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Comment by cypherpunks01 | Hacker News Reader

Absolutely. The problem is only going to become much worse now, due to banning sales of legal/regulated products. Relatedly, Massachusetts governor just announced a 4 month total ban on ALL vaporizer products (THC, Nicotine, flavored, unflavored) despite zero Massachusetts vape deaths, so consumers will now be turning either to cigarettes (which kill 1,300 people per DAY nationwide) or black market THC/Nicotine vaporizers which are the very likely causes of the current unknown illnesses and deaths as you mention.

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Cigarettes are bad but they kill you slowly and predictably. Vaping is better, but absent quality control it might kill you in unexpected and unpredictable ways (because right now we much less about what vape manufacturers are doing than we do about cigarette manufacturing or the effects of raw tobacco or cannabis).

Looking at it as a one-dimensional continuum of worse-better can be quite misleading if the problem is better represented by 2 or 3 coefficients.

Smoking kills 40k people, per day, in the US? That number seems off. I don't think there are that many births in a day so we'd be losing a lot of people.

Whoops, misread a stat! Corrected, it's 1,300

You're performing numerator analysis there. You're comparing deaths irrespective of number of users, never mind their duration/frequency of use. For smokers, this would be pack-years, which is the number of daily packs times the number of years. There's the sheer volume of smokers, probably 10x the number of vapers? Hard to say, I'm not well read on the literature.

In any case, comparing numerators here is not good epidemiology, as smokers are far more numerous and have used for far longer/heavier use.

> despite zero Massachusetts vape deaths

There were deaths in other states. How close do they need to be geographically till it is ok to do this precautionarily?

I believe you’re referring to Michigan? Incidentally my former summer camp counselor is the lawyer challenging that ban https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/politics/michigan/201...

Not only that, the massive hysteria and misinformation is a problem for everyone outside those states that are shotgunning measures.

I took a hiatus on my nicotine vape when the news started exploding and went back to another form of tobacco as I just didn't know what was going on. Its the devil you know vs the one you don't.

Snus?

Close, dipping tobacco.

40,000 people per day? Seems a little high.

Whoops, corrected! it's 1,300, as per CDC https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/fast...

In my job as a Paramedic, i can't even begin to count the number of people I've seen with respiratory distress that is directly related to cigarette smoking. It's absolutely horrible for you. :/

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