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Comment by sonnyblarney | Hacker News Reader

Yeah I'm not so sure Juul is that special.

There are tons of competitors in what is effectively a new and disruptive space with tons of potential upside by re-legitimizing nicotine addiction.

For whatever reason, they're winning, but there are so many factors beyond design that I'd be very reluctant to postulate this was the decisive factor.

Marketing, branding, operations, access to large markets, talent, social proximity to 'free press', soft lobbying (i.e. close relationships to various institutions through hiring or serendipity etc.).

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Nicotine delivered through e-cigarettes is not even remotely as addictive as classical cigarettes. I also know 3 people that stopped using cigarettes using vapes, 2 of which stopped altogether.

It's the same nicotine, and a nearly identical delivery method, and it's just as addictive - if not more so in some cases. The reason I believe it can more addictive is because of the constancy of vaping for some: with cigarettes, you 'have a break' and go out now and again. With vaping it can be 'all the time'. The higher frequency makes for ready addiction.

Using people who are 'trying to quit smoking and using vaping as a mechanism' is a poor measure of determining the addictivity of vaping because people are already trying to quit.

Personally, I quit 'light smoking' with vaping rather easily.

But then I took up vaping for about a year, and quitting was brutally hard. I was not even a heavy vaper. It consumed my entire body.

Quitting smoking I would get 'pangs' or 'acute' points where I wanted to have a cigarette - if I could get past that, it would be fine. With vaping ... it was like a constant pain. I think this was related to the nature of usage.

And I was using a log mg vape, I could have easily moved up.

Vaping is a really, really bad idea. Though the nicotine addiction is not nearly so hazardous alone, it's far worse or addicting than say, a coffee addiction - particularly for young people this is a bad idea.

I've quit smoking involuntarily thanks to vaping: A friend told me to try vaping since he thought I might enjoy the 'manual part' (wrapping coils, mixing liquids).

After 2 weeks of vaping I wanted to smoke a cig again. It tasted so awful that I instantly stopped smoking cigarettes and continued vaping (I still never intended to stop consuming nicotine, but the positive effects of not smoking were showing pretty immediately)

My coils drifted into the subohm range pretty fast, mechmods and 100W+ boxes was what I needed to produce cubic meters of vape. But upping the volume of vaped liquid allowed me to reduce the relative nicotine contents (improving the taste of the liquid further) up to the point where I started asking myself whom for I'm consuming nicotine.

Stopping to vape was pretty easy at that point.

Never looked back.

Fully concur with both comments - for those who actively want to quit smoking, vaping can really help.

It just opens the pandora's box to youth vaping. And also full-on vaping addiction as well.

If I was king I would ban advertising for vaping other than as smoking cessation. In Quebec where I live , you can't even have vaping products in the window. All of the signage and rules are strictly limited, much like the limited packaging on cigarettes.

It's amazing to see that if you separate brand and advertising from a product, how hard it is for companies to be successful. Tells you a lot about human behaviour!

I agree that it's not a good habit to start, but my wife quit smoking by switching to a vape and gradually reducing the nicotine to zero (over years). So all I can say is mileage varies on that.

It's great if you want to quit and it helped me too. But it's not great if you just start, it's not great if you are a teenager who will dismiss parents or older people's advice to not get into it, just because it's cool and they know what they're doing.

Anecdotes are fun, but we observe higher degrees of nicotine use among young people now than we did before vaping exploded.

> relegitimizing nicotine addiction

You should visit Europe where smoking doesn't have nearly the amount of stigmatization it does in America.

There are smoking rooms within my office in Germany, and the rooms smell like an American restaurant circa ‘95.

Yes, I lived in Germany, it's a throwback. But your comment makes it seem as though the Euros have some bohemian progressive outlook in the issue; this is not nude sunbathing, this is smoking, it kills people for sure :).

I'm not sure whether you can generalise over Europe that easily. There's quite the stigma on smoking in the Netherlands, which has for the largest part gained a foothold after banning smoking in working places (including cafés and bars). I haven't heard of a Dutch workplace offering special smoking rooms so far.

Can you smoke in Dutch bars? One thing that I was horrified by in the Netherlands was people smoking right at entrances to buildings. In the US, you have to be 20 ft (~6 meters) from entrances when you smoke.

Smoking in general has been prohibited for a few years. Many bars still have special smoking rooms, but they are on the verge of being prohibited as well. Smoking near entrances is, indeed, still often allowed, but that too is getting more and more pushback, and the number of places that allow it is clearly decreasing.

Point being: there's a clear stigma against smoking here, and wherever we're "behind" in terms of pushing back against smoking, we are heading in the same direction.

Don’t generalise Germany to the whole of Europe. As a Swede that just came back from a visit to Germany I was actually appalled by how much you smoke there.

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