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Comment by LinuxBender | Hacker News Reader

My son grew up with my ex. The entire household smoked. When he moved in with me, he switched to vaping. I am very thankful for that. While vaping has some risks (shady vape juice vendors, low quality coils that give off toxins), I gladly accept that over something that we all know causes cancer for the consumer and those around them.

Any time I see discussions or articles about vaping or e-cig being dangerous, I automatically assume it is funded by a part of the tobacco industry that has not invested in vaping. There is no logical reason otherwise. The vape juice quality can and should be addressed by the FDA and consumer reviews. By all means, educate people on risks, but every attempt to keep people on cigarettes needs to be nullified.

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I think I could live with an increase in e-cig users if it meant a drastic decline in tobacco users.

Fighting all use of e-cigs throws the baby out with the bath water. That's my frustration with all the anti vape campaigns you tend to see.

It's like advocating against teen education of condoms because not having sex as a teen is possibly healthier.

It's obviously worse than not smoking at all, but it's getting clearer study after study that it's at least partially better than smoking. The huge majority of vapers I've ever spoken to (the overwhelming majority being ex-smokers), except those Vape Naysh types, are very aware of this.

We do need to get rid of flavored Vapes, kids don't even realize they are using nicotine and becoming lifelong addicts.

Adults use flavored vapes, too. In fact, almost all the adults I know who vape use flavored vapes; adults ranging in age in from 30-70. And all those adults switched from cigarettes to vaping.

The war on cigarettes has gone on so long that we've lost perspective. Part of the strategy of that war was to make nicotine out to be some horrendous and horrendously addictive poison, which was an easier sell for some people than explaining the varied and complicated effects from smoking combustible tobacco.

Kids shouldn't be using nicotine because of their developing brains. Kids experimenting with vaping out of ignorance should be educated.

But let's not lose sight of the fact that cigarette smoking is unfathomably more harmful for society. From an epidemiological perspective, if this was a zero-sum game it would make perfect sense to trade vaping for cigarettes, even if that meant teens were vaping at the same rate as they were smoking cigarettes at the peak.

If people want to obsess over flavored poisons, we should start by banning wine coolers (if not all wine!), alcoholic cider, and the myriad brands of flavored hard liquor.

I think if they do this a lot of people will go back to smoking.

Ex-smokers still want to smoke, vaping is just barely decent enough to switch if you want to.

1) That only matters if nicotine itself is substantially bad for you, which is far from clear: https://www.gwern.net/

2) Adults like flavors too. We shouldn't ban anything appealing that kids shouldn't have just because it might appeal to kids.

  “The whole problem with nicotine is that it happens to be
  found in cigarettes,” she told me. “People can’t
  disassociate the two in their mind, nicotine and smoking.
  It’s not the general public that annoys me, it’s the
  scientists. When I tell them about the studies, they should
  say, ‘Wow.’ But they say, ‘Oh well, that might be true, but
  I don’t see the point.’ It’s not even ignorance. It’s their
  preconceived ideas and inflexibility.”

  ...

  “To my knowledge, nicotine is the most reliable cognitive
  enhancer that we currently have, bizarrely,” said Jennifer
  Rusted, professor of experimental psychology at Sussex
  University in Britain when we spoke. “The cognitive
  enhancing effects of nicotine in a normal population are
  more robust than you get with any other agent. With
  Provigil, for instance, the evidence for cognitive benefits
  is nowhere near as strong as it is for nicotine.”

From https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/will-a-nicotine-p...

I've never smoked (though I tried and failed to be pick up vaping 10 years ago), but I think it should be abundantly clear that for centuries many smokers have been effectively self-medicating, either to blunt some mental disorder (Schizophrenia, etc) or for what today we might call a cognitive enhancer. It's just that the addictiveness of smoking has masked that phenomenon. Vaping is unmasking it because nicotine alone is not nearly as addictive as smoking. (Seems unclear if vaping is as non-addictive as, e.g, nicotine patches or gum. Probably not, but we'll see.)

That is fascinating.

It's worth noting that tobacco contains harmala alkaloids [1] which are monoamine oxidase inhibitors (MAOIs). So it's possible those who persist with smoking in place of vaping or other nicotine delivery mechanisms might be doing so because they're (unknowingly) self-medicating for depression.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmala_alkaloid

There's no reason adults would want to vape juice that tastes like shit. Why not going after retailers that illegally sells to minors instead of fucking over consenting adults? By this logic, you'd have to ban sales of peach schnapps to be anywhere consistent.

There is a reason flavored cigarettes are illegal. Should the children be fucked over instead?

Unless he's vaping juice without nicotine, there is still a cancer risk.

I used to chew nicotine gum to enhance my concentration but after reading research that nicotine by itself causes lung cancer I stopped.

  research that nicotine by itself causes lung cancer

Reference, please? I haven't heard of a causal link between non-inhaled nicotine and lung cancer.

I've tried to do research on this before and found very few studies looking at nicotine alone. I also never saw anything about a link between oral nicotine and lung cancer so I'm suspect of this claim as well.

There are indeed some shady vape juice providers as I mentioned. Some even included heavy metals. People should research what they are buying and where it comes from.

As for vaping itself causing cancer, I would be interested in seeing the studies and who is funding them. Applying any heated material to your tissue can increase the probability of cancer, just about as much as walking in the sun for a short period of time. This is still substantially lower risk that sucking tar/smoke that is radio-active, which all cigarettes are.

If someone outlaws vaping, I will help my son avoid said laws until such a time that people snap out of it.

Nicotine by itself is not a carcinogen. There could be other substances that causes cancer inside the gum.

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