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Comment by KingMachiavelli | Hacker News Reader

If we are to ban anything that could endanger public/youth health, then we should ban alcohol & driving as well. (In the US) It's absurd that same cities/communities that were behind legalization of cannabis also are the first cities to crack down on vaping. Why is one thing a champion of individual freedom while another is the scourge of soccer moms?

Make the legal limit for everything 21, I don't care. I'm an (young) adult and would like to consume the same substences humans have been consuming for 100s of years; alcohol, cannabis, & nicotine (tobacco), It shouldn't matter that I'm mitigating the harm of the worse one (tobacco). The goal isn't to be 100% safe, otherwise I'd also have to eliminate driving, red meat, etc.

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This is not an argument in good faith.

The social ROI on driving is a net benefit, in our current society (95% of us would be dead in a few weeks, if all cars and trucks disappeared tomorrow.) They cause long-term problems, and we absolutely must be working towards a low-carbon future. Do you have a roadmap towards a low-vaping future? I assume not - so I'm not entirely sure your concern for public health is entirely sincere.

It's also been argued to me that prohibition did not have a particularly large impact on overall crime rates, but may have had a positive impact on public health. Depending on which statistics you want to cite, you can very easily make this case. [1]

So, no, it's not at all clear that prohibition was a disaster, and its entirely possible that had we let that experiment run a generation or two, alcohol consumption today would have been much, much lower.

[1] https://www.aeaweb.org/conference/2014/retrieve.php?pdfid=80...

Huh?

They're not banning tobacco, they're banning e-cigarettes, specifically because there is a ton of evidence that youth get addicted to nicotine via e-cigs.

If you want to smoke tobacco, go ahead, you're still free to do so. No need to hyperventilate.

If you want to quit smoking tobacco, don't use e-cigs. Start using products like nicotine lozenges, gums, patches, etc in addition to therapy or other medical interventions. These nicotine delivery mechanism have not been shown to get youth addicted to nicotine.

> specifically because there is a ton of evidence that youth get addicted to nicotine via e-cigs > If you want to smoke tobacco, go ahead, you're still free to do so

So we should freak out about youth using a thing that's a 95% harm reduction compared to smoking tobacco, and not ban tobacco. Got it.

> Start using products like nicotine lozenges, gums, patches, etc

Last I checked these were half as effective as e-cigarettes for quitting.

>Start using products like nicotine lozenges, gums, patches

All options with abysmal success rates. It's so easy for people with enough knowledge to be dangerous and no skin in the game to support nonsense like this.

I want to be able to consume nicotine in an enjoyable and safe manner. It's not my fault youth are able to buy/access e-cigs, cigarettes, alcohol, weed, etc.

> red meat

Isn't the evidence of toxicity/carcinogenicity of red meat mixed?

Exactly, it's the same with e-cigs. Some studies show that nicotine is bad for the vascular system, some studies show red meat increases your risk for heart disease and certain GI cancers, etc. The issue is opticts, tobacco smoke is really it teams of the carcinogencity and people consumed a lot of it. But since vaping looks similar and it's not 100% safe, people want to apply the same level of danger to it.

This argument reads just like Mad Men's Pete Campbell pitch from Episode 1.

"You're going to die anyway, die with us!" https://vimeo.com/123757690

Basically, but we've come full circle; we would rather ban a safer alternative (vaping) than ban something we have decades of evidence of harm (tobacco). Why aren't we restricting tobacco sales to smoke shops? Most grocery & convienience stores still sell cigarettes. Why are we more concerned about the habit-formation/addictive chemicals than the actual carcinogens in tobacco?

Different substances are regulated differently because they have different risks for the population. Nicotine is significantly more addictive and harmful than marijuana which is why it is regulated differently than marijuana: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Drug_danger_and_dependenc...

>harmful

Need a citation here. I've read the literature and the current consensus (as far as I'm aware) is "we don't know what the harms are". There is a study which suggest that nicotine may increase cancer risk in mice, though it is not a direct cause and even then the study was inconclusive.

Your link is a chart which shows relative lethal doses of substances. Nicotine requires a "very high" dose, not one you would ever get in practice. Not sure what point you were trying to make with that.

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