Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by 4ntonius8lock | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

4ntonius8lock

> 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.

View on HN

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com