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Comment by mfoy_ | Hacker News Reader

Also, (forgive me if I get the jargon wrong here...) isn't the vaping health crisis the article mentions due to sketchy THC vaping solutions that have Vitamin E oil in them? Not Juul's nicotine stuff?

I.e. because THC isn't water-soluble, it has to be suspended/dissolved in some oil-based thing. Lipids + lungs = BAD.

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Vitamin E acetate and myclobutanil are the most likely culprits. Myclobutanil is a fungicide that cannabis growers use to prevent mildew. It also turns into cyanide when heated.

Speculation: State governments are leveraging the hysteria to slow a loss in excise tax revenue stemming from the decline in combustible cigarette use.

Yes, the vaping deaths almost certainly are from black market, contaminated THC pods/cartridges.

But why let a few facts get in the way of perfectly good outrage?

Note: I'm not a smoker, but I feel strongly that vaping has the potential to dramatically decrease smoking deaths. More research is needed in lieu of the current media and government-driven hysteria.

Problem is that even though the Juul cartridges are proprietary, that hasn't stopped people from making Juul-compatible off-brand products. There are of course other concerns besides the vaporised oils.

Regulatory crackdown was probably spawned by the deaths caused by bad THC solvents. But while regulators peruse the industry they found that nicotine vapor companies like Juul had plenty of their own misdeeds.

That's not how I see it. Regulators started cracking down on JUUL a couple years ago and drove the value of the company down until Phillip Morris bought 35÷. Then they backed off until JUUL started losing market share to the new generation of refillable vapes that use nicotine salt like the JUUL system. The difference? JUUL pods aren't meant to be refilled, and 4 pods with a total of 2 mL of juice will cost $20 in most states. With a refillable system, you can have 30mL of the same strength juice for $20.

So, here come the regulators again to protect big tobacco. They want strict controls on who can manufacture juice. Less competition =more profit. JUUL only has a handful of flavors compared to the thousands of alternatives. So, here come the regulators to limit the flavors. And surely it's just a coincidence that the one flavor they really want to limit it to is tobacco, Phillip Morris's bread and butter.

If you've been vaping a cucumber rosehips menthol juice every day, cigarette will taste like absolute shit. But if you only have the option of vaping tobacco flavored juice? Well, then a cigarette might not sound so bad.

Sure, I agree that JUUL hasn't been an angel, and probably are guilty of marketing to kids. But that all started being investigated well before the tainted THC carts started making people sick.

There is no clear answer yet, but some signs are pointing to the metal parts used in cartridges/vape chambers being the cause.

Maybe just in counterfeit knockoffs, maybe not. It's unclear.

There's two vaping crises.

One is THC vaping solutions that are killing people.

The second is that we're currently living through a meteoric rise in nicotine addiction among teenagers. For a very long time, teenage nicotine use was going down, due to declines in smoking rates. Smoking rates still continue to decline, but nicotine vaping rates have gone up and to the right. 1 in 4 high school students are now vaping nicotine. That number is growing by ~20% year over year.

This is a public health crisis.

If it's not killing people, how is it a health crisis? Would it be a public health crisis if we had a meteoric rise in teens swimming, given that the risk of death or illness from swimming is far higher than it is from vaping?

> If it's not killing people, how is it a health crisis?

I'm not sure we can safely say we know the long-term impact of vaping nicotine yet.

There are also indications that the uptick in vaping has stalled the decline in cigarette smoking.

https://www.concordmonitor.com/Youth-smoking-decline-stalls-...

> I'm not sure we can safely say we know the long-term impact of vaping nicotine yet.

So we can't say if it's a health crisis.. yet. Right? We also don't know of the long-term impact of melatonin but we're not considering people consuming it when they have insomnia to be a health crisis, right?

We've got evidence it's negatively affecting the known health crisis of cigarette smoking.

I'm inclined to treat non-addictive melatonin and extremely-addictive nicotine differently in how we approach potential health risks.

The key word here is addiction.

Is caffeine addiction a serious public health crisis?

Nictoine on its own is no more harmful than caffeine.

https://news.sky.com/story/nicotine-no-worse-than-cup-of-cof...

Quitting caffeine is as easy as a few days, maybe a week of feeling like shit. Take an aspirin or two, and move on with your life.

Quitting nicotine is a fucking struggle.

It doesn't kill you, but it has negative impacts on your life, when you aren't using. Addicts become really shitty to be around, when they haven't had their hit for a few hours.

What exactly is the public benefit to getting children addicted to a substance that is incredibly difficult to kick?

I'm also not forced to consume caffeine merely by standing next to you.

What is the actual quantity of nicotine in second hand vapor?

Most likely not very high.

Got any studies to back that up?

Seems to be high enough to feel the effect. Never experienced this by just standing next to someone sipping coffee.

> Addicts become really shitty to be around, when they haven't had their hit for a few hours.

Oh noes the horror!!! Major public health crisis! An invasion of grumpy assholes. Basically like half of America in the morning...

Is this confirmed by any studies?

Quitting either can be easy as just not doing it one day, or a fucking struggle. It depends on the person and the use.

Personally I've had an easier time putting down the vape than the coffee cup.

I'd be concerned about high schoolers addicted to caffeine.

> This is a public health crisis.

No, no it's not. It's a manufactured hysteria which is now used by the government to squeeze tobacco companies by the nuts. It's the new 'ear sexing' that dem kids are doing. Its parents too busy to monitor their kids and schools stretched too thin to monitor their bathrooms and hallways. No amount of regulation will fix that. Remember when Marijuana was illegal? Yeah, the kids were totally not smoking it. Thank God for the war on drugs to cut down on teens getting high.

> which is now used by the government to squeeze tobacco companies by the nuts.

As it should. These companies provide absolutely zero benefit to society, and rely on addicts to keep their business going, and they try to get more addicts in the process. Human greed is truly destructive.

mmm.. it depends. Fucking over these companies is a good way to go. But fucking them over just the right amount so that they continue doing business to pay money is not ok. It creates a perverse incentive in which the government actually wants people to buy cigarettes so it can continue the money flow. You'd think that cigarette taxes go into public health but that's not the case. The problem here is that with vaping, people are smoking less, thus buying less cigarettes and paying less to the government via tobacco taxes. Because vape pods/ejuice/ecig hardware is not taxed like cigarettes.

The way I see it, tobacco products should be fully banned. If there are companies that truly want to help the addicts, they can work in a controlled manner, overseen by the government, something like a rehab program. There should be deadlines set by when the rehab programs would end when there are no more smokers left. Easier said than done of course, but I see no effort in that direction.

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