Comment by singingfish | Hacker News Reader

Comment by singingfish | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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