Hacker News Reader

Comment by lightyrs | Hacker News Reader

As a former smoker who was only able to quit using Juul, this is disappointing to me. As a father of a one year old, I understand the reasoning behind this.

I think perhaps the answer is to make the Juul and similar products less appealing to youth. How? Of course this is a complex topic but less flashy hardware and marketing could be a small start.

View on HN

I, too, am a former smoker and I have questions. Mostly how a device that delivers the addictive substance helps you quit.

Were you taking a "step-down" strategy like with the nicotine gum? Since the gum is carefully regulated and the "juice" isn't, how can you be sure your step-down is actually doing anything? And since the gum is metered out in measured doses, what's to prevent you from just grabbing full-strength juice and falling off the wagon? (Compare with smoking, which means you ostensibly have to go and buy a pack of smokes and a lighter, assuming you followed step 1 in the gum and got rid of your cigarettes and lighter)

I'm not advocating Juul use as a strategy for quitting. I'm merely sharing my own experience, which was that Juul was the only thing that allowed me to quit (after 10 years of many attempts using most available options). Why did it work? I'm not sure. Perhaps it created just the right amount of elasticity in my addiction.

I'm afraid you haven't actually quit, merely swapped one delivery mechanism and associated set of toxic compounds for another.

I was able to quit using Juul. That is to say, I no longer smoke cigarettes or Juul.

But this is somewhat an admission of using it as medication, which is far from what Juul is being marketed as. It should be next to the nicotine patches at the pharmacy. Can you even buy nicotine patches in bulk? Substances that can be abused for something other than their primary use as medication are heavily regulated by the FDA (think meth ingredients).

Risk reduction vs. risk elimination. Swapping from one to another means reducing risk by a huge margin, according to the huge majority of (short to mid-term) data we have for now.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com