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Comment by loudandskittish | Hacker News Reader

But...why? I smoked a pack a day for a little more than 10 years, got an e-cigarette and haven't looked back. I don't understand why anyone would do the reverse.

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Practically every one of my friends either smokes, vapes, or does both.

Of the ones who only vape, most of them will still smoke the occasional dart. They'll smoke them if they can't use their e-cigarette (e.g. out of fluid, left it at home), because they're still addicted to nicotine they'll take what they can get.

There's also the social aspect of smoking cigarettes. I don't know why, but standing in a circle puffing on e-cigarettes just isn't as social as smoking a real cigarette, so if everyone else is smoking cigarettes the vapers will usually have a smoke too.

My experience has been that standing in a circle puffing on e-cigarettes is every bit as social if not more. Most cigarette smokers want to quit and they often get inspired by vapers standing around them.

The concern is that the e-cig brands have moved well beyond those attempting to quit smoking. Similar to the old Joe Camel ads, the thinking is that the e-cig companies are targeting kids with fruit and candy flavors. If they were really serious about them strictly being a tool for quitting, they should mandate that the only allowed flavor is wet ashtray. Seriously, what legitimate reason is there for a quitting tool to be more appealing than the thing being quit unless the goal is to hook people on the new thing?

That's ridiculous. One of the reasons nicotine gum isn't that successful is because of how nasty it tastes.

Why shouldn't those quitting smoking be allowed fruit flavours? I can only think you want them to fail and end up keeping on smoking tobacco.

Failed attempt at humor on my end apparently. No, I don't want those attempting to quit to fail. The point I was attempting to make is that by making them taste good (as opposed to at most flavorless) is that it both makes them more appealing to non-smokers (esp kids) and likely encourages many smokers to kick cigarettes but pick up a vaping habit rather than a tool to wean them off of nicotine.

Now one might say 'who in their right mind would want to start a nicotine habit?' Well centuries of tobacco use to more recent times with people eating detergent pods, huffing glue etc should readily provide the answer. Also, the tobacco industry knows what they're doing and I suspect it's not about getting people off nicotine but rather changing the delivery mechanism. (You do know big tobacco is big into vaping, right?)

I can see your point, but some kids are always going to try some of what's available - weed, tobacco, alcohol, vaping, glue sniffing etc. I doubt the flavour mattered much when cigs were the only choice, or before they'd learnt to like beer / vodka. It's far more peer pressure than advertising. yes, of course ads play a part too.

I would be comfortable with discouraging kids as far as possible, requiring ID and so on. For some of the adult ex smokers I know, including myself, I doubt they'd have quit without vaping with some of the sillier sounding flavours. Some of the quitters will be kids who regret starting smoking 5 years previously. I don't have good answers to balance the conflicting needs or to prevent it becoming a growth sector far beyond smokers wanting out.

When I first tried vaping one of the few flavours I got was tobacco - which was awful, and never tried again. It took some months to step down the strengths to zero, and kept on vaping a while at 0 nicotine. That was 7 or 8 years ago, and no vaping or tobacco since.

Regulation in the US and UK is very different for vaping, but here big tobacco seems to be badly failing at vaping. Every shop that sells cigarettes now has a selection of the tobacco company's cartridge style "pretend cigarettes" vaping at five or ten times the cost of the simple juice bottles. I've only ever seen one person using one. Most towns have gained a juice stall selling cheap flavours.

But nicotine by itself isn't really that harmful to your body. So why should we care if some kids pickup vaping habits?

I mean, it we remove all the bad part of being addicted to nicotine, why is it still bad to be addicted to nicotine?

It's like the experiment of a room with monkeys, ladder, banana and water hose.

By the way, there's nothing preventing one to use nicotine-free fruity vaping liquid.

The whole "marketing to kids" with fruit flavors seems like a straw man. I have asked everyone who mentions it to show me one ad targeting kids, and no one yet has been up to the challenge. I think it's the whole "think of the children" excuse when advocacy groups want to amp up regulations on things.

I personally chose the fruit flavors when I was quitting cigarettes so I could distance myself from the flavor of tobacco, and it worked well for me. I cannot even finish a real cigarette now without feeling nauseated (even though I always seem to try after a few beers). I'm thankful for those fruity flavors every day.

> Seriously, what legitimate reason is there for a quitting tool to be more appealing than the thing being quit

If the quitting tool is less appealing, then it makes people more reluctant to quit. That's just simple logic.

What if your quitting tool is so appealing, that people who don't have addictions are appealed, start using the "quitting tool" (as it is often used today), and start being addicted to nicotine as well?

I don't get why this isn't obvious.

Yep, a really good tool to get people off of cigarettes will inevitably lure some people to try it who weren't smoking cigarettes to start with.

> and start being addicted to nicotine as well?

Then they'll be addicted to nicotine. And?

You're dropping that like it's some sort of trump card, but the reality this is about harm reduction, and trying to find a policy that will lead to optimal outcomes. If you can get X smokers to switch to vaping while Y non-smokers also start vaping, is that good? Depends on the harm of smoking, the harm of vaping, and the size of X relative to Y. Just yelling that Y is non-zero number without all the other information we need is just pointless noise.

If "...and then they'll be addicted!" was a compelling argument, we'd be banning Starbucks.

And? Unless you can prove “getting group X less addicted” is more valuable than “getting group Y addicted”, that’s just a bogus argument. Considering Y is more likely to be younger people, I find that unlikely.

> Unless you can prove “getting group X less addicted” is more valuable than “getting group Y addicted”

If group X is larger and/or the harm avoided from their switching to less harmful behaviours is more serious, then a simple utilitarian calculation says yes, it is more valuable.

What data I've seen is still tentative, but suggestive that this is the case.

Do you have data to show the opposite?

Maybe the same reason people go from smoking heroin to shooting it: it’s a stronger high (ie more nicotine)

You can definitely get way more nicotine in a vape hit that you can from a cigarette.

You can get less, too - in fact, you can tinker with it to get pretty much anything you want.

E-cigarettes can contain any concentration of nicotine, and can have powerful enough heating elements to release huge quantities of it. E-cigarettes can deliver far more nicotine than cigarettes if you build them that way. But the user titrates the dose to the subjective effects, so dose per inhalation doesn't matter much.

However, in most cases e-cigarettes deliver only nicotine, while tobacco also also contains harmala alkaloid monoamine oxidase inhibitors. In animal studies[0][1] these have a synergistic effect in producing addiction when combined with nicotine, and anecdotally many humans report whole tobacco alkaloids having a subjectively different effect than pure nicotine.

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16177026 [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14592678

I used to smoke a pack a day, switched to ecigs, bought enough concentrated nicotine juice to last me for the next 100 years, mix my own juice so no worries about getting a bad product. It's been 5 years now and I can't stand being in a car or house full of cigarette smoke anymore. If nothing else my health has improved just from the fact I'm no longer being taxed into the poor house and can afford to buy healthier food. I don't know if there are going to be long term effects from ecig use but having lost my mom to lung cancer I know there are from using cigarettes. I am against kids smoking anything but I would say that kids that admit to trying ecigs are probably just more prone to high risk activities, I bet most of them also drank and did drugs too in the past 12 months that doesn't mean the vaping is the cause. As for your comment I agree that some people that vape still get cravings for what ever else is in tobacco as my dad will vape 99% of the time but still carries a pack of cigarettes of which he will smoke one or two of per week. Still much better that just smoking and when he does smoke he goes outside of his home, which has resulted in an added benefit that more non smokers come to visit him more often reducing the loneliness any widower will suffer from.

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