Many people seem to believe that vaping is harmless, this is good to make the point clearly that vaping, while not as harmful as smoking cigarettes, isn't a "cost free" activity. I personally didn't realize that it could have these effects either.
I quit smoking, with the help of vaping. I was a pack-a-day Newport smoker that started on a ludicrously high 36mg nicotine level. I was down to 3mg within a year and quit entirely a year later.
This is a very common story for former smokers that switched to vaping. There is a theory in the vaping community, or maybe its an urban myth, that the lack of MAO inhibitors is what allows people who vape to essentially lose their addiction. What I can tell you is that stopping vaping after two years was painless, very much unlike attempting to cold turkey cigarettes.
Philip Morris (now known as Altria) put $13bn into Juul to do the exact opposite. The margins on vaping are higher, the current perception of vaping is that it's better than smoking, and it's way easier to get kids addicted to vaping than cigarettes.
I see too much evidence to the contrary... that big tobacco is now big vaping (which is really big nicotine).
We dont know just how bad vaping really is, it's hard to say its better than smoking, and its impossible to say its not bad for you at all.
I don't think it is intentionally on purpose, but it sure does seem this way sometimes.
A specific example that comes to mind: city of San Francisco banning sale of e-cigs completely, while keeping regular cigarettes just as legal as before [0].
0. https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2019/06/25/7357140...
My guess is that banning cigarettes would go too far. It's unrealistic to expect cigarette smokers to quit over night and start using patches and lozenges.
It's a little more realistic to expect that people who vape to do so.
Why?
>It's a little more realistic to expect that people who vape to do so.
From personal observations, what would actually happen is that those people will just switch to smoking cigarettes.
Vaping is really hard to tax unlike cigarettes. State and local governments are addicted to cigarette tax revenue, but that has been evaporating quickly, so outlawing vaping and not cigarettes is really profitable to them, even if causing more harm overall.
This is absolutely true. Inhaling propylene glycol and glycerine daily for thirty years might cause you to grow three heads or have babies with 27 fingers. But the results of every reputable report I've seen until now has indicated that vaping is much, much better than smoking cigarettes.
The nicotine salts in Juul pods are a type of nicotine that supposedly feels more like a cigarette when inhaled, as opposed to other vapes that use freebase nicotine.
Philip Morris strategy to create confusion is obviously working. Don't buy from big tobacco if your goal is to quit smoking.
In a month I cut down my smoking by over half and I smoke less and less as time goes on. I find the flavours bother me though and is the main reason i haven't quit entirely. I actually enjoy the taste of cigarettes, I haven't found any ejuice I actually like the taste of it all reminds me of candy, even the ones that are supposed to taste like tobacco.
I eventually settled on a juice with a coffee caramel flavor that smelled like someone just made a cake.
Go and try several combinations in a store that is specialized. The Juul is Big Tobacco still giving you an old fashion hit of nicotine.
Edit: if you are located in Europe this was my favorite.
https://ea-sigaret.nl/e-liquid-kopen/100-vg-eliquid/vg-e-liq...
Then there's the matter of, freebasing an alkaloid makes it more bioavailable to your brain, you may be smoking lower concentrations, but your body's absorbing more nicotine per puff.
Kind of like the difference between snorting coke or smoking crack. Cocaine hydrochloride is cocaine in salt form, crack is the freebase form. Both are addictive nasty drugs, but with crack, you need less to get high, the high lasts longer and in the long term tends to really fuck people up from what I've seen.
Also, the first time I ever heard of freebase nicotine, was when I was reading about how it was added into cigarettes to increase the addictiveness and rush you get.
That cake flavoured one still sounds unappealing. I'd really prefer some kind of savoury or smokey flavour. I've never really enjoyed sweet things.
I'm not a chemist so you good be spot on in the information you provide. I'm just sharing my positive experience with freebase and hope more people can quit smoking.
Taste is such a personal thing, I don't like sweets either and this flavor was delivered by accident because the store made a mistake.
>Freebasing is a more efficient method of self-administering alkaloids via the smoking route. For example, cocaine hydrochloride decomposes at the high temperatures necessary for smoking. Free base cocaine, in which the cocaine alkaloid is "freed" from the hydrochloride salt, has a melting point of 98 ℃ and is volatile at temperatures above 90 ℃, therefore providing an active drug for smoking. After inhalation the alkaloid is absorbed into the blood stream and rapidly transported throughout the body. However, since blood is buffered with carbonate at physiological pH (near 7.4), free-base amines will be rapidly converted back into their acid form. In fact, 94.19% of cocaine will exist as the acid form under equilibrium at pH=7.4, calculated using the Henderson-Hasselbalch equation assuming a pKa of 8.61[1].
If you were vaping off one of those little pens, then 10 makes a bit more sense, and maybe even a bit low. But, those never really hit right for me. I cough when I hit a Juul though, so idk.
Smoking is one of the most harmful things you can possibly do to your body. Many people underestimate how much of a low bar being better than smoking is.
E-Cigarettes are only now becoming mainstream, and have only been in use for the better half of a decade.
We wont truly know the effects until we have a large sample size over a long period of time.
Ultimately, saying it's conclusively better for you than smoking is short sighted. We thought smoking was good for you in the 1920s...
But best available evidence says 5% right now.
To me this is up there with "I know of no one on HN who actually dislikes Javascript."
You're contradicting a mantra that is so ubiquitous that it's a bit hard to take you seriously.
People I know IRL and on Reddit (without even venturing into circlejerks like r/juul and r/vaping) think vaping is so harmless that health effects aren't even the tiniest part of the discourse while they puff on their vape pretty much every waking hour. Compare that to almost every cigarette smoker who is at least in a state of "yeah, I should quit someday." I'd be hard pressed to find someone who vapes saying that, and when it comes up it's usually just for financial reasons.
Not to say you aren't having the experience that you said you have, but rather to point out that you may be surrounded by a rather unique group.
Maybe its a fast evolving community and things have changed. I haven't touched vapes since 2016, so my involvement in the online community is zero these days. When I quit, Juul wasn't even a thing and mech mods were the norm. Everyone that talked about vaping was in the context of harm reduction, not harm elimination.
Those I do know IRL that still vape just aren't even trying to give it up, but they also weren't willing to give up cigarettes until vapes came along and took away the smells. Maybe it is also a factor of my social circles being 30+ and upper middle class now and smoking/vaping/drunkenness in general being frowned upon.
Every time I lower my dosage, I notice I vape 2-3 times more than usual, and after a week, I stabilise again (at around 15-20ml per day). I exclusively vape on an RDA.
Over the weekend, I was invited to go to a shisha bar. After 3-4 tokes, I was high as a kite. Hadn’t experienced such a nicotine high in a very long time.
I can’t wait to finally be off nicotine completely. I’m already noticing that I often forget my vape when leaving the house, and when I notice, I don’t really sweat it. It’s a slow process, but for me, it works.
And yes, I know that it’s possible that I might grow a 3rd arm 20 years from now. But I’m playing the odds: cigarettes will kill me dead for certain. Vaping, maybe not.
I quit chewing tobacco this way. Picked up vaping a while later for no apparent reason. Will probably quit this the same way.
I've heard this from enough vapers that I'm starting to suspect that vaping causes paranoia. Big tobacco is happy as a clam that so many people are vaping. Cigarettes were on the decline before vaping came along and gave nicotine addictions to a new generation.
https://www.politifact.com/virginia/statements/2019/jun/12/t...
> The CDC conducts an annual survey of tobacco use by middle and high school students, asking if they’ve used a tobacco product in the last 30 days. The most recent poll, released in February, found middle school use increased from 5.6% in 2017 to 7.2% in 2018; among high school students, it surged from 19.6% in 2017 to 27.1% last year.
> Almost all of the increase comes from e-cigarettes. Among middle school students, use rose from 3.3% in 2017 to 4.9% last year. Use nearly doubled among high schoolers, from 11.7% in 2017 to 20.8% in 2018.
> In other words, the number of high school smokers dropped by 1.2 million, while those using e-cigarettes rose by almost 3.5 million. That more than wipes out progress in reducing smoking during the last seven years.
Uk government estimates risks at 95% less than smoking which means we're still winning health wise by quite a bit.
https://www.apnews.com/1c899ae55fca41bab3cefcdc37bf6de4
> For decades, the percentage of high school and middle school students who smoked cigarettes had been declining fairly steadily. For the past three years, it has flattened, according to new numbers released Monday.
It may also encourage relapses:
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-ecigarettes/vaping...
> Adults who smoke cigarettes may have an easier time cutting back or quitting altogether if they start vaping, but a new French study also suggests that vaping may make ex-smokers more likely to relapse.
“It’s not clear yet what’s going on and it’s best to not jump to any conclusions,” said David Levy, a Georgetown University researcher.
In the UK, teenage smoking is at record lows - just 16% of secondary school children have ever smoked tobacco, down from 19% in 2016. We have not seen a significant rise in youth e-cigarette use. This may have something to do with the 2014 Tobacco Products Directive, which introduced substantial new regulation on both cigarettes and e-cigarettes including restrictions on advertising.
At the moment we don't think vaping turns non-smokers into smokers. But it's complicated, especially if there are companies that are marketing vaping to young non-smokers.
I personally think vaping is a useful public health measure, but I recognise the very many years of terrible behaviour from tobacco companies and it feels like light-touch regulation doesn't work.
Definitely a myth, I never smoked but vaped for 2 years. I quit a few months ago because I was vaping so much I noticed some pretty bad side effects, the increase in blood pressure was real. Nicotine is highly addictive, I still feel like I want to do it and it takes willpower not to go back to it.
Currently tapering on a vape.
After just two weeks, the improvement in overall body function was amazing. Benefits continued on for months after that.
So for me it's more about helping him risk manage, getting him on vaping instead of cigarettes is "less shitty" way of getting that fix for him, even if I'm fully aware that it's not healthy in any shape or form.
It's the lesser of two evils for sure, however, nobody should pick up vaping if you aren't currently smoking cigarettes.
Normal cigarettes have established to be undisputedly harmful, whereas ecigs while possibly addictive, the long term effects of consumption are merely not well known/studied.
Despite any studies, I would be very interested to hear a theoretical assessment of the safety of ecigs.
I don’t really buy that premise, at least for some significant definition of many (some definitely, but many?).
On the other hand, what is a cost free activity anyways? A can of Coke (sugar) is pretty bad for you, I’m glad I’ve given that up. My wife thinks the sugar free stuff I’ve switched to is still bad for me, ugh. I guess only water would be considered cost free in that context.
Unless you are defining time usage as a cost which is absurd.
Not sure if you are joking or not, but I would wager the costs of sex are actually enormous even compared to drugs. Look no further than the costs and issues surrounding the following: adoption, foster care, abortion, child support, single parent welfare rates, STDs, etc.
In theory sex is a "cost free" recreational activity, but in practice it isn't.
As I get older, "don't stick your dick in crazy" makes more and more sense. Pretty much all the STIs in my demographic can be cured with a $20 pill. And almost all of my post-nut clarity revolves around fearing becoming a father prematurely.
I grew up hearing about the archetype of the heroic man getting laid constantly. In my 30s I now meet that man all the time: he's now saddled with a kid with a woman he rarely sees while trying to date for real.
If only. HSV2 affects 1 out of 6 people, rarely shows its symptoms and can be latent for years, has a big stigma associated with it, and there's no amount of $$$ you can pay to make that go away, unfortunately. Also the occasional antibiotic-resistant variants of the $20 ones, if you get sufficiently unlucky.
Though among the people I know close enough to know this about them, nobody has HSV2 and almost none of them know somebody who has it. Meanwhile I know a dozen men stuck with accidental children with women they never wanted anything to do with.
CDC says HSV2 has 12% penetration into the population aged 14-49 but has no further demographic info. HIV is even more common yet I don't know anybody with it because I'm just not in the high risk demographic. So these just aren't part of my perception of day to day worries (perhaps incorrectly, as you would point out) compared to unwanted children.
The person I replied to made it sound like unwanted pregnancy is a solved problem which isn't even true for women, thus categorically less true for their partners.
1. 90% of people with HSV2 allegedly don't know about it, because it's not a standard STD test you'll be given unless you have an outbreak 2. People with these conditions aren't parading about it, there's no upside to it, so most just keep it to themselves and their doctors. People are afraid of being "outed". Some will go so far as not to tell the people they're hooking up with about it. (not ethically recommended / legal, but that's humans for you)
Considering all the negative health outcomes that are correlated with money (well, a lack thereof) that doesn't sound cost free to me.