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Comment by SomeOldThrow | Hacker News Reader

> In the presence of a black market producing toxic products, prohibition is a reasonable response.

How do you figure? Prohibition will drive UP black market usage. Why would you do that?

I think he is making a supply/demand economics argument.

If you prohibit X, the demand will still be there so a blackmarket will pop up to supply X to meet the demand. However, if the market comes to find that the black market supply of X includes toxins, then the demand would fall.

The problem here is the market is irrational and people will continue knowingly buying toxic X from the black market.

I'm not saying the demand will fall (I mean, it should rationally but I wasn't making an economic argument) My point was that our message to users should be, "Don't do it while it's toxic, wait until it's safe" where safe is legal & regulated for safety, like with juul-variety vaping, which isn't killing these people.

I'm fairly certain it is not known for sure that Juul isn't killing people. It actually seems to come up often in terms of nocotine products people who get sick are using. That could be just due being a popular brand, but the company is obviously very shady and I wouldn't be surprised if they turn out to be part of the problem. Current regulations seem to be very minimal and not sufficient to establish safety. At first I thought it was overreaction, but I can see why the CDC is saying maybe don't vape for now, especially if you start to have any lung issues (which seems to be about what you are saying except for the last part about Juul being safe).

Yes, I'm not so hot on Juul either. I don't think it's safe, but as a legal, regulated product it has a certain minimum baseline that these black market products lack. That's all I meant.

Based on US media coverage, nobody knows any data points about the safety of vaping at all.

It seems like the winning move here for public health would be to increase the supply of legal product to drain demand from the black market.

We have the black market already, and it's toxic. So telling people they shouldn't do it right now seems reasonable. At the same time, we should be making it legal & safe. It's simple: "Don't do it while it's dangerous, wait until it's safe"

You already shouldn’t do black market vapes. This doesn’t change anything; it’s not like black market vapes were state approved before.

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