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Comment by Nursie | Hacker News Reader

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.

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/

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.

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