FDA is considering drugs to help kids quit vaping
lite.cnn.io
lite.cnn.io
I've been rolling around an idea for a device to help ween off nicotine for years now. I need to consult with an EE, but don't have any in my network. If anyone's willing to chat for 30 mins, or interested in colaberating I'd love to hear from you, emails in my profile. If you're aware of any service out there to buy small block of consultation time, that would help at well.
A lot of them are hobbyists but there's a few who've made a business out of it and they might know the right people.
Anecdotally, I've had 2 experiences with people like that. One was a coder who was self employed and worked out of his house, and another was my auto mechanic before I moved. Both always had a cig burning sitting burning in an ashtray but only picked up and consumed maybe 25% of it while they were working.
In some places, cigs might cost $15/pack (your numbers), but I just passed by a Chevron gas station selling for $7 where I live (Portland, OR). The cost depends greatly on the local/state taxes and is not indicative of everywhere. A carton of Marlboros here (the most expensive brand) is around $60 ($6/pack). A quick scan of this table [1] shows rates by state. A cursory look shows a tax range of about 0.37% (Georgia) to 4.5% (DC), but those are only the state taxes and don't take into account other local taxes. I'm just pointing out your example of $30/day (I assume where you live) is quite different from $12/day where I live, and there are even cheaper places than where I live. Portland isn't exactly the boonies.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cigarette_taxes_in_the_United_...
That describes pretty well how I smoke the ecig: all day long, maybe three puffs every few minutes. While the normal cigs (maybe four a day) I inhale greedily at high speed.
This wasn't me at all when I smoked two packs a day. I smoked the entire cigarette, and if I was going to put it down for a while, I put it out. And that was when they were cheap.
You just smoke all the time. The first thing I did when I woke up was light a cigarette, before I got out of bed. You choke a couple of cigarettes down during your break, not just one. You smoke through lunch. I was probably 5-7 cigarettes in before I even got to work.
I started Juul in late 2017, was off smoking completely by April 2018 (3 pods a day) and quit Juul cold turkey January 1st, 2019. I’d tried to quit millions of times over 10 years, but Juul made it easy.
This rings absurdly true with me. I realized at some point that a cigarette was a little celebration ritual that I went through after completing anything.
It's also why I'm negative on vaping as a tool for quitting; it doesn't get rid of that ritual part. Snus (someone else also mentioned dipping elsewhere in the thread) does. Entirely quitting the impulse to the ritual took me a good two years, and having the nicotine hit from the snus helped me through it. Quitting the snus was a fairly miserable two weeks.
I'm not denouncing vapes, though, because although I don't think they're good for quitting nicotine addiction, they're good for quitting cigarettes, and that's good enough to lengthen your lifespan by 2-3 years, and the lifespan of your lungs by 10-20 probably. I don't know that we know what the long term effects of inhaling propylene glycol are, but there's no doubt there's a better outlook than cig smoke. I just can't help but recall how gross and unpleasant inhaling what smoke machines produced was when I was in a touring band.
edit: entirely incidentally, I feel that ritual made me more productive. Between cigarettes, I felt like I was supposed to do something before the next cigarette. It was like: finish writing that function, smoke, get to the point where I can run tests, smoke while the tests were running, get to the point where I can run benchmarks, smoke while benchmarks are running, get to the point where I can hand things off - make the call to the person I have to hand it to, smoke.
After quitting, life seems more dreamy, spacey, and unstructured. I think that's a point for vaping, although I think the fact that cigs are discrete units that lower in quality slightly after having been put out is both a factor affecting the ritual, and a quality that vaping does not have.
Quit smoking at least 7 years ago, so this isn't just addict wistfulness.
My dad swore off of drugs and alcohol, and always said he wanted to work until the day he dies. He's instead spent the last 10 years dying of Alzheimer's.
For what it's worth, I'm inclined to follow my dad's approach. Perhaps with a different interpretation of retiring when I die. But there are some games you just can't win.
This is very true, but try switching to Swedish snus. Dipping tobacco still has a lot of cancer risk, whereas snus doesn't, really, so you can take your time quitting. It's the difference between roasted and steamed tobacco; it's the combustion products that get you.
Basically, since 2005, the nitrotesimne levels in US Style smokeless tobacco has declined by more than 75% due to changes in manufacturing (largely), and from say, 80mg to 5mg, in the 1975-2016 period.
Tobacco Specific Nitrosamines are widely acknowledged to be the single largest cancer causing agent in oral tobacco. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobacco-specific_nitrosamines)
https://rodutobaccotruth.blogspot.com/2016/07/is-snus-safer-...
https://rodutobaccotruth.blogspot.com/2012/10/more-evidence-...
https://rodutobaccotruth.blogspot.com/2012/01/informative-st...
Within a month or two you can be at 0 nic and smoke out of habit instead of compulsion. Soon after you start to forget to even do it and it fades away. The final trick though is to remember to throw it all away. Not right away - give it a few months. It'll be easy.
Secondary point is that "addiction to nicotine" isn't actually "bad for you". Well no more so than a double-espresso-shot. If you have a puritan streak in you that feels that all chemical influence on your mood 'is bad' then 99% of your potential target is not vaping. Let's start with "glass of wine after work"
What sets Juul's liquid apart isn't the nicotine salts, which as you said have been done before. If I'm not mistaken Juul was the first company to use benzoic acid in their nicotine salts.
https://www.degruyter.com/downloadpdf/j/cttr.1983.12.issue-2...
Also as a possible correction, they're not adding benzoic acid to nicotine salts, rather they're using benzoic acid and freebase nicotine to make nicotine benzoate - which is a nicotine salt. I may be misunderstanding your phrasing though, if I am I apologize.
>I can't see how the salt version "isn't good" - it better mimics the thing you're trying to kick.
I think there may be a misunderstanding here.
This article is about the FDA "discussing the potential for drug therapy to help addicted young people quit". "The FDA has concluded that the level of addiction it is seeing among youthful e-cigarette users is so disturbing and so unprecedented that it needs to at least ask whether we need a solution that goes beyond what we ever did with cigarettes,"
>I fail to see how quitting with a 'hit' based approach is suddenly wrong
Breaking nicotine dependance is the goal. Nicotine salt versions were available but much less common vs freebase suspentions until recently. Introducing other drugs to combat nicotine addiction seems like a more drastic and less sucessful approach vs vaping of formulations that cause less violent blood nicotine level fluctuations combined with gradual reduction in nicotine concentration.
If electronic inhaled caffine delivery devices existed with newly popular caffine suspention formulations that promoted increased daily dependence and high frequency of device usage and also had rising popularity among teens and pre-teens, I would view them as a slightly more serious "bad for you" problem to address.
This phenomena will likely increase as Altria brings there centuries of proven addiction expertese and research to JUUL.
It’s generally accepted that freebase alkaloids are most rapidly taken up by the body as they are non-polar and pass through cell membranes more quickly.
I quit smoking a couple years back and I was baffled by the lack of quality information I could find online. It's 90% propaganda, thanks to the anti-smoking warriors. Most of it pushes these quit-smoking drugs or just different forms of nicotine intake (which is the very drug you're supposed to be trying to quit in the first place).
You'd think we would have collectively learned something from the abysmal failure of things like the DARE program and abstinence-only education. Facts work better than scare tactics and propaganda.
Doctors prescribe these because they (probably rightly) believe not that the drugs are harmless, but that the side effects of the drug are less harmful than the direct effects of continuing to smoke.
Really quitting takes either a major motivating scare like a cancer diagnosis (for some people even that isn't enough) or a very determined decision to stop.
Wait, what? I thought nicotine itself was pretty harmless, and that most of the harm from smoking comes from all the other junk you suck into your lungs? Wikipedia seems to agree:
>The health effects of long-term nicotine use are unknown. The general medical position is that nicotine itself poses few health risks, except among certain vulnerable groups, such as youth. Nicotine use as a tool for quitting smoking has a good safety history.
And yes, nicotine replacement therapy has a decent track record compared to other methods, which should not be surprising since you don't have to actual break the addiction. You just maintain the same addiction with a different delivery system.
Interestingly, vaping itself is just another nicotine delivery system, but one that the anti-smoking zealots decided to demonize, unlike the various inhalers, patches and gums they push.
Addictive stuff is bad if taking it has other negative effects. Food, water, and air are likewise addictive, but that doesn’t mean you should do without. You’d need to cite something other than being addictive to establish a reason to avoid them entirely.
>And yes, nicotine replacement therapy has a decent track record compared to other methods, which should not be surprising since you don't have to actual break the addiction. You just maintain the same addiction with a different delivery system.
I think the idea is to follow them up with a tapering off of the nicotine levels, which is much easier at that point.
And indeed, if you fail to taper off, at least you’re doing yourself much less harm.
The definition of addiction includes negative consequences. If there aren't any, it's not an addiction.
Dictionary definitions don't help resolve a debate on the substantive points.
This is a perverse usage. The physiological need for food, water, or air is innate; it arises from your body itself, not the action of the external substance on your body. Additionally they do not induce the classical development of tolerance.
Many people would hold that addiction itself is bad. Even if there are no other negative effects, there is the effect of dependence on the addictive substance and commensurate loss of independence (the addiction always occupies some mental space since you must always think about how you are going to satisfy it).
It's not very informative that a substance is addictive in the sense that "you must use this every day or experience extreme negative side effects". You have to also look the cost of taking it and what it does to you when you use it.
I have to constantly eat to stay alive? Manageable. I have to consume water and breathe air? Manageable. I have to inject 50 cents of insulin? Manageable. I have to absorb 50 cents of nicotine? Manageable.
If I have to consume expensive amounts of crack, which also makes me homicidal? Okay, then that's a problem.
I was objecting to the OP's criticism of the lingering nicotine addiction and usage as some kind of be-all end-all deal-breaker. No, it depends on the relative harm. If you go from "expensively sucking down toxic junk to get your nicotine fix every day" to "taking a cheap nicotine-only does everyday", that's not defeating the purpose of anything, and it's very much missing the point to dismiss it as "still being addicted to nicotine".
> I have to constantly eat to stay alive? Manageable. I have to consume water and breathe air? Manageable.
No matter where you go, the entirety of society is structured around the fact that all people need to eat, drink and breathe.
> I have to inject 50 cents of insulin? Manageable. I have to absorb 50 cents of nicotine? Manageable.
This is where the disconnect is. The cost of insulin dependence is not merely the cost of insulin itself. An insulin dependent person must always be aware of their blood sugar levels and diet. They must always be prepared for a situation in which they're away from their insulin supply. They must be prepared for an emergency or incapacitation due to complications with their condition and its treatment. There's a significant cognitive load that isn't accounted for by the fabric of society like the need for food is.
Likewise, there's a psychological, social and occupational cost to nicotine addiction that isn't reflected in nicotine's price alone.
This is why people are saying that chemical dependence is inherently bad: it's an inconvenience at best, a costly burden to most and a killer at worst.
I get your point, but I think it's a bit oversimplified. I think that addiction itself can cause problems, even if it's just distress from feeling a lack of control. I've had several people tell me that caffeine addiction is no big deal if you're getting it from mostly healthy or neutral sources, but I remember being addicted to caffeine for sleep/attention regulation and for me that dependence was stressful on its own.
Another example might be porn addiction, which is well-known to have negative effects due directly to the dependence on certain stimuli to achieve certain mental/physical states.
But if most people were to develop nicotine addiction for several years and then stop for a week, they would experience mental anguish far beyond what anyone could consider "healthy". For long time smokers, that anguish can go on for months.
Healthy people do not experience intense mental suffering simply because they don't have nicotine. It's a disease - an illness - even if it does not cause cancer.
Would you rather people be addicted to just the nocotine, or the nicotine plus carcinogens?
You take the smoke into your mouth where you can taste it but continue to breath freely through your nose without taking any smoke down into your lungs.
You do absorb nicotine through the lining of your mouth and it's not without risk, mouth cancer is a possibility but my understanding is it's a much lesser risk than smoke in the lungs.
Finally you can retrohale where you allow some smoke to come up through the sinuses and out via the nose, which allows you to pickup some extra flavour.
You take the smoke in your mouth, mainly. You might pump it through your nose, too.
I hope you are equally against sugar which is also addictive and has much worse adverse effects than nicotine.
When I give up sugar I do not instantly find that my relationships are easier to manage, for instance, without the demon of sugar addiction popping up into my brain to have me lash out at my loved ones who are standing in the way of another hit of sugar. Even putting it that way sounds absurd, but swap in nicotine and it makes perfect sense.
Obviously you don't understand the true mind-bending power of nicotine. The comparison to sugar is one that could really only be made by someone who has never experienced a nicotine addiction. I say this as someone who loves sugar and tries to cut back. It's not the same. It's not even slightly the same.
Yeah, nicotine withdrawal can be a real thing.
Maybe you haven’t, but low blood sugar diabetic emergencies are a thing.
https://www.nytimes.com/1992/01/18/business/new-philip-morri...
360 mg / 6 = 18, less than 1 pack has a lethal dose of nicotine. However, since uptake by the body is low for nicotine, smoking what would seem to be a lethal amount doesn't kill people.
https://www.webmd.com/smoking-cessation/nicotine-poisoning-c...
Hell no. Nobody really gives a shit if you consume nicotine or not. We should just avoid doing so in the form of a horribly dangerous delivery system.
You seem to be talking about yourself. I'm talking about people suffering from the addiction.
Their "agenda" of not dying of lung cancer? It sounds like you're vindictive towards people who don't appreciate smokers pumping our air full of carcinogens.
Nobody cares whether or how you get your high. The only reason anyone gives a shit about smoking is because we're tired of choking on ash and tar whenever a smoker walks by. You may think it's tolerable, but you're also the one inhaling through a filter: we have to breathe the shit that comes out the other end.
How can there be such a disconnect, those are first class drugs! Is it cognitive dissonance, i.e. actively refusing to acknowledge it? It's pretty much universal too, not just one or two countries.
And we do have the converse also. Driving under the influence of alcohol is strictly prohibited, but rules for other drugs are much less standardized.
Alcohol abuse is not normalized in most developed nations. America is a harmful exception.
For those lazy to click the link: the US is 24th in terms of alcohol consumption per capita on that 2015 list of developed countries, out of 33 total. In the older list from 2010, which featured more countries, US was number 48.
They tried prohibition in the US, it didn't work.
> It's a common myth that Prohibition did not work in the US. In reality it worked far better than those pushing for it realized. What we need to remember is that Prohibition was foisted on the US buy the upper class who felt that alcohol was keeping the working class poor and uneducated (the myth of Demon Rum is still a prevalent one today, albeit it's evolved quite a bit). Prohibition was actually effective at reducing the overall consumption of alcohol and shutting down illegal speakeasies. There were a number of unintentional consequences though 1) The alcohol industry brought in so much money to the state and federal governments that even the passage of Income Tax was unable to make up the loss. 2) Those who pushed for Prohibition never expected it to be equally enforced and once Law Enforcement was able to get working class consumption under control they started enforcing it on the upper class and politicians which of course did not go over well. 3) There was a surge in crime due to the creation of a massive black market which also encourage rampant political corruption both of which were a bad look for the United States. 4) There were so many loopholes in the Volstead Act that it was costing a fortune to enforce the law.
Well no. If you want to be objective (in the USA at least) it's opioids. Also, If we had better stats on suicide I bet more would be done with opioids than alcohol, but I'm speculating at this point.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:HarmCausedByDrugsTable.sv...
It's not really a source.
This way, young stupid people have a chance to get familiar with the judgement-clouding effects of alcohol long before they are able to propel a 2-ton weapon at others.
I don't enjoy being drunk. I enjoy wine or beer in small quantities, especially with food. The production of both has deep roots as a means of preserving fresh fruits and grains, and dealing with potentially non-potable water supplies. That it intoxicates I'm sure makes it more attractive, but heavy intoxication is generally frowned upon in cultures where beer and wine have deep historical roots.
Also, most people can regularly use alcohol and tobacco without it consuming their life, so I think this is an important factor. The same cannot be said for heroin or crack.
Edit: I'd also like to add that I know a number of people in my generation (millenial) who would consider themselves soft drug users. This would mean marijuana and maybe some hallucinogens occasionally. In Canada at least, regular usage of marijuana is very much normalized amongst my generation. It's not really considered any worse than drinking and I think you'll see over time that marijuana culturally is defined outside of the "bad drugs" category.
(Actually, it's a bright idea for all the parties involved, because "think of the kids" brings positive karma points, and parents and insurance plan will cough up the money)
I wonder who's paying the dinner bills after today's hearing.
http://nymag.com/news/features/43892/
The fact this wasn't caught until after this drug was approved by the FDA really makes me question the efficacy of our extremely expensive drug regulatory system.
> Instead of debating the role of nicotine replacement and drug therapies, the agency "should be focusing on policies that will prevent youth initiation with e-cigarettes and addiction to nicotine,"
I've been noticing this form of argument... in case it's not clear why I find it strange: yes, for a hypothetical child it's ideal that he not get addicted in the first place. But you still have these children who are addicted, that's a real problem, so while it's useful to also consider prevention, a regulatory agency is mandated to address an actual problem.
It seems more important to address the source of the issue to prevent it from continuing to occur rather than only treating the symptoms. (Fixing the current is still important, but seems secondary to me)
Failing that they would probably both find it in the their best interests to force companies who want to produce vape related products through a regulatory process so expensive that only massive companies such as Marlboro or Pfizer can afford to comply - can’t have the little guy taking a slice of their poison pie.
I think that if kids are going to try nicotine (and let’s face it - they are) better it be through a vape than a cigarette.
Anecdotally as a person who has sometimes smoked as many as 100+ cigarettes a day - I am finding vaping to be helpful in quitting the horrible cigarettes and if it were not offered as an alternative, would probably go back to smoking because none of the other cessation methods have been effective for me.
I know both smoking and vaping are far from ideal but the lesser of two evils is still better any way you slice it.
When you have something that is taking significant profits from big companies, one of the first ports of call for them is to whip up some hysteria along the lines of “think of the children” if applicable.
The rhetoric surrounding this appeals to something deep within human nature and it becomes trivial to demonise people who have a contrary point of view - in this case people who happen to be proponents of harm reduction and freedom of choice.
I posted a very well researched response, to a similar article (unfortunately somewhere else, I can't remember where).
As a big opening gambit - "Smoking rates of children have gone off a cliff since ~ 2000". Not only have they dropped, they've accelerated. If any of this acceleration is associated to the corresponding increase in vaping over this time, then the vaping industry is possibly the leader in saving lives. (I'm open to other suggestions).
That doesn't appear to be the case.
See the chart in https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2018/12/the-juul-fad-...
Plus doesn't seem to include relative harm. I'd have thought it would take a large number of non-smokers taking up vaping, to match the harm-reduction of one smoker switching to vaping.
It's the percentage of high schoolers who've tried each. 1% of high schoolers switching from smoking to vaping will cause the percentage of high schoolers smoking to go down by one and the percentage of high schoolers vaping to go up by one.
The solution? Prescribing other drugs to these kids (as if there are any that actually work against smoking, except the very one they're trying to gegt them off).
It's a wonderful example of fake news, using clever (but technically true, if someone ever called them on it) language to persuade people to be scared.
The vast majority of smoking’s harmful effects are due to the combustion products not the nicotine. It is really unclear if vaping will really have a long term effect on kids. In addition, given that vaping doesn’t really hurt other people via second hand smoke or altered behavior(see alcohol) this whole panic about vaping seems overblown. How much do you want to bet that the “medical experts” who are harping about the dangers of vaping without a lot of data are “consultants” for pharmaceutical companies looking to get their “anti-addiction” drug approved.
https://www.health.harvard.edu/newsletter_article/drugs-in-t...
So as far as we know it does nothing.
Especially useful would be to see a burn-down chart of say, new smokers and new vapers of the same age range, and seeing cumulative lung disease and mortality, and seeing how the progress of that differs (or is the same).
Think about it like this: would I want to run a marathon on a bad air day in China? Probably not.
[0]. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41370-017-0005-x?fbclid=IwA... [1]. https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2018/08/411476/risk-heart-attacks-...
Edit: Study 1 focused on PM10 (particulate matter smaller than 10 microns) air quality levels, and not PM2.5. PM 10 tends to be associated with more acute respiratory distress, while PM2.5 is a more chronic threat [2]. Nevertheless, there is sufficient evidence that monitoring environmental PM10 levels remains an important public health metric.
Somewhat misleading since more than half of those studied were smoking and vaping. From the study:
Among the 9,352 current and former e-cigarette users, 333 (3.6 percent) had experienced a heart attack at some point, with the highest percentage (6.1 percent) among those who used e-cigarettes daily. In the analysis, a quarter of the 2,259 people who currently used e-cigarettes were former smokers of conventional cigarettes and about 66 percent of current e-cigarette users were also current cigarette smokers.
[0]. https://www.jacionline.org/article/S0091-6749(18)30029-0/pdf
I am wondering if the particulate in the studies cited above is not simply made of droplets of propylene glycol and glycerol- which might be well tolerated and simply absorbed and metabolised.
The pdf you linked starts with the statement:
"Decades of research has converged on an understanding that all combustion-derived particulate matter (PM) is inflammatory to some extent in the lungs". (Italics mine)
Particulate emitted by an ecig should not be combustion-derived.
Second, just because it's not a combustion product, doesn't mean it's safe. The reason why we get lung cancer form asbestos is that the mineral fibers are unable to be fully broken down, and cause long term irritation. Think sand or dust [1].
[0]. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5954153/ [1]. http://www.npi.gov.au/resource/particulate-matter-pm10-and-p...
The article does discuss other studies on PM2.5, but they seem to be conflicting (some says indoor vaping increases PM2.5, some say it doesn't. Can you edit your comment to reflect the uncertainty here?
For what it's worth, the marathons in China are quite fun.
For scientific rigor I will edit to include this nuance. PM10 tends to be associated with more acute problems, while PM2.5 is associated with more chronic problems [0]. PM10 remains a closely monitored public health reporting metric. Taken together however, the notion that vaping is "just water vapor" is fraudulent (and knowing the historical context of the tobacco industry, knowingly so [1]).
I will allow myself to complain that there are many threads in this comment section that make very broad statements that are unsubstantiated by science. Though I suppose it's the cross to bear for scientists arguing in good faith.
[0]. http://www.euro.who.int/__data/assets/pdf_file/0006/189051/H... [1]. https://www.wnyc.org/story/gleaning-truth-merchants-doubt/
If you continue to smoke tobacco.
"Scientific" studies like this that assert causation when all they have is correlation, based on surveys that we know little about (and likely wouldn't be able to learn the full details of even if one was energetic enough to hunt down the original paper), certainly don't do anything to convince me. If anything, it just increases my suspicion around the "science" we're fed.
But when you add in the other lines of evidence, you start building a case. It's sorta like a murder trial (not withstanding a separate discussion of our criminal justice system...) where the case is built over lines of evidence.
And as one of my graduate professors once said, "there is no double blind randomized trial for the efficacy of parachutes" ;) [0].
When you're dealing with a murder trial, whether harm has occurred is clear. In this case, not only is there a lack of evidence for causation, there's not even any evidence for harm.
While I'm not in favor of the Nanny State, the fact that tobacco products (read: known carcinogens) are sold freely boggles my mind. Imagine if a terrorist (e.g., UBL) had said, "I'm going to developer a product that addicts it's users. This product will cause health issue, and perhaps even cause cancer. I'm going to bring this product to the masses wolrdwide."
If such an proclamation where made, the public and the governments would FLIP OUT. The war on terror would ratchet up ten-fold. It's a mad world
Note that most of the people who make this argument are either addicts or nicotine sellers, so I am highly skeptical and you should be too, especially since there hasn't been much study on the direct effects of mere nicotine.
If the science comes in and it turns out nicotine really is harmless on its own, and it really does help you focus and suppress appetite and whatever, then I'll be all aboard the vape train, love myself a good nootropic. Until such a time, I think it's wise not to take chances. Give it a few years for the science to settle before getting addicted.
That said, it's still an addiction. I'd advise against any form of addiction [1], and I'd further advise against compounding addictions upon each other. Especially when it comes to nicotine, it's a HARD habit to quit.
Unsurprisingly, the science of nicotine is murky[2], especially the science around non-cigarette based nicotine. That's likely to change as vaping becomes more popular. I would not be surprised if vaping turns out to be slightly less bad than cigarettes, these companies like PM aren't known for their ethics. Vaping on it's own, sure maybe it's not any less bad than living next to the 405. But corporate sold stuff? COme on.
That said, nicotine is a drug just like all drugs. There are good things about it and bad things. With nicotine, the bad mostly outweighs the good. The bad is easy enough to google and isn't something to dismiss at all. The 'good' is vasoconstriction, alertness boosting, and short-lived memory retention; that's about it. These things are really useful if you have a reasonable suspicion that grievous bodily injury may occur to you in the next few hours. So, if you aren't in an active warzone, I'd stay away. Office politics can be vicious, but not that bad ;)
[0] https://www.psychiatry.org/patients-families/addiction/what-...
[1] There is a coffee mug not 2 feet from me at the moment.
While there are many possible explanations for this, a particularly compelling theory is that this is self-medication: nicotine directly alleviates some of the symptoms of schizophrenia, so schizophrenics naturally gravitate towards becoming heavy users.
Along these lines, albeit very anecdotally, many people take up smoking as self-medication for high levels of stress and anxiety.
Here’s an idea - since all vapes except home made devices are electronic, put a Bluetooth chip that requires a phone app that securely identifies the age of the vaper. Make it mandatory for all vaping devices and boom - massive cut in underage vaping.
I don't think it's just the substance that is perceived as unclean. Even for a libertarian, there is a slimy texture to any industry based around an inherently addictive product. Especially when it comes to marketing to kids -- potential lifelong loyal customers if you can hook them while they're more easily influenced.
Suppose there was a substance that was completely neutral in terms of its effects on your body. It has no caloric content, is not caught on drug tests, it tastes like water, and doesn't even make you feel different when you take it. The only effect that it has is that, several hours after your last dose, you find yourself craving another.
How would you feel about this substance being marketed? It's not hurting anyone, other than that they spend a portion of their money on the habit. But the companies selling it aren't doing their own customers any good, either, and in fact, each new customer they get to try the substance is just being roped into a life of either willing themselves through the cravings or spending a little money to make them go away.
Now, obviously nicotine is not this substance. For one, I do think nicotine users actually enjoy the products and also get some alertness benefits from them. But there is that skeevy layer to it too.
I'm not coming at this from a place of puritanism. I'm not a nicotine user but I do consume alcohol. I think we all know alcohol is worse than nicotine in terms of health effects, and the alcohol industry has done an extremely effective job of positioning their product as something cool grown-up adult people use, joke about, and have "sophisticated" tastes in. Just run through your favorite TV shows from the past 20 years or so and try to find any that don't show main characters either a. enjoying alcohol as part of all their social events, or b. abusing alcohol and it's played off as funny, or c. abusing alcohol as part of a "tortured genius" trope.
In a lot of industries the top 10-20% of customers account for the majority of sales. It just gets weird when you have an industry that has to pretend it cares about "responsibility" when its bottom line is as dependent on its most addicted users as they are on the product.
I guess my point is, at some point we call people adults and let them weigh the benefits vs. the risks. Even if they suck at doing that, it's on them. But I'm totally OK with the FDA's aggressive stance on e.g. Juul marketing to teenagers, because that seems to me to be all about getting somebody to start the habit when they're least likely to make wise decisions.
is there any evidence that juul is marketing to teenagers? genuinely asking, as I receive their promotional emails and they never strike me as targeting underage users.
From what I can gather, the reported issues are mostly with their early advertising, showing a lot of vaguely 20ish people looking cool and having fun. They also did a lot of social media marketing and some music events.
I can see the argument that, hey, say your goal is purely to help people transition from cigarettes to a less harmful nicotine vehicle. Won't using the marketing techniques of other successful startups be the best way to accomplish that goal? People aren't going to want to switch from cigarettes to something that has the social image of "desperate addict trying to quit". It helps if it looks like something normal people enjoy socially, and hey, maybe makes them feel a bit more youthful.
That makes perfect sense. But is it possible to succeed in that, without also appealing to teenagers? If not, is it worth it?
Those aren't rhetorical questions, I genuinely don't know the answers to them. It's a complex area to think about.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/27/science/juul-vaping-teen-...
> Five days later, Carrie Yantzer, the principal at Nederland Middle-Senior High School, received an email that immediately struck her as suspicious. The writer introduced himself as Bruce Harter, a former educator working with Juul to develop an anti-vaping curriculum for schools.
> “I read about the challenges you’re having with Juul,” Mr. Harter wrote. He offered a free, three-hour curriculum provided by Juul to discourage teens from using e-cigarettes by teaching them about their brains and giving them mindfulness exercises.
The "cool flavors" thing was a (now banned) tobacco industry trick, too:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/electronic-cigarettes...
> Other efforts from Big Tobacco to target children were eventually stymied by the government as well. In the late '90s, the Federal Trade Commission banned the indelible Joe Camel, and the Food and Drug Administration banned kid-friendly flavors like strawberry, grape, and chocolate from traditional, or combustible, cigarettes in 2009.
I can agree, that seems suspicious.
> The "cool flavors" thing was a (now banned) tobacco industry trick, too
this is more along the lines of what I expected, and I strongly object to this argument for two reasons. the first is just that, as an adult, I don't accept that I should be prohibited from buying something that tastes good to me just because a child might also enjoy the flavor. the second is that having vape flavors that actually taste good makes it a much more effective harm reduction tool; after a giving it a chance, many smokers actually end up preferring the experience of vaping. if you ban all the good flavors, a good chunk of these people are just going to switch back to smoking.
also, I notice there are a lot of people that support the flavored cigarette ban of the 90s and are now railing against vape flavors. I never hear these people complain about sweet, fruity liquors. if strawberry vape juice is targeting children, who is strawberry vodka for? do we also need to think about banning sweet wines?
Do people still believed that government and its agencies exist for the benefit of the public rather than to benefit capital and corporate interests?
The US government has never been a country of the people, by the people, for the people. It's been a government of the rich, by the rich, for the rich.