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Comment by abduhl | Hacker News Reader

Or, alternatively, we've hit the "preponderance of the evidence" stage for e-cigarettes and vaping in general being bad for your health and governments are doing what they think is correct for the health of their constituents.

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And I’m sure that everyone who currently uses e-cigarettes in those countries will simply shake their heads and give up the habit. Which history clearly shows is what happens when we ban a substance. Right?

Yeah....

Not only is there vanishingly little “evidence” that e-cigarettes are harmful to health, most of the evidence we do have is for knock-off street THC or cheap Chinese juice. That’s hardly a logical reason to ban e-cigarettes entirely. Especially given the fact that many of these people will go back to smoking real cigarettes.

The black market will inly grow when the substance is outlawed. These bans are effectively deregulating and needlessly endangering constituents.

Unlike with cigarettes, black market production of e-cigarettes sounds unlikely. They're complex electronics that need large factories to build.

Illegal importation from legal foreign factories will probably happen, but those foreign factories are going to be building to the same standard regardless, and compared to normal contraband like "plant leaves" it's going to be pretty easy to tell where they are coming from.

basic mech setup is a high drain battery connected to a coil with a wick through a high current switch. no rocket science here.

> Unlike with cigarettes, black market production of e-cigarettes sounds unlikely.

Wait, isn't that exactly the problem that's lead to what's happened here? Unregulated THC cartridges causing health issues in states where marijuana is still illegal?

There's a difference between E-Cigarettes and the consumables you place in them, I'm talking about the former while you're talking about the latter.

India probably banned both though the article only discusses the former, if so banning the latter is unfortunate since as you note banning it has serious health risks.

Sure, but clearly there's black market production for the latter. I guess I don't see why you think it's difficult for black market production to spring up for the former.

By that I mean: I don't think the e-cigarettes themselves are wildly more complicated to produce than the cartridges--though I might be wrong on that.

It's not the illicit devices that have been killing people, it's the illicit juices. Those can be made in your kitchen.

Nah. We won't see as many regulated mods, but plenty of less user friendly options are easy to make. In the early days of cartos and whatnot we used to make our own with very simple stuff.

Um, no, not so much.

* https://www.instructables.com/id/Homemade-Vape-Pen-e-cig/

* https://www.instructables.com/id/DIY-Electronic-Cigarette/

* https://hackaday.com/2014/09/13/homemade-e-cigarette-vaporiz...

* https://modern-crafts.net/basics-for-building-your-own-box-m...

Note: mechanical mods are a great way of setting your batteries on fire. Most regulated mods are built around a relatively small number of platforms (https://www.evolvapor.com/), but there's no magic involved and if there aren't open-source hardware now, there will be soon. If you don't care about unit-cost, size, and scale, I'm absolutely sure any electronics hobbyist could build something as functional as most of the commercial platforms.

I can see two obvious consequences of banning e-cigarettes:

1. The Arduino brigade whining loudly that they can't get the parts for their plant-moisture monitor "because you could build an e-cig with that."

2. A rise in trouser explosions from improperly constructed vapes. (Contraband rarely gets UL listed, right?) I would like to officially nominate the term "jake leg" for the resulting limp, in honor of a previous attempt at regulating morality in the name of public health.

P.S. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4KA40gBpDhc

The logical reason is that is permits excessively high nicotine dosing. This was also possible with gum and patches but they were prohibitively expensive for most people to do that.

And where is this actually happening? In what numbers? Too much nic in your juice isn't even enjoyable (it's incredibly harsh.) This is a make believe problem.

Has India also outlawed cigarettes, cigars, and pipe tobacco? If not, this isn't due to an preponderance of evidence and a care about constituents' health.

It is if e-cigs are causing a higher overall use if tobacco products. The time to stop it is early on, now. Traditional tobacco products on the other hand are so entrenched that it would take a truly astounding amount of effort to institute such a ban. I agree there's some amount of moral panic at play here, but it's not the only factor and maybe not even the dominant one.

Per TFA, there are around 35 Million vapers worldwide. The WHO (via Wikipedia) indicates that over 120 million people smoke cigarettes in India alone, with 1m dying every year due exclusively to smoking complications.

So, no, e-cig use could not possibly be higher, or have a higher health impact.

Are there numbers by age group? I know of people that wouldn't smoke, but got addicted to nicotine at earlyish ages via vaping.

You misunderstood. I didn't say that e-cigs were, by themselves, higher. I said they may be causing a higher overall use of tobacco (well, nicotine) products.

Health risks are less clear. Vaping hasn't really been around long enough to examine life-long vapers for the really long term effects. Still, based on available evidence, I'd guess the risks are much lower than smoking. But if it converts non-smokers into vapers, that will increase the overall number of people at risk. Of course it can (and does) convert smokers to vapers, which may not reduce the raw number of people doing something risky, but it may decrease the overall pooled risk of that whole population.

So I don't know. From a public health policy point of view, it's not an easy equation to balance. What amount of new people with health risk is worth it to reducing the overall risk? Should there be such a utilitarian calculation? Should they try to reduce both the number of people with risk and the overall risk pool by both banning vaping and making traditional tobacco products harder/more expensive, or more education to prevent initial use? What about freedom to make these not-so-great choices, people make bad but not illegal choices all the time, why should this be different?

I don't propose answers to the above. I'm simply saying the India ban may not purely be a case of moral panic. That's all.

What about the people that will go back to smoking cigarettes, a clearly worse alternative? E-cigs are preventing all those people from using traditional tobacco products, not causing higher use...

Sure, that is an extremely important consideration. But in the US, smoking has been on the decline. At the rate of decline it could approach nearly 0% in the next 20 years or so. Vaping may reverse that trend, keeping people would have been risk-free in an (albeit lower) risk category, at the same time it converts people who never would have been at risk into a risk category. It's not a simple equation to balance, not when the gains over the short term may work out to be losses in the long term.

I'm not offering this up as "the way it should be", that a ban should be instituted, I offer it up as an important consideration. Personally, I think we might do best by reaching for the best of both worlds-- get rid of flavored vapes the same way we got rid of flavored cigarettes, continue to push traditional smokers into the healthier option, at the same time convert our anti-smoking education & awareness campaigns into ones that include warnings against vaping.

They are set to ban cigarette filters as part of the single-use plastics ban. India is, apparently, one of the worlds largest producers of cheap unfiltered cigarettes.

Not necessarily a bad thing, however, as the filters have little to no health benefit and are a huge environmental issue.

There's much more evidence for fast food being bad for your health, and we're not up in arms about that one (collectively). I'm not _for_ vaping, necessarily -- and I don't like it in public: I'm for smoking in general to be banned from public spaces because of the way it affects other people -- but if you want to choose that in your own house, go for it.

not to mention alcohol

I hate when someone produces a cloud of vape steam in the middle of a crowd of people waiting to cross the street. It just hangs there, a visibly stinking, redolent horror invading everyone else's nostrils.

This is all subjective. I personally don't mind at all, but cigarette smoke irritates the hell out of me

This is why public spaces have to target a relatively high standard -- everyone is bothered by and allergic/sensitive to different things.

Wait until you realize that describes normal breath, too.

:-)

People have a hard time seeing what they don't have interest in could have interest to other people.

Most people don't vape, so it's much easier to get on a moral high horse and tell others what to do; there's no consequence for the majority.

If they reacted to vaping the same way to cars, coffee, sugar, fast food, etc... they would suffer a loss of freedom. And people don't like to lose their own freedom, but plenty of people are eager to restrict others.

It makes sense for me: most people don't work on self improvement so imposing self improvement on others is a way to feel that society is improving.

I think fast food is a sort of health crisis in America, but comparing it to things in the category of "smoking" isn't fair. It's not like food, people don't need to smoke every day to stay alive, lack of smoking isn't affecting poverty stricken communities, etc. Of course eating and smoking overlap in ways; both require the consumer to take responsibility for their health and their decisions. That's still not an apples to apples comparison, though.

Poor diet is literally killing people by the millions. Vaping has seen an acute outbreak of a problem affecting a tiny portion of people who vape which will almost certainly be traced back to a manufacturing problem.

It also disproportionately affects lower income families/individuals. Very similarly to smoking.

"Preponderance of the evidence" being 5 reported deaths from "vaping related" illnesses, 3 of which involved illicit cannabis products?

Meanwhile untold numbers of people have been able to quit smoking, which we know absolutely causes harm, thanks to vapes.

Funny how quickly the media disinformation outburst about those illicit vape products convinced the public conscious that there is suddenly massive evidence of general vaping long term effects.

Right? Completely insane, people are acting like vaping is the same as meth now

E-cigarettes are considerably less harmful than smoking. Banning vapes while keeping tobacco legal is incoherent.

It's an emotional response.

This is, perhaps, more about protecting established industries than public health.

It's kinda sad because it's not as bad as real cigarettes, and makes quitting them a walk in the park for those that want to quit.

While that's the marketing view of most of the e-cig companies, we don't actually know if either of these claims are true.

#1 e-cigs are not as harmful as normal cigarettes It will take several decades to prove or disprove this point. However, early research points to this not being the case.

#2 e-cigs make it much easier to quit tobacco Again, early research doesn't indicate that e-cigs don't outperform other smoking cessation techniques.

The main concerns I've heard are from a public health perspective. Most tobacco researchers and public health officials are concerned that e-cigs are essentially a "better" product. "Better" meaning perceived as being less offensive, cooler, convenient, and less harmful. The concern is that since the youth perceive e-cigs as cool and safe, while cigarettes as uncool and harmful, it's seeing significant adoption in younger people which is undoing the gains from the anti-tobacco campaigns in the 90s. Essentially, the hypothesis is that e-cigs are a slightly less (but really the distinction is minute and trivial) harmful product that is significantly more compelling to people. The net effect is the threat of e-cigarettes is that it can do significantly more harm to humans that cigarettes (since more people perceive it as safe).

I can vouch for #2 (and many other people if you'd listen). UK scientists vouch for #1.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/dec/28/vaping-is-95...

With this evidence, are you willing change your stance on it?

#1 you are just plain wrong about. Let's see your evidence.

#2 is nonsense. I did it personally and you can hop on any vaping forum to find millions more.

If they were doing anything for health they would ban actual cigarettes...

Has there been new evidence? All I've heard recently has been the recent cases of an unidentified lung illness (which seems much more likely to be the result of some new product on the market, since it doesn't take years to become apparent). Any new epidemiological studies? Any new direct evidence of harm? (I mean, beyond the long-existing studies involving burning vaping liquid at extremely high temperatures and discovering lower quantities of dangerous chemicals than you would find in cigarettes or marijuana.) Any serious study showing higher levels of nicotine addiction than cigars or pipe tobacco? (Cigarettes have had decades of engineering specifically to make them addictive.)

Are you sure this isn't just another puritanical flap?

That's not a good enough reason to ban something. Actually let me clarify that, it is theoretically a good enough reason to ban something, but in reality it just lead to speakeasies and NASCAR.

Please point me to this preponderance of evidence. I'll wait.

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