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Comment by adventured | Hacker News Reader

Just about the last thing the US needs is another drug related black market problem. The US should generally be liberalizing on drug access and use, not making more recreational drugs illegal.

There is a reasonable action between making it illegal and having e-cigarettes without any restrictions at all.

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its mind boggling that the same jurisdictions that want to make e-cigarettes illegal want to make shrooms and marijuana legal. absolutely mind boggling.

Presumably they believe the problem is things that are addictive rather than things that are drugs.

Marijuana and mushrooms are not that harmful compared to e-cigarettes. It's a rational approach.

Didn't that story about a mysterious rise in lung disease tied to vaping a couple of weeks ago implicate marijuana as the cause?

I heard THC technically it could indicate a lack of quality control in their products or delivery mechanism. Like bathtub gin for blindness - while alcohol isn't healthy the methanol was the actual cause. Expired vaccines have killed people for instance.

No, it implicated tobacco/nicotine based products. And it sounds like something significantly more dangerous than the usual vape products are involved. People have been vaping for years without being hospitalized their first few months of usage. This sticks out as highly unusual, regardless of your views on vape safety overall.

This is a case of particularly bad reporting. These cases are all related not to nicotine but to THC and other drugs being tainted.

https://www.leafly.com/news/health/tainted-vape-carts-sicken...

You're arguing smoking marijuana (burning it and inhaling the byproducts) is less harmful than e-cigarettes.

I highly doubt that.

Nobody is proposing a ban on nicotine gum and patches. Any actual addicts will be able to get their fix. So a ban on another nicotine delivery system doesn't seem to me like a big risk for, say, Colombian cartels smuggling in black-lab vape cartridges.

i think you haven't research the problem at all.

banning never works. no circumstance makes banning stuff acceptable. you can however limit access. otherwise you're just exploiting your own fears to drive people into doing your bidding.

Then ban advertising of ANY kind for tabacco-related products. No cool kids or influencers, no flashy magazines, no outdoor ads and so on.

I'm 100% on board with this.

i have no problem with this.

yes, the worst thing about the hitman trade is that it's unregulated so you can't get your money back if they kill you instead since the other guy offered a better rate. better to legalize it so these disputes can be resolved in court. and to keep regulations to a minimum so the industry can continue to innovate exciting new options.

i completely agree that the ban on murder for hire has been a total failure and should be rescinded immediately.

how's the war on drugs going?

You seem to be mixing up a factual claim with what is almost a religious one.

Banning stuff does in fact work. The Consumer Products Safety Commission has banned all sorts of stuff: https://www.cpsc.gov/Regulations-Laws--Standards/Regulations...

Despite that, Mexican cartels aren't selling shoddy cribs and high chairs on the streetcorner.

Automotive regulators have banned a wide variety of unsafe things as well, but people aren't sneakily removing their dashboard padding and the like.

It's true that banning some things doesn't work, and I'm generally against drug prohibitions. But I think banning Juul will probably work just fine, because we aren't banning the substance entirely, just a delivery mechanism.

>Colombian cartels smuggling in black-lab vape cartridges

Source?

If you've ever tried to quit smoking, you'd know that the gums and patches don't work, which is why vape pens have been so successful at getting smokers to quit after decades of patches and gums failing. It's not the amount of nicotine in your blood that matters, it's the delivery mechanism. Inhaling nicotine gets it to your brain faster, which creates the pleasurable experience. Patches just make you feel shitty and burn your skin, while vape pens recreate the sensation of smoking with an order of magnitude less nasty shit in it. Nicotine salts based vapes like juul are even less damaging since the quantity of vapor is massively reduced compared to traditional vaping liquids. Juul may be a bunch of scumbags, but these conversations really irk me because there is a clear benefit to vaping as an alternative to smoking. If you can figure out how to curb teen vaping without telling me I can't use a juul because it's maybe kinda bad for me, I'm all for it. If the proponents of banning vapes want to ban alcohol first, I'll be less skeptical of their intentions.

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