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