statement.

Why is vaping more popular than Nicotine gum, and Nicotine patches?

A third party can't even tell their is anything special about your gum. So you would think it could be popular among high-school students and people on the air plane and the other situations that don't allow vapor clouds.

That's because Nicotine gum, and Nicotine patches are ridiculously expensive compared to vape. Believe me, I tried.

The act of smoking is a huge part of the addiction. It took me a few months once I got to 0 nicotine ecig liquid just to quit that. For months after that, I constantly had the urge just to smoke. Wasn't even about the nicotine anymore.

Because smoking as a habit has very little to do with nicotine addiction. The psychological addiction is the key. After a long period of smoking it takes only a few days to fully overcome nicotine withdrawal whereas it takes much longer time and effort to get rid of the habit itself. Smoke, gestures, the ritual, everything related to smoking becomes a part of your identity, so replacing the whole package is easier compared to eliminating everything but the chemical aspect.

20 year old Juul addict living with two others! AMA.

Personally I like my Phix... twice the amount of nic juice, about the same price and bigger battery. Definitely more action for about the same amount of money. They're not the best kid on the block..just the first in this category.

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