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Comment by d1zzy | Hacker News Reader

I hope this doesn't result in e-cigs getting banned in the US because that would be terrible. I live in the same house with someone who has been smoking since they were a teenager (quite common where we're from) and e-cigs has allowed them to stop smoking cigarettes which may or may not benefit them that much but it most certainly benefits me (no smell of smoke in the house, no second hand smoking, etc). They have tried quitting multiple times before and nicotine patches, gum, etc.

The article mentions that the group which filed a lawsuit is disputing the effectiveness of e-cigs as "smoking cessation" devices. From my personal experience they most definitely function.

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My main issue with e-cigs is that they are heavily marketed to kids, for example with young sponsored influencers doing smoke tricks and other shit.

Thanks to e-cigs, teen cigarette (not e-cig) smoking has started increasing after decreasing for years. Teens that would have never started smoking are introduced to it with e-cigs.

I don't know how these 2 phenomenons balance out. Does the number of cigarette smokers moving to e-cigs counterbalance the number of younger people starting to smoke cigarettes because of it ?

In all cases, I have no issue with more studies on the direct impact on e-cigs themselves.

> the number of younger people starting to smoke cigarettes because of it ?

Just ban cigarettes if that is the problem.

Kids really shouldn't be smoking e-cigs either. E-cigs are only better than cigarettes because "cigarettes are so legendarily bad for you".

I can accept them as cessation devices, but all their value in this realm should be weighted against the new users they introduce, chief among them: Kids.

They shouldn’t be eating chips, breads, candy, soda, and sitting around watching garbage YouTube/Netflix media and superhero shows. Solution isn’t always to ban something. They shouldn’t be marketed to kids, just like sugary snacks in my opinion, but education is better than banning it for all adults. Just slap the same 21 year old restriction as alcohol and move on.

I don't see the argument. Bad effect from things that are relatively non-addictive (at least physically) suggest that things that are addictive needs to be even more controlled. If anything there is now a disparity between what science tells us about "junk food" and digital media, and what how we treat them. The idea that you can teach people faster than dangers can appear without boundaries doesn't seem to be supported these days.

Considering 70% of US population is overweight, and 30% is obese, I would say the foods I listed are addictive. Regardless of definitions of addictiveness, I still think education is a better force than prohibition for most vices.

Banning alcohol, marijuana, and other drugs have all been unsuccessful. Why would it work with cigarettes?

The aggressive taxation, cultural shaming, disallowing smoking in public places, health warnings etc. seem to be more effective than most blanket prohibitions, even against the addictive properties of nicotine.

> number of younger people starting to smoke cigarettes because of it ?

Where is this fear coming from? The reason you pick up cigarettes is being around other people who smoke. I have seen zero evidence that cigarettes are on the rise among kids or that vaping somehow acts as a gateway drug. Using this to justify restriction of access to a cessation aid has always struck me as myopic, ineffective, and killing people. Granted it hasn’t happened quite yet, even in SF, so maybe there’s still hope. I’m certainly not looking forward to buying juul pods at extreme prices on the street.

Why not ban the goddamn cigarettes? People will complain and then roll their own anyway if they really need it in their life, and I certainly don’t see otherwise healthy teenagers rolling cigarettes again. It’s disgusting seeing arrays of cancerous easily smokable sticks in gas stations and corner stores.

Not a fear, a fact https://tobaccocontrol.bmj.com/content/26/e2/e106

I think they should remain available to adults and for minors by Rx (if they got hooked on tobacco). But I certainly would like to see this better understood and regulated.

I don’t think they should be outright banned like SF is doing, but some regulation and understanding (sci studies) would be good.

Surely tobacco should only be available by prescription, by the same argument?

I mean, what argument is there for e-cigarettes to be banned or heavily regulated when anyone can go buy cigarettes?

If they ban both, fine. If they just go after e-cigarettes, this is the work of the tobacco lobby, end of.

It's the puritans, not big tobacco. Big tobacco loves ecigs, they're its future.

Right, but if the can create a regulatory environment that makes it impossible for anyone but juggernauts to compete, then they’re securing that future.

I suppose the question is where the moral outrage originates - with the puritans, or did someone plant that idea in their minds by hijacking the agenda?

I smoked for 15 years and tried all the usual quitting aids many times. E-cigs were the only thing that worked for me, but I’m a bit concerned about the long term affects of vaping.

Have you tried tapering the nicotine levels from vaping? Asking for myself..

I did.

I went from pack-a-day Newports to Vaping at 36mg/ml. Within a week I was down to 18mg/ml. Within a year I tapered all the way down to under 3mg/ml (I mixed all my own juices).

I stayed right around 3mg/ml for about a year, then I moved jobs and could no longer vape in my office. It seemed quite pointless to go outside and vape since I didnt really have the urge, I was still vaping in the evening after work for another 2-3 months. I finally reached the point where the trouble was more than it was worth, and just stopped entirely.

So yes, I'm a big fan of vaping. Is it "safe?" Probably not. Is it less harmful than cigarettes? I dont think that is even in question, at all. Vaping is, at worst, a significant harm reduction for smokers and those around them. At best, it is a method of quitting cigarettes and have proven successful for MANY former smokers.

I really hate the direction things are going with regulation, because to me it looks a lot like PM and friends are using regulatory capture to ban everything but menthol vapes that they can afford to get tested, thus perpetuating their existence and granting them a lock on the market.

I started with 25mg years ago (hard switch in April 2012 from a pack a day) and nowadays I happily vape at 3mg

Have you stopped smoking really?

To me is sounds like someone saying "I don't smoke any more, I just use cigars instead".

As in "no longer inhaling combustion products", certainly. I'll admit it's still a damned silly thing to do... unless it's compared to sticking dead plant matter into your face-hole and setting fire to it.

I started smoking at age eleven (it was perfectly legal, and I'd been buying cigarettes legally for more than half of my life by that point - it was as much a normal part of an errand as picking up a quart of milk or a loaf of bread), and can't say I put a lot of consideration into it at the time. Over then next four and a half decades, I tried quitting, unsuccessfully, dozens of times. Vaping means I haven't been inhaling burning plant matter for years. I'm happy with the harm reduction. The "quit or die" attitude is what needs to die.

I completely respect your rights to smoke whatever you feel like, and your wish for a better healthier way of doing it, or hell even suing the people who targeted you at 11, but my issue is that it hasn't been proved to my satisfaction that vaping is healthier than cigarettes.

The history of smoking is one of killing people more efficiently, ecigs feel like a continuation of that great tradition.

Are you seriously suggesting that the removal of basically every compound in tobacco found to be cancer causing and the addition of ones with a much lower likelihood of harm that have already been in use for well over a decade is going to be more dangerous?

With the exception of certain nasty flavoring agents and such, I think this is quite unlikely. There's certainly no evidence to support it.

Were they so harmless proof they they are shouldn't be hard to find. The studies I have looked at point an ambivalent picture. Unlike the case for marijuana which seems to not cause any lung cancers contrary to people looking for a link for 50 years now.

There is a fairly big practical difference between cigars and cigarettes. Cigars (like pipes) aren't traditionally inhaled into the lungs, so if you have genuinely gone from cigarettes to cigars and you aren't inhaling you're probably a lot better off.

It is a misconception that cigars are better than cigarettes. One cigar contains as much tobacco as 15-20 cigarettes and although you are not using lungs to breakdown and absorb smoke, you are using your mouth lining which can lead to all sorts of mouth cancers.

Yeah and your statistics are also misleading because who the hell smokes a full cigar in a sitting?

Most people actually. Most people who light a cigar will finish the entire thing.

In my experience most people will smoke a 1/3 or 1/2 of it and put it back. Then you clip the burnt part off and continue later. Maybe I only smoke around lightweights.

That's very much the exception than the rule, I've smoked cigars for 5 years at this point and nobody I know who also smokes does that. Usually I pencil in between 45 minutes-2 hours to smoke a cigar depending on size.

That's not my experience. Relighting a cigar tastes awful, and half-smoking it can dry out the other half. Most folks smoke at least one full cigar in a single sitting.

I used vaping to quit smoking. Then I quit vaping, and found quitting vaping easier than quitting smoking. Now I just breathe deep when I feel like taking a hit from something. The feeling of filling my lungs with some bulls--it is what is missed most, I notice.

Quiting vaping is quite likely to be easier for actual chemical reasons - Tobacco contains not only nicotine but an MAOI which seems to add quite a bit to it's addictive effects.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16177026

> I hope this doesn't result in e-cigs getting banned in the US because that would be terrible.

If there is unequivocal, unhacked evidence that e-cigarettes reduce mortality by a sensible comparison in adults, obviously nothing will be banned, but you ought to be able to see why this is a high bar to meet for children.

> obviously nothing will be banned

Tobacco: 500,000

Alcohol Deaths: 88,000

All Non Alcohol Drug Overdoses (including prescriptions): 64,000

Marijuana Deaths: 0

Yearly statistics for the USA. Seems your 'obvious' might not be so obvious for the rest of us.

But then again, I think many 'obvious' things for you are not obvious to the rest of us. Like the muddled thinking related to children: 1st, it's already illegal to sell them to kids 2nd, will kids get them less if they are removed from local retail locations that check ID? Will driving it underground reduce consumption or only increase the dangers of use?

For some, it's obvious that they see it obviously. Others... we see nuance and no clear cut answers. Though many of us dislike such strong and rash positions backed by emotive, reactionary, broad stroke arguments and so little data.

Nobody dies from Marijuana overdoses but having smoke in your lungs is having smoke in your lungs whether it comes form a cigarette or a joint or a campfire and it's pretty much equally bad each way. Users tend to spend less time smoking joints than cigarettes but I'd be very surprised if the incidence of lung cancer from marijuana was zero.

Because there definitely isn't any other way to consume marijuana other than smoking it.

There are alternative ways to consume tobacco too

But Tobacco and it's components, regardless of how they are consumed, are carcinogens.

My post with statistics, while downvoted, is correct.

The largest studies of lung-cancer–marijuana-use association were also very surprised to find that the incidence of lung cancer from marijuana was, apparently, statistically indistinguishable from zero.

What you say is common sense. Like the earth being flat and the sun revolving around the earth, though, it just happens to be completely wrong.

> having smoke in your lungs is having smoke in your lungs whether it comes form a cigarette or a joint

This is not a thing that's true, it's a thing you assume. Having different smokes or vapors in your lungs can have different effects, just as drinking different liquids can have different effects. Tobacco smoke causes cancers. The more elements in another smoke that are shared with tobacco (or other plants that cause disease) the more the new smoke should be suspect, and it suggests a direction for initial testing. We can't just treat all odors as cancer-causing; vaping doesn't even involve burning vegetable matter, so even if burning some chemicals common to all plants causes cancer, that wouldn't make vaping suspect.

From what I have read any type of smoke you put in your lungs is carcinogenic, Marijuana included. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23846283?dopt=Abstract

Yes, but some types of smoke are much more carcinogenic than others.

Incredible how the same people who denounce edibles also then go ahead and assume all weed is smoked.

It's like they want it both ways.

> Vaping doesn’t even involve burning vegetable matter

Actually the substrates are PG or (more popularly) VG. That’s propylene glycol or vegetable glycerin. The latter is obviously plant based and studies have even measured the concentration vapers breathe as meeting OSHA standards.

The real dangers of vaping are: the vasoconstriction of nicotine, the flavoring (which famously caused issues when a substance that was safe to consume but not inhale was used), and the free radicals from burning cotton or oxidizing metal in the coils.

Then ceramic coil ftw

You are absolutely correct.

Low quality coils can be very dangerous.

That is why open and free access to products consenting adults want to use is important.

Most quality vaping is done with ceramic coils.

There are facts and nuance and reason. Or reactionary emotive perspectives that only hurt everyone involved. The choice is yours.

it's not the tobacco per se, even if it's a factor, the primary cancirogens are the other shit they mix in to get it burning easily, reliably and timely

This thread's so full of FUD spread by the aptly-named Truth campaign, and this one (and its parent) takes the cake. Eventually the fight-fire-with-fire approach they took to combat big tobacco is going to bite us.

While you're probably right about primary carcinogens, the tobacco plant pulls radioactive isotopes like Po-210 and Pb-210 out of the soil and air, and those concentrations have been growing as Polonium levels rise in soil from years of fertilizer use[1]. So to say 'it's not the tobacco' is a very dangerous comment.

Moreover, cardiovascular disease is the primary cause of death for smokers, not lung cancer, and while extracting nicotine from tobacco and vaporizing it in a PG/VG solution might mitigate risk of the latter there's no reason to believe it'll do anything for CVD. If anything, without the MAOI in tobacco that increases the nicotine's effect, on average folks vaping probably have higher levels in their bloodstream than folks that smoke.

[1]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2270238/

> Moreover, cardiovascular disease is the primary cause of death for smokers

that alone tells nothing, cardiovascular disease is the primary death cause for general populace, that why you need to work out incidences, and guess which one has greater variation?

cardiovascular disease: 4x more likely

Cancer: 23x the risk compared to general populace

respiratory disease: 17x the risk

https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/heal...

funny how you had to cherry pick stats to present your point while accusing people of being shills.

smoking is bad, we get it. not everyone that can see a larger picture are part of God knows what conspiracy.

and I specifically did not say "tobacco without the other stuff is fine" so go grind your axe somewhere else

Juul is supportive of this -- and Juul is funded deeply enough (by Altria -- Marlboro, over 12 billion) to be able to go through the FDA review. Pretty much all the independents cannot. This means that the vaporizer business will be completely ceded to "big tobacco". Please don't say "e-cigarette", say "vaporizer" instead. Really would appreciate that.

Nicotine has a very non-linear impact on health. While ecigs are about 10x better in terms of the amount of 2nd hand nicotine, I wouldn't call them safe. IIRC it takes extremely low nicotine levels to cause (temporary) circulatory problems.

I'm happy for you, and those who've stopped smoking. That said, for me personally, ECigs have been a detriment. My city basically outlawed smoking, which was generally great. Then ECig users started smoking everywhere in place of cigarettes, and even less respectfully. I had people in my office constantly smoking them, even. My thoughts on both are the same - do what you want as long as it doesn't bother me. ECig users seem to ignore that here. As long as they are treated and regulated like cigarettes, I'm on board.

That's much more a cultural and location thing. For a lot of purposes ECigs are treated like tobacco, most public smoking laws apply to ECigs ( and cannabis, etc). The reason people get away with ECigs is its less offensive in a lot of places but what can the fed. Gov due about local policing and attitude toward ECigs?

Where I live they're socially and legally treated exactly like any other form of smoked tobacco.

The simple solution there seems to be making e-cigs available via a prescription as a smoking cessation/avoidance device.

The simple solution is to not do anything other than require e cigs to advertise the adverse effects of their product. As far as I can tell, they aren’t hurting anyone other than the people that use them. And as a society, I think junk food and carb heavy meals are a costlier disease.

As someone who lost 80 pounds cutting out junk food, sugar, and carb heavy foods while watching my older brother continue to struggle with his weight and accompanying health issues, I heartily agree.

Oh, dear god no. Nicotine inhalers exist, and I went to a doctor to get a prescription for them a few years before ecigs became prevalent. The doctor insisted that Chantix was the way to go. I reacted badly to Chantix.

I finally quit cigarettes by switching to ecigs, and eventually quit those as well. Actually, I just passed the 5 year mark nicotine-free a couple weeks ago.

Point is, doctors are happy prescribing Chantix, which is bad, and the better option may simply not be prescribed to folks for whom it would to a lot of good.

Not in the US, the price would go up 10x.

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