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Comment by sbilstein | Hacker News Reader

One thing that gets lost in Juul and vaping supporters is just how bad nicotine addiction is for your personal life. I recently quit nicotine a few months ago and it made a big difference for me.

Nicotine withdrawal kicks in very quick which is why smokers take constant breaks. The anxiety, the grumpiness, irritability and anger you feel as a smoker when you are without nicotine will piss off your partner, make you seem difficult to friends and colleagues and generally just color your world in a dark way.

Juul pods helped me stop smoking for a short period of time but I became an order of magnitude more hooked on nicotine. I work from home and couldn't go more than 15 minutes without sucking on that stupid device.

I quit smoking cold turkey 90 days and it's made a dramatic difference to my mood. I no longer worry about being socially outcast or being judged for blowing vape clouds.

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I think the key with vaping (not necessarily with Juul though due to market availability) is that it's very easy to decrease the dosage of nicotine without reducing the fixation amount. For traditional cigarette smoking you want a high amount of nicotine to fill that void (and also to get through the other side of other addictive substances in tobacco beyond nicotine) and to effectively "get hooked" on vaping instead, to the point that normal cigarettes are completely unattractive to you.. Afterwards, decreasing dosage with a vape is super easy, especially if done in a blind way, ie, buying two identical flavors at different dosages (your "normal" and the lower dose) and put them into two carts. Pick a random one each day to use. I've heard of people doing this all the way down to 3mg to get over the lowest dosage hump even. One has no nicotine, the other only has 3mg. Eventually the non-social fixation (ie, at your house alone) stops, and the social fixation (ie, outside of a bar, etc) is controllable with no nicotine... Then that's not even getting into the different ohm ratings etc that further control dosage without affecting the fixation of using the vape.

edit: note I say "easy", but its not a short process.. If you try to go immediately from 48mg to 3mg you won't have a good time. It takes months for each step down

Nicotine's method of action for addiction isn't commonly understood very well. It's extremely specific - nicotine works to make the things you do around the exposure more habitual. If it's slapping on a nicotine patch and going on a run, you're more likely to get into a habit of slapping on a patch and going on a run. If it's taking a break outside and puffing from a vaporizer, then it's simply taking a break and puffing from a vaporizer.

That's largely why e-cigs are the most successful way to quit smoking tobacco products - it's the most similar habit to smoking cigarettes, so it slots into the existing highly-reinforced habits that smokers have. You drop a bunch of the random other chemicals that are present in cigarettes, and wind up reinforcing the replacement habit before dropping dosages and having a regular habit that's as easy to quit as, say, biting your fingernails.

Thing is, the fact that you can reduce the nicotine dosage does not necessarily mean that people will; unlike cigarettes, it's trivial to also increase the nicotine dosage many times.

I don't think a significant amount of people do that. Coming from someone with a lot of experience vaping (actually helped me quit smoking), it's somewhat difficult to find ejuices with pleasant flavors (anything that's not a stereotypical cigarette flavor like menthol) above 6mg, and around 9mg or higher, the nicotine flavor becomes quite pronounced and overpowering, and your flavor options are severely limited.

I started experimenting with nicotine gum as a non-smoker. From what I've read, the method you get your nicotine has a major effect on level of addiction. Inhalation combines a habitual act with the near instanaeous activation time to create a highly addictive behavioural habit.

I chew one 4mg piece of gum over the course of a day for mental stimulation and that's had some really nice side effects for me, such as being able to stay up later and continue on mentally engaging work.

I have a friend who did that for a few months and it took her iirc 2 years to get over the gum fixation.. even without nicotine, she always had to have some gum for cravings

I think she was chewing the nicotine gum a few times a day, but I'd still be careful about it.. iirc the reason she did it was she wanted gum and the only gum her parents had regularly was nicotine gum and she was like 14 at the time

> I think the key with vaping (not necessarily with Juul though due to market availability) is that it's very easy to decrease the dosage of nicotine without reducing the fixation amount.

There's some truth to this. I used to believe it wholly. You can go through my comment history and see that I've mentioned it before on Juul-related threads.

My more recently-developed stance is that it doesn't work as well as you'd think it does. It may work for some people, in some situations, but the reality is that your body can become surprisingly good at figuring out that its not getting the nicotine it wants, so you may just end up vaping the lower stuff more often. The double-blind thing honestly wouldn't work for real addicts; it may even be subconscious, but the body knows. You can't trick yourself out of a nicotine addiction.

The ritual is a big part of the addiction, and if you're not careful in regulating the number of pulls you're just going to make the ritual worse, without changing the amount of nicotine you pull in.

If you can combine it with some kind of regimen, like you don't pull more often than once every ten minutes, then sure, that could work. That's why it works for some people; not the strict reduction in potency.

My own experience FWIW: I had no problems going from half a pack a day to a 3mg liquid + half a pack a week.

I found that with vaping I just bought more Juul pods. Cheap, easy, minimal immediate side effects.

Tobacco had similar issues but I just couldn't smoke tons of cigarettes all day.

Both bad, I think stepping down nicotine works for some but not for me. You gotta do what you can to quit :)

and if you're using a tank system or filling your carts, you can mix your own dosage from 0% + something else. or just stay at 0%.

It comes down to personality and biochemistry, not everyone is that hooked on the stuff.

If you ban everything that is addictive you end up doing a disservice to people who can handle the substance or item in question. Banning addictive substances because some people can't handle them goes against my philosophy of the purpose of government.

Do we need some kind of super-citizen test where you have to prove your knowledge and responsibility for people to be able to be free to do/have/use the things they want?

I don't want a nanny state that bans what it thinks is bad for me and prevents me from accessing things that I want because some people can't handle it.

I was talking to some of my old farmer relatives a few months ago and one of them was telling stories about his dynamite license. It was a useful thing to have when interacting with the land and you could get a license and just go out and buy dynamite. This was maybe 50 years ago. That is the kind of world I want to live in, where people who can prove themselves can get any tool they want or need to manipulate their minds or the world around them.

Not a world where a committee (or public pressure) can decide what I can't handle or what's too dangerous.

I don't want to live in a world of padded walls.

What's to stop research into super-heroin as a product in that world? Just come up with the most psyche-abusive substance possible and enjoy an army of essentially slaves. People with the notion that free will is some sort of absolute confuse the heck out of me. I guess sibling post is right, it's just an issue of fundamental worldview being different.

The government banning tobacco from sale is the same sort of free-will exercise by humans for humans as is me banning tobacco from my own body, just on different levels.

The government can just as well have "addiction" problems with things that are bad for the population which are supported by the population.

The difference isn't free-will or not, it is only the level on which it is applied.

I prefer personal free will to collective free will whenever it is possible and reasonable.

The purpose of government is to do things we can't do for ourselves. I can decide whether or not to use a substance which might be addictive or to abstain from it forever. The government can do that too but I really don't think they need to. They need to make sure that those kinds of products are sold pure and as expected, that there is accurate information about their usage and effects available, and that people selling them do not mislead or manipulatively hook people, but ultimately I would rather a responsible individual make decisions than a collective.

I can’t get behind this argument when we live in an economy driven by a massive industry of personalized marketing and advertising. You espouse free will as if it’s some absolute, but studies show that human behavior is primarily the product of environment and is, to an extent, easy to predict the likelihood of someone becoming a smoker based on their age, race, income and zip code. How can we justify giving mega corporations carte blanche to market poisonous and addictive substance to our own friends, family and neighbors without asking that the government step in to prevent it?

You're talking about marketing, I'm talking about availability of products.

I don't think anybody is going around discussing the philosophy of government because they're concerned that they aren't free enough to be advertised to.

There is a marked difference between governments interfering with an individual's freedom to act on themselves and interfering with an individual's freedom to manipulate the actions of others.

>giving mega corporations carte blanche to market poisonous and addictive substance

They absolutely do not have this. Tobacco ads are banned from TV and Radio in the US, for example. Wouldn't exactly call that a blank check.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Health_Cigarette_Smokin...

They absolutely do have this. Juul has spent millions marketing on the internet and social media, and recently was advertising on TV until the networks began to refuse ads _within the last week_.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/18/business/juul-vaping-ads-...

Just want to say you've summed up the entirety of the way I think about "buyer freedom" in our advertisement infested world.

Banning plants has always been highly effective... it worked for weed, blow and of course heron. Highly effective ;)

Notably absent in your list is to incentivize the "right" behavior, especially when society will have to pay for it down the line via social safety nets. Hopefully less of an issue with vaping.

Correct, I do not want the government to be a moral guide.

I want the government to promote what is true, not what is right.

If addicts had access to a supply of affordable regulated clean consistent heroin 95%+ of the harms of addiction would be mitigated.

Heroin isn't a good habit, but it's surprisingly well tolerated by the human body and the majority of evils come from prohibition itself.

> What's to stop research into super-heroin as a product in that world? Just come up with the most psyche-abusive substance possible and enjoy an army of essentially slaves.

Way ahead of you...

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/sep/11/purdue-pharm...

$12B to make the cops go away. The adult version of Carlos the Jackal.

This isn't legal advice, but a lot of the restrictions around buying and using explosives on your own land for personal purposes is waived for binary explosives. You can go and buy tannerite, mix it on-site, and use it as an explosive firearms target and blow stuff up. Zero licensing required to do this.

NB: Do not do this if you have a felony conviction since this that makes it a crime.

I just read Ignition! so I have lots of ideas about doing irresponsible things which are fundamentally incompatible with a Mountain View apartment. Converting a bit of a cornfield into a rocket test stand is a reasonable thing to do, right?

But if anyone wants a remote employee in a central time zone moving back to the family farm so I have a few hundred acres to screw around with instead of about 20 sq ft...

You definitely need to stay abreast of fire safety and toxic chemical regulations here, and you probably want an explosives license anyhow for some of the materials you might want (particularly for ignition I think).

Again, not a lawyer, highly suggest you consult with one before doing amateur rocket science.

I'm sure all the employers on HN are just chomping at the bit to have you on their company health insurance plan after that post :P

But on a more serious note, if you're considering the remote work life, I do recommend it.

I did about three years of remote work, I have mixed feelings about it, really depends a lot of the environment.

If a different farm would do, my workplace is about 20 to 30 minutes away from an area where you could buy about 10 acres without trouble. It's low-level hacking, in Florida, a few dozen miles south of Cape Canaveral: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19797601

personally I'm with you, although I'll grant reasonable concessions (eg, not many citizens need surface-to-air missiles). the problem is ideological unfortunately. people simply don't share your definition of "freedom" or value it.

> I don't want a nanny state that bans what it thinks is bad for me and prevents me from accessing things that I want because some people can't handle it.

Show me a one-armed guy who bought a stick of dynamite thinking, “No way can I handle this.”

Smoking and Juul hurt public health more than anything else. Not only the smokers themselves get lunge disease or even die, but also other innocent second-hand smokers get hurt. I do not want my little kids' lungs to absorb smoke just because they are playing in public. Smoking and Juul are universally bad with little or no benefits. They should be banned from any public space for good.

This kind of paranoia about exposure goes way too far beyond trying to prevent actual negative consequences to a fanatical obsession with one irritant out of a million which is way below the noise floor.

If you want to live in a HEPA bubble, live in a HEPA bubble. Outside isn't that.

i was a tobacco user for roughly ten years, equivalent of 2-5 cigarrettes a day max. The month i picked up a juul that amount effectively 10x'ed. I feel bad for all these kids who are going to leave high school with a stronger nicotine tolerance and dependence than some 40 year chain smokers.

This is why I never tried it. I bet I would like it, a lot. And with cigarettes you have to go outside, you smell bad, etc., these things have none of those problems. It just looks very easy to get hooked on them.

There's no negative feedback loop to vaping, its like if you could drink with no hangovers.

*that we know about. There's a lot of people worried about long term effects and possibly even brain damage.

Via what mechanism would vaping nicotine cause brain damage that isn't caused by cigarettes? The glycol?

That's what further research would provide.

I switched to nicotine gum and it was just as bad. When i tried to quit gum I would wake up every hour, sometimes sweating. I was building up a chewing tolerance way beyond what i had with cigarettes.

Nicotine is really powerful stuff. I believe there's no free lunch with quitting. Eventually you will take a quality of life hit white quitting that almost directly mirrors how much relief it gave you to get through the day.

> Nicotine is really powerful stuff. I believe there's no free lunch with quitting.

The by far best way is to just never start. In Germany we made a lot of very good progress towards that (lowering % of young people getting hooked on smoking), which seems to have been completely upended by vaping.

I've never been addicted to tobacco but I used to vape heavily in HS & currently on/off (my friend brings his vape(s) over, etc). I've never experienced anything to the extent you describe. I can definiently feel a desire, in that, I would rather be vaping vs not but not the the point that I've actually filled up any of my personal vapes recenctly or bought a new device.

It's well known that the other chemicals in tobacco act as MAIOs increasing the effect of nicotine which makes it more habbit forming - and I believe that extends to even after you switch to a nicotine replacement program.

Really, the most annoying thing is that tobaccoo is still legal are are both nicotine + cancer. At least vaping/nicotine alone won't kill you so it's strange that it gets more attention.

Nicotine is itself a carcinogen. But in general, smokeless tobacco products (including vaping) are much less damaging to your health than smoking.

I don't think nicotine has been shown to be carcinogenic in humans, although there's plenty of other bad things it does.

I'm almost positive it's been linked to bladder cancer.

Nicotine stimulates Growth Hormone release and GH is linked to some cancers.

For sure many tumors respond much more intensely to GH than normal tissue. Much in the same way estrogen makes some breast cancers grow faster. So it has a carcinogenic effect, and once the cancer starts, nicotine turbocharges it. (Depending on the cancer, of course).

You know what else increases HGH .fasting increases hgh by about 3 to 5 times than normal baseline .

Clearly we should ban fasting

There is a lot of other foods that do that too

Do we know the 30 year effects of say being a heavy Juul user? It's hard to compare damage of something that has been out for 100s of years vs something that has only been out for a few years.

> Nicotine is itself a carcinogen.

No, no it's not. It's a teratogen.

Leaving this here: "an agent or factor which causes malformation of an embryo".

Statistically, vaping products are far more dangerous than smoking.

Smoking may cause cancer and lung disease which kills smokers over time, but that time period is measured in years and decades.

In contrast, 8 people have died in the last few months from vaping-related illnesses despite most of them being active and healthy only a month or two before their deaths. Another several hundred people are in hospital beds with severe lung diseases related to vaping and many of them could die or never regain function.

At the current rate, vaping would need to go another few decades without a single death just to achieve statistical parity with smoking.

I'm pretty hard against vaping, but this is just plain wrong. First, the statistics are bad.

Since 2011 when vaping really started taking off, there are roughly 220,000,000 vaping years: total cumulative # of years folks have vaped. And 8 deaths, or 0.000000003 deaths per vaping year. Compare to smoking, which has had about 8,000,000,000 smoker years and 28,000,000 deaths, or 0.007 deaths per smoker year. We don't know the really long term effects of vaping, so all of this is subject to change, but the idea that vaping kills more is completely unsupported by even the most basic (see above) accounting.

And that's leaving off the fact that you're ignoring the cause of death for these 8: which, while unknown, has strong indications it's not linked to mainstream vaping devices.

This is blatant misinformation. The majority of those with 'vaping illnesses' that have created this Hysteria reported using black market THC vapor cartridges.

That's fairly disengenuous. When you say "smoking" you presuppose tobacco, but you use "vaping" to account for 8 cluster deaths in two decades without much thought for the substance.

By your logic, eating and shots kill 130 people a day[1], so how long would it take before vaccines are safer than cigarettes?

[1] https://www.drugabuse.gov/related-topics/trends-statistics/o...

i like how you produced statistics without a sample size, dosage regimen, or even qualifying what you mean by 'smoking'. Hookah? Cigars? Pipes? Cloves?

very acute and savvy of you.

Juul seems to have higher nicotine content than most of the traditional vaping juices. Even the new reusable nicotine salt devices.

It's also pretty gross and strong by comparison IMO. But I guess it's for people who just stopped smoking cigarettes which is similarly harsh whenever I try them now.

It's a nicotine salt so it's stronger but less harsh on your throught. A 50mgml nicotine salt concentration ends up being as 'strong' as ~28mg/ml nicotine freebase (since the salt makes up ~45% of the molar weight) but has the throat hit of like a 12mg/ml nicotine freebase.

The volume held in the device & volume per 'puff' is also a lot less hence the smaller devices.

just for what it's worth, i personally get nicotine salt juices for use with my sub ohm tank. i never really got the appeal of those small vape pen style ones like the ego or the modern wave of juuls. but i have heard some people say you can't do nicotine salt ones or shouldn't with a sub ohm vaporizer. i still don't see why. the reduction of throat hit with a large delivery of vapor seems to be the ideal way to consume it for me

The nicotine inhalation flux would be dependant on the coil used and amount of current, maybe they reduced the heating rate to reduce amount of filler in liquid required.

Juul pods are 3 and 5% where I live. That's typical for vape juice. Are they different elsewhere?

5% is not typical. The highest strength vape juice sold in most places is around 24mg/mL or 2.4%. Most "old-school" vape users smoke something more like 12mg.

I went from 12 down to 3mg, same with most of the people I know.

You realize quickly that the Nicotine content isn't super important as long as you taper it down.

Which is not an option with Juuls and the other disposable garbage products. Refillable Vladdin style devices are the way to go.

Congradulations, man. That's really hard and I'm glad you feel that it had made a difference in you life. I've helped a few people get on the path to stop smoking. It's hard. Most people I helped struggled massively. It's a big accomplishment. Hats off to you! Enjoy your newfound freedom. :)

On the flip side, going out on breaks w/ people to smoke or vape can be a great social enhancement. Made at least one great friend this way. Also how my mom met my dad.

Still trying to think up a good replacement for this...

Those of us who don't smoke still find ways to socialize and meet people. Usually around a totally different drug (alcohol).

If you are trying to quit, which it sounds like you are not, you have to unlearn this aspect of smoking. Obviously as a smoker, I loved doing that!

It's just not good for your health or happiness. I was especially worried whenever I was going back to the bar/restaurant/office wondering if I smell too much like cigarettes

> I was especially worried whenever I was going back to the bar/restaurant/office wondering if I smell too much like cigarettes

As someone who quit cigarettes 5 years ago, but still chews 2mg gum (12 of them per day, about), you did for sure heh. Wasn't until I stopped smoking that I realised how bad it smelled.

Also how good food tastes when I could taste stuff properly again!

I agree -- on balance, smoking is not worth it, at least not regularly.

So I basically never smoke cigarettes anymore, and Juul only occasionally.

Still, I miss it...

At my previous job, I simply went out with the smokers sometimes, to get some, uh, 'fresh air'. Didn't really get any fresh air that way, but I did socialize with them just fine and it wasn't as weird as it might sound.

Congrats for quitting. I was also just like you. I would smoke maybe one analog a day but with Juul, I blitzed through a whole pod. I became 10x more addicted. Thankfully I have been tobacco free for over a year now.

You could do a taper basically.

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