Comment by ineedasername | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ineedasername | Hacker News Reader

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I'm not sure we can say it's damn near harmless at this point. It hasn't been around long enough to measure the really long-term health impacts, especially considering there are chemicals present in vaping that aren't in traditional cigarettes. They've only seen wide use for a little more than 10 years. Do we really know what propylene glycol will do to lungs or bodies over decades? There are also some harmful chemicals that are actually higher in e-cigs [0]

In short, while available research points towards these things being safer, we really don't know what that margin is. Even if it's, say, 10 times safer, if vaping explodes to more than 10x the current smoking population then net harm could still be increased. Or not! But that's my point: we really don't know.

Personally, I don't think they should be outlawed. I think fruit flavors should be banned just like they are in cigarettes, and I think anti-smoking education campaigns need to ramp up their message to include vaping as a "no, just don't ever even start" part of the effort, and e-cigs should be required to only be marketed as aids for quitting smoking.

[0]https://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/141/4/e201735...

> I'm not sure we can say it's damn near harmless at this point.

Compared to what? Harm isn't measured in a vacuum. In the comparisons that make sense (e.g. vaping vs smoking american cigarettes) vaping is in fact damn near harmless in comparison, even if harmless is not the term I'd use for a vasodilator as potent as nicotine.

All of these "well we don't know vaping is harmless" monologues are coming from bad faith where you compare it to breathing "air" or something. Even that comparison doesn't really work because city air can itself be on the order of harm of a smoking habit—wouldn't it be funny if simply existing in SF turned out worse for your lung health than vaping?

https://www.washington.edu/news/2019/08/13/air-pollution-can...

So... of course we don't know what the harm of these things are, but we do know the harm of cigarette smoking, a factor that seems repeatedly absent from calls for regulations of vaping. Why aren't people banning cigarettes?

Of course it's relative. I'm comparing. Being relative is both implicit and synonymous with comparing rates of harm between two things. But you simply can't definitively say something is damn near harmless relative to cigarettes when you don't actually know what harm it causes, and nothing you've said changes that we don't know what harm it causes. Available evidence strongly points towards not being nearly as harmful, but that's at a relatively short term time scale.

I also don't see how comparing vaping to not vaping is a bad faith argument. If smoking causes lung cancer at 13 to 23 times the rate as not smoking, it would seem important to compare vaping's rate to both of these, along with any other health effects. It's one (albeit imperfect) baseline. Sometimes, as in the case of living in a polluted city, the baseline varies and should be controlled for in studies. You yourself emphasized relative harm. So comparing harm of doing something to that of not doing it is exactly what you would want in order to get that relative relationship.

More on pollution-- maybe living with air pollution is worse than vaping, but then living that way and vaping would be worse still. Again, there's that relative harm again. These studies have been done with traditional cigarettes, showing living in pollution increased lung disease but smoking then increases it even more, again all relative (in most studies) to "never smokers". An important piece of research to find out for vaping as well.

Finally you put a straw man up against my arguments when you talk about banning hypocrisy: I don't advocate banning it, and you're right that it seems a silly conversation to talk about banning vaping if you're not thinking about the same for cigarettes. For my part, I generally want vaping to be treated on par with cigarettes, excepting I think it should be marketed as a quitting method, not an alternate life-long choice.

>But you simply can't definitively say something is damn near harmless relative to cigarettes when you don't actually know what harm it causes

I totally get where you're coming from and am sympathetic to this argument, but I don't agree with it. We have learned a great deal from decades of research in to the harms of cigarette smoking, and have drawn some uncontroversial conclusions about why smoking causes so many health problems. We also can be reasonably sure that vaporizing nicotine does not create those same harmful conditions. I'm not saying anyone knows the long term implications of vaping, but "no one knows what will happen" is not a strong argument to me. As it stands, I think we have every reason to believe that smoking cigarettes is drastically more harmful than vaping.

> I think fruit flavors should be banned just like they are in cigarettes

Should this apply to vodka and other liquors as well?

Does Vodka enter your lungs?

It enters your body and is absorbed by your bloodstream. Is the delivery mechanism the issue?

The delivery mechanism is certainly an issue here. Food additives are tested for how safe they are to ingest, and they are not tested for how safe they are to inhale. In general we know that there are a lot of compounds safe to ingest which are not safe to inhale.

Just to pick an obviously stupid example, I could chug a can of soda (or seltzer, if you prefer) in one go. It would contain around 2.2g of CO2. If you put that 2.2g of CO2 in my lungs, I would be dead. (Well, you would have to keep it there. It would at least be very painful.)

Or to pick another obviously stupid example, I could drink enough alcohol to kill myself. In most situations, I would vomit or pass out before I got to the fatal dose. But instead, I could give myself an alcohol enema and just die (which does happen, from time to time). So, delivery matters absolutely.

For the non-obvious examples we (at least) need data. If you are putting “high” concentrations of a chemical (for some appropriate definition of “high”) in your lungs you will want some good safety data. For ingestion we already have an FDA approval process. You may disagree with the methodology, but at least it’s there.

Digested material generally gets partially broken down by either the gastric mechanisms or the liver and other organs involved.

Hence dosage for injections/sublingual delivery is much lower than dosage for normal pills to swallow.

The idea behind banning the flavoring is to make is less appealing to children. I don't see why the way it's consumed matters.

It's pretty rare, but yes, some people vape alcohol.

LOL yeah let's ban menthols too. You have a great point.

No. With alcohol we want to encourage responsible use, so a kid having a wine cooler seems okay. With cigarettes we basically want elimination so a kid taking a puff off a 'unicorn cake' vape seems bad.

I don't know. I don't know if there's any research about flavored alcohol appealing primarily to under-age drinkers the way flavored cigarettes were linked to underage cigarette use. Also there are levels of regular drinking that have neither definitive long term health consequences or the capacity for rapid addiction. Direct comparisons aren't really applicable, at least not without taking those vast differences into account.

I think it's pretty solidly established that an alcohol addiction is drastically more harmful than a nicotine addiction -- keeping in mind that we're talking about vaporized nicotine, not cigarettes.

Your point about certain populations of drinkers being able to indulge without obvious adverse health outcomes is also applicable to users of vaporized nicotine. And again it is worth pointing out that alcohol is significantly more harmful than nicotine.

I would be curious to see any research that supports the idea that flavored vape products are primarily appealing to underage users. I suspect there aren't many teenagers opting for scotch as their drink of choice, but I am certain there are plenty of adults who prefer a rum punch, peach white claw, jameson and ginger ale, or a glass of wine (it's made from grape juice for god's sake, brazenly targeting the children!), etc.

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