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Comment by exogeny | Hacker News Reader

I sort of hate these articles, because the comments always boil down to three main categories:

1. I vape and this hasn’t happened to me, therefore I’m an expert on public health policy

2. I vape and because it’s better than cigarettes, it’s safe on those terms alone

3. What the hell is wrong with you idiots, safer than cigarettes is not the same as safe

You’re either irrationally defensive (1, 2) because you feel attacked, or you’re a smug dick (3) that trivializes addiction.

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I agree on the smug dick part, but is 3 really trivializing addiction? Or is it perhaps a useful counter to the egregious motivated reasoning that goes along with addiction?

I certainly think we should be sympathetic with addicts and help them where we can. But I don't think that requires accepting the obvious bullshit that addicts come up with in justifying their behavior. And it's not like vaping is the only way to kick a nicotine habit.

Another huge problem is people rarely accept the realities on the ground in these abstract debates. That people will continue to smoke cigarettes otherwise or find black market means to vape even when its heavily regulated or banned. As a consequence it simply pushes people into completely unsafe vendors and shady people, pushing good kids into the justice system, encouraging related criminal activity which black markets help finance, etc creating a net-worse situation.

High school kids have been able to find weed for decades despite various stringent laws. Many drug dealers are high school kids themselves. I wouldn't be surprised to find kids selling vape oil and cheap chinese vape pens.

This should ultimately be about balancing real alternatives, doing our best to minimize harm, and educating the people who will do it anyway. Although most education attempts have laughably failed like those 90s TV spots by out of touch ad companies paid for by the gov.

People like to argue in some fantasy idealistic world where people will stop engaging in non-violent activity which harms themselves because policy makers say so.

I agree with the general thrust of your point, but I'm not sure it applies here. People smoke weed because it's fun or because it is medically useful. But from the tobacco smokers and ex-smokers I know, that's never the case. It's not fun; it's a very hard-to-kick addiction.

It's also an addiction provided on a for-profit basis. That means strong incentives to create new addicts. I don't think it's at all unreasonable for us as a society to work against that.

But that would force it into hiding. Much fewer people could run out for a short five minute vaping break in plain sight of everyone. So they’d save it for the evenings and their homes, which means they’d do it much more rarely, which means that much fewer people would get addicted. And nicotine as a drug isn’t all that fun.

There are three pretty clear facts

1. There is has been a sharp drop in the number of smokers

2. There is has been an even sharper jump in the number of the vapers, especially concerning among youth.

3. The available evidence says that the inherent risks of vaping are an order of magnitude less than smoking.

As a society we're discussing whats the optimal public health policy to reduce vaping and smoking. Unfortunately these are substitutes so as we crack down on the availability of one we increase consumption of the other. And this is why it's important to understand the relative risks of vaping versus smoking. If they're similarly unsafe then it doesn't really matter how hard we crack down on vaping. But if smoking is far more dangerous than vaping(which the evidence points to) then we need to be much more careful about reducing vaping availability.

Among my peers at least people vape for the stimulant effects. Helps with work, and helps at the bar. Its also easier to manage than coffee which stains teeth, taints breath, and makes you poop.

>What the hell is wrong with you idiots, safer than cigarettes is not the same as safe

I don't see anything wrong with the second part of that statement. Of course, the first part comes across as being an pretentious twat, but it's important to remind people who actually believe vapes are perfectly safe and can do no harm.

Mitigating risk is what it is all about. Methadone is less risky than Heroin, which is why you can get a prescription for the one at a drug treatment facility but not the other.

> which is why you can get a prescription for the one

And you can't buy either at a corner store. Methdone > heroin and vaping > cigarettes but we still should not encourage vaping. It is dangerous and we should treat it as such.

So is drinking alcohol, but you don’t see stop drinking commercials on TV.

Have you ever heard the phrase "please drink responsibily"?

Besides, it's a different issue. It is general knowledge that alcohol has some serious health consequences.

That language replaced “Don’t drink and drive” in alcohol advertisements because the manufacturers wanted the lede to be “Please drink...” instead of “Don’t drink...”. It’s there either because there’s legislation requiring anti-drunk-driving statements in the ads or to head off legislators adding such a requirement.

Actually there are/were places in Europe where addicts could get an actual prescription for heroin. It greatly reduced harm.

Methadone isn't actually safer than known purity heroin, and in fact many opiate addicts say that methadone causes much stronger dependence than heroin/the morphones/the contins. The only "socially good" things about it are the consistent availability and long duration of action, which prevent desperation and petty crime

> 3. What the hell is wrong with you idiots, safer than cigarettes is not the same as safe

I wouldn't say this to anyone who was previously addicted to cigarettes and switched to vaping as a safer alternative.

I would, however, say (a nicer version of) it to any non-smoker who wants to try vaping. And, I would push back against anyone who vapes and thinks it's safe, lest they create more people in the aforementioned category.

Think link is about 11 cases identified (and a cluster of 8, whatever they mean by that).

That would not point to "vaping" being specifically dangerous, but a specific dangerous product batch either vaporizer or fluid causing lung disease. It wouldn't be surprising given the loosely/unregulated status of many of these things and the ease of importing supplies from questionable origins.

Some of the liquids causing this particular “pandemic” were obtained on the black market and included THC... May not even really be a case of something slipping by the professional sales of eliquids.

Not to be confused with a computing cluster, this is a reference to analytical methods.

In medicine and medical jargon, the verb “to cluster” and noun “cluster” have a specialized definition. It’s a loaded term, intended to signal that observations of coincidental medical conditions found close together and at around the same time are presumed to be strongly related in an as yet unknown way.

It’s usually stated in a public health context, when an alert or warning is announced.

Example: A sudden spike in food poisoning at restaurants is noticed by way of shared reporting between hospitals. If there are 10,000 incidents within 48 hours in the entire state of Texas, statistical “clustering” helps shake out the unrelated noise of the usual incidental food poisoning, to locate the unexpected events according to shared qualities. Same restaurant chain, correlated ingredients across chains (all lettuce), associated factories or farms, suppliers, freight shipping company, style of prep work, common equipment (all had same blender or mixer brand), and so on.

It’s a way of problem solving during fluid events as they unfold, in an attempt to get out in front of a problem, as it happens.

I think in (3) you should separate the smoker -> vapers versus the non smoker -> vapers. I've seen a lot of the latter amongst younger people, which really sucks IMO.

As it turns out, “irrationally defensive” is the overwhelmingly dominant response in humans faced with analyzing their own behavior in any situation.

so adding more divisive comments, instead of discussing facts is the way to go?

The official recommendation from the NHS in the UK is now that vaping is indeed less harmful than cigarettes:

Public Health England's 2015 independent evidence review found that, based on the available evidence, vaping is around 95% less harmful than smoking. The Royal College of Physicians came to a similar conclusion in its 2016 report 'Nicotine without smoke: tobacco harm reduction'.

- https://www.nhs.uk/smokefree/help-and-advice/e-cigarettes

Perhaps we don't have enough data yet, but as a matter of public health policy it is definitely useful to know which is less harmful for you.

Or you take the metaposition and the next person lists (4) categories of comments

Metasmugness is the best position one could take in any topic. Rising above the ones who rise above others, holier-than-holier-than-thou, etc.

Oh but it's smugness all the way down, thou holier of holies. ;)

Here is my obnoxiously unsolicited opinion: I vape copious amounts of cannabis and recently have been noticing trouble with my lungs filling with phlem... guess it's time for me to slow down.

on my side it's mostly that studies only cover a few kind of liquids.. and still no regulation came out to only sell safe ones.

Out of curiosity, where do you sit? I think I am mostly 3.

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