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Comment by smileysteve | Hacker News Reader

There's so much opportunity in this market to end up better than smoking. First and foremost, by making reduced or no nicotine the standard.

Juul could have taken a play from the soda manufactures, selling people flavored water (without the hfcs).

I believe vaping is safer (and more depending on the carrier compound) but we know nicotine will still have its troubles.

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Except that the only reason Juul was so successful was because it put a large amount of nicotine into a small package.

I am totally fine with people drinking flavored water on a sidewalk. I am not okay with people intentionally emitting clouds of flavored, aerosolized, pyrolized clouds of random chemicals on the sidewalk. I don’t want to breathe secondary smoke or vaping byproducts.

Cars?

I also have a problem with highly polluting motorcycles, old or unmaintained cars, and gasoline-powered leaf blowers. I can’t even imagine how bad cities mu have smelled in the 60’s or 70’s.

(This is a separate issue from CO2. Motorcycles are not major CO2 emitters, but they are often vastly worse in terms of toxic and stinky pollutants than modern gas-guzzling trucks.)

Transport is important and necessary for society to function.

If a car was developed that generated no greenhouse gases and had no negatives then gasoline cars would be outlawed very quickly.

Smoking/Vaping has no such utility.

What's wrong with nicotine? Or is it just the addiction?

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4363846/

"Nicotine poses several health hazards. There is an increased risk of cardiovascular, respiratory, gastrointestinal disorders. There is decreased immune response and it also poses ill impacts on the reproductive health. It affects the cell proliferation, oxidative stress, apoptosis, DNA mutation by various mechanisms which leads to cancer. It also affects the tumor proliferation and metastasis and causes resistance to chemo and radio therapeutic agents. "

"Nicotine is one of the most addicting agent (sic). The US surgeon general (2010) has concluded nicotine to be as addictive as cocaine or heroin."

Is this really true? The last time I looked carefully into this claim, I found that pretty much everyone conflates nicotine and tobacco, and that the precious few studies on nicotine showed minimal addictiveness. E.g.:

"However, substantial evidence exists to suggest that nicotine's reinforcing effects alone are not sufficient to account for the intense addictive properties of tobacco smoking ..."[1]

If anyone has further references, that would be great.

There are also known health benefits of nicotine [2][3]. Probably, just like for every other drug, we need to better understand the risk vs reward tradeoffs.

[1] https://tobaccocontrol.bmj.com/content/25/4/444

[2] https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/xw7agz/four-surprising-po...

[3] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/will-a-nicotine-p...

<sample_size=1>I am 100% addicted to nicotine. I have managed to quit drinking alcohol from a 1L/day vodka habit. I switched to vape years ago, haven't smoked a cigarette in years, and have been cutting down the mg/ml level of nicotine in my vape for months now. Once I go below 6mg/ml I start to get very very unhappy, and if I switch to 0mg, I start having symptoms I recall very well from detoxing from booze.</sample_size=1>

I don't find the article you shared particularly trustworthy. It reminds me of D.A.R.E.

Here's an article that reviews the effect of nicotine as a cognitive enhancer.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/will-a-nicotine-p...

There are a lot of people out there who will oppose any relatively harmless thing that gives people a small amount of pleasure, just on principle.

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