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Comment by t-writescode | Hacker News Reader

Why aren’t we stopping kids from getting them?

Changing the flavor sounds needlessly draconian, as adults like apple and bubblegum, too.

You can flood your system with caffeine using over the counter caffeine pills, or ultra-high caffeine drinks.

You can flood your system with alcohol with everclear or unconventional ingestion methods.

Neither of these behaviors are as common as this article is trying to push about nicotine, probably mostly due to education and possibly due to the relative addictive nature of caffeine and alcohol.

This whole article, though, talks about teens, presumably underage ones, vaping. Isn’t that already illegal? Shouldn’t we get better at that part before we add more things?

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Because people are awfully good at getting around laws preventing the purchase of things, particularly when those things are legally purchasable by adults -- c.f., cigarettes, alcohol. It's not crazy to think that a multi-pronged approach would be more effective: Try to reduce sales both sales _and appeal_ to underage people. We do this with alcohol, for example, particularly high-alcohol malt liquor [1]. We ban or restrict advertising when it's likely to reach children. [2]

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5391327/

[2] https://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2013/who_ban_t...

How is this different from flavored alcohol in appeal, though? You could buy bubble gum or chocolate or any other sort of flavor for alcohol, and primarily hard alcohol, at that! Or harder, at least (30 proof+)

It's a lot harder to consume alcohol in public as an underaged kid. A lot of it happens in private, after hours or on weekends.

A lot of the vaping done by underaged kids is happening in public - some of it during school hours right inside the building. As a parent of teenaged kids I hear a lot about their peers vaping right in the middle of a classroom.

Is it? Put your liquor in a thermos or a water bottle or a soda bottle and you look like any other innocent teen having a legitimate beverage. Hell, you can do it while talking to an authority figure. Vaping seems much harder to disguise than this.

Except the smell and puckered face every time they drink it. Vodka in a water bottle produces bubbles while water doesn't. School staff is super aware of this stuff.

Then maybe make vaping, nicotine or not, illegal for children. Now you don’t have to specify and they can’t be advertised to, at all, even for the purely flavored vapor.

Kids in my high school used to drink birthday cake vodka out of a water bottle in the middle of class too...

I don't think we target high-alcohol malt liquor (which is less alcoholic than many ipas or any wine) because of the alcohol %.

But the flavors encourage vulnerable teens to pick up the habit!

As if teens didn’t just get packs of cigarettes before, they just had to be more discrete about them. Kid next door smoked in his back yard and threw the butts over the fence into mine, that was just last year.

The whole thing is a joke, stores need to do a better job checking ID cards instead of the government creating draconian restrictions. The corner stores I frequent will sell me alcohol without carding me because they “all know who I am”, but the local smoke shop will card me EVERY SINGLE TIME even though they’ve seen me a dozen times (I personally appreciate this).

Won't make a lick of difference. Someone always has an older brother or friend. Where there’s a will, there’s a way.

What they should do is just apply some friction. Like when you had to start getting OTC meds like Sudafed from the pharmacist. I don’t know if that’s federal or my state. But if you buy too much Sudafed you get on the meth cooker list.

Agreed. If the smoke smelt of vomit...

> Shouldn’t we get better at that part before we add more things?

Addictions are very pernicious things. Other methonds to combat addictive substances have similarly failed and succeded in varying ways. Look at the Opiod crisis, despite the pills being highly controlled and only given out via the supervision of multiple highly educated doctors, it became an epidemic of additction in parts of the US. The opiods overcame the laws and many people's best intentions.

Nicotine is a different addiction, for sure, but the Opiod crisis provides a good case study.

To combat these things, using multiple overlapping methods is a good idea. Laws, yes. Enforcement, yes. Restrictions on advertising, yes. Taking flavors out, yes. taking candy out of the packaging, yes. All of it together, yes. It is likely to take a multi pronged approach.

Per the article, it does seem that these vape pens are a different animal from traditional cigarettes. It seems that there are significant health risks that are really hurting real people in the real world. It seems that these people are victims of their addictions and victims of the people in the companies that push and sell these things.

More data is needed, of course, and I am not a prosecutor in a court of law.

But, it seems like these companies are trying to hurt children for money.

> Look at the Opiod crisis, despite the pills being highly controlled and only given out via the supervision of multiple highly educated doctors

They may be highly controlled now, but they weren't for decades which is how we have gotten to this point.

The opioid crisis in the US started from doctors prescribing opioids, often in hospital settings.

Those meds were licenced and controlled.

Has oxycontin ever been available without a prescription?

Great comment.

I‘m a bit afraid that alarmists and the likes will manage to restrict the sale and use of electronic cigarettes and nicotine-liquids for adults, as they already managed to do in a number of countries.

Products like the Juul are orders of magnitude less harmful than real smoking and I think adults should absolutely have the choice to use them. And yeah, many of them apparently like flavors such as Mango and Bubblegum instead of using liquids that claim to taste like tobacco.

The great lesson from the Facebook et al. debacle we are going through is that a technology that starts out benign and sometimes very useful (think Facebook in the first few years) can morph over time under economic and ideological pressures into something highly harmful to society at large (Facebook today). Second, the expertise developed due to a product existing can also be dangerous. Every technique created by the online-ad industry is now being used to derail democracy across the world.

Let's analyze Juul using the second point. Juul is an experiment modern technology is being leveraged to determine how quickly an addictive substance can be used to alter brain chemistry. The techniques learned from e-cigarettes (using data from tens of thousands of users) will in a few years be used for other hard drugs. Juul is turning a blind eye to kids using its products, but the drug mafias will actively pursue kids and get them hooked onto highly dangerous drugs using new high tech drug delivery devices. Yes, these devices already exist, but they are not being widely used and studied by scientists in methodical fashion, and published in journals.

Now the first point. Pretty soon, competitors will decide that the easy way to beat Juul is to make their own e-cigarette more addictive. From there, its going to be a rat race to the bottom where every company in the space will devolve to R&D labs trying to create the most addictive e-cigarette possible.

Do you really want to live in this future?

> Products like the Juul are orders of magnitude less harmful than real smoking

Source?

There are many, here is one I hope you find reputable - The Royal Collage of Physicians.

https://www.rcplondon.ac.uk/news/promote-e-cigarettes-widely...

A quote:

"Although it is not possible to estimate the long-term health risks associated with e-cigarettes precisely, the available data suggest that they are unlikely to exceed 5% of those associated with smoked tobacco products, and may well be substantially lower than this figure"

>... it is not possible to estimate the long-term health risks associated with e-cigarettes precisely...

> the possibility of some harm from long-term e-cigarette use cannot be dismissed due to inhalation of the ingredients other than nicotine

> Smokers should be reassured that these products can help them quit all tobacco use forever.

> This new report builds on that work and concludes that, for all the potential risks involved, harm reduction has huge potential to prevent death and disability from tobacco use, and to hasten our progress to a tobacco-free society.

The report is pretty clear in that vaping is likely to be better than cigarettes on the health of the UK.

Not that vaping is harm free, to be clear.

Mostly the absence of the carcinogens from combustion.

I don’t think there’s clear evidence that the contents of ecigs are safer (too new), but we know how terrible tobacco combustion is.

We also know that nicotine itself isn’t particularly harmful.

> We also know that nicotine itself isn’t particularly harmful.

Source?

US Surgeon General's report is pretty good.

https://www.hhs.gov/surgeongeneral/reports-and-publications/...

In the context of tobacco the nicotine is addictive; possibly carcinogenic; but there's a load of other stuff in tobacco which is far worse.

I think it would be foolish to allow 16 year olds to have access to nicotine products unless they're already smokers.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-nicotine-all-b...

> So far the answers aren't clear.

That article contains no information that clearly states that nicotine is harmless, just that using vapes and nicotinic gums are less harmful than the use of cigarettes. To be clear, it does not say that nicotine is harmful, nor does it say that it is harmless.

> We also know that nicotine itself isn’t particularly harmful.

I.e. not harmless, but not especially harmful. Like caffeine. Remember, humans have a 100% mortality rate.

Despite the fact that you cannot get out of life alive, the evidence seems to be unclear on if nicotine is harmful or not and what, if any, effects it may have on the quality of a life that will end or the effects on the time of death.

Yes, but that is true for a lot of substances, like again, caffeine.

All we know is that we have yet to find evidence that nicotine is especially harmful, and that’s just how it works in the biological sciences. If everything required proof of no harm, we would simply die of starvation.

Elsewhere in this thread, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20536162

> Isn’t that already illegal? Shouldn’t we get better at that part before we add more things?

Pretty much the answer to every law that's passed. Why not just enforce the laws that we have?

>Why not just enforce the laws that we have?

Because that's harder than patting yourself on the back for making it double illegal. You need to allocate funding, convince enforcement to care, etc, etc. Doing a good job enforcing a law requires buy in on basically every level. Making a law is a cakewalk by comparison.

> "Changing the flavor sounds needlessly draconian, as adults like apple and bubblegum, too."

I heard this same sort of thing back when Obama banned flavored cigarettes. I wasn't very sympathetic to it back then and I'm still not. But with the passage of several years I think we should be able to evaluate the impact of banning flavored cigarettes. Have any adults been unduly impacted by this restriction? I can't imagine how anybody would be, but there is no reason to speculate since it's been several years. Is there any demonstrable harm caused by the banning of fruity flavor cigarettes?

> Is there any demonstrable harm caused by the banning of fruity flavor cigarettes?

loss of freedom.

you should have to demonstrate some value to the ban.

The general thrust of my argument here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20537240 also applies to flavored cigarettes. Its going to be race to bottom of extremely harmful products.

I don't care about freedom of the tobacco industry, nor the freedom of teenagers to smoke, nor the freedom of adults to smoke flavored cigarettes. I take it you can't identify any other 'harm.'

Thoughts on adults enjoying marijuana? How about pot-brownies? Alcohol? Flavored liquors?

If something is legal for adults and illegal for children, then why is it okay to restrict the methods of enjoyment of that item in ways that do not impact other people (e.g. driving while drunk impacts other people).

Your whole argument seems to be built around protecting children, so let’s protect them by disallowing advertisement of the product, especially explicit or advertisement that can be reasonably expected to be viewed by minors, and by carding people that buy the products.

Let’s make all vaping, nicotine, thc or otherwise illegal for minors.

Please don’t come after my apple vodka. I like those flavors, too.

>I don't care about freedom of the tobacco industry, nor the freedom of teenagers to smoke, nor the freedom of adults to smoke flavored cigarettes.

Ah, so you only care about your freedoms.

To be clear, I’m pretty sure that was a voluntary move on juul’s part, you can still buy those flavors of pods on their websites. Supposedly they are coming back to stores when juul can confidently deploy the age verification system they want.

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