A Stanford Professor Says Juul Stole Her Anti-Vaping PowerPoint Slides
buzzfeednews.com
buzzfeednews.com
I switched because my nicotine addiction isn't an easy one to break, and vaping is significantly cheaper (our government increases excise taxes on tobacco annually, so currrently $30 NZD buys me a pack of 20 cigarette that I smoke in a day, or it buys me a bottle of vape juice that lasts 2 weeks).
And I'm a big fan of vaping for the economic and (so far as we know currently) health benefits for smokers.
But what really concerns me, is the number of young people who would never smoke due to the (successful! and good on the Ministry of Health for doing so) demonisation of cigarette smoking, who are instead happily vaping away.
It seems apparent from the marketing that Big Tobacco has realised where their next big market lies - young people who don't want to smoke, but will vape if you tell them it's healthy and cool. At the end of the day, you're still getting people addicted to nicotine for money. Yes, bonus that there's less cancer involved, but it' still a monetised addiction.
My preference would be for vape liquids containing nicotine to be prescription only for recovering smokers. If kids want to blow watermelon vapour out of their lungs, go nuts, just don't do it with a known addictive substance in the mix.
Isn't this going to make the argument for making teens smoke cigarettes so they can get access to vaping with nicotine? And before you say "they're not going to go that far," we can also have a conversation about what underage people will do to get access to alcohol.
Also, I'm especially humored by people wanting to put legal restrictions on things like vaping but wont have that same discussion about alcohol, which imo is much more harmful. Alcohol literally is: Yes, bonus that there's less cancer involved, but it' still a monetized addiction.
That's not true. I find nicotine quite useful for hackathons and the like where I don't want to sleep, but also don't want to visit the restroom as often as red bull or other caffeine options would make me.
However, nicotine is far, far, far more addictive than caffeine, so it really is a different ball game.
Like caffeine. People say they don’t drink tea or coffee for caffeine but there might be one person who drinks decaf or no caffeine tea or coffee with the regularity of all the addicts who know perfectly well that they drink it most every day and feel crap if they don’t.
Alcohol is an entirely different animal to nicotine. Nicotine doesn't, in normal doses, produce a notably altered mental state that's strongly associated in society with "having a good time". Alcohol is significantly more attractive because of all its socialisation associations.
Also, nicotine is significantly more addictive than alcohol. https://www.health.com/condition/smoking/an-addiction-specia...
Right, nicotine doesn't lead to drunk driving. So that makes vaping with nicotine a target for legislation, whereas alcohol is perfectly fine because it leads to a good time?
Nicotine also doesn't lead to things like alcohol poisoning, or liver damage.
Then simply apply the same to cigarettes. Only current people who smoke can buy them, this paves the way to eliminate it altogether. But unfortunately, greed and money speak more than the health of people.
But what if adults just want to vape? Plenty of things are addictive. Sugar, video games, Facebook... if you want to take away somebody freedom to do something I think you’d need a pretty compelling reason. Otherwise why not just have the government tell you when to go to bed, wake up, go to the gym, what to eat, etc.
With smoking, the government decided that the affects were so grievously harmful that they should put serious restrictions in place regulating their sale. You can agree with that or not, but at least there’s some logic to it. Nicotine is not the harmful part of the cigarette, and unless some new information comes to light, vaping isn’t anywhere as harmful as smoking. Where’s your justification for trying to remove people freedom to do it? Because following your line of reasoning to it’s logical conclusion, we’d end up with government mandated lifestyles.
Where did you get the idea that I made anyone else's decision? I am literally just asking for the option of vaping without nicotine to exist.
My theory is only that many people (especially kids without a history of smoking) would choose vaping without nicotine on their own if they had the option. Juul et al know that would drastically shrink their revenue, so they, the profit seeking company they are, made sure their product had an addictive substance in it, and then marketed it to people not already exposed to the addiction. Requiring them to make an equal product without nicotine is at worst market regulation that basically all consumable products go through and at best a public safety mandate.
I did some googling and even promising links advertising no nicotine alternatives didn't even seem to have any in stock to order. Also noticed some disturbing trends with hiding the nicotine levels by mixing grams and percentage strengths and referring to it as "nic" which the skeptic in me says this is to divert attention from it being nicotine and people doing research on its addictive properties for those young enough not to know from anti-smoking campaigns.
Edit: Did a bit more digging and found some, but still likely harder to get if under 21.
Why would you willingly take a highly addictive substance for shits and giggles? You don't even get properly high on it. I got addicted to tobacco because I was young and an idiot.
But you're right, adults should be free to be idiots if they like. I just feel repelled by large tobacco corporations profiting by pivoting nicotine addiction from tobacco to vaping products.
In my country, British American Tobacco is focusing a large amount of their marketing on selling nicotine vapes to young people. So perhaps treat vape products the same as we treat tobacco products - plain packaging, no marketing allowed.
This is the mentality that ended up getting society down the drain. No, "adults" (many of whom aren't mentally) shouldn't be allowed to be idiots, especially if it puts other people at risk.
Also, you are constantly putting other people at risk as well. Taking any form of transport, cooking, living in a house that has either electricity or natural gas, playing any form of sport, living in a house made from flammable material. If you want to include emotional or psychological harm, then add the very act of existence to the list. All of that and countless other things you do every day puts other people at risk. So again, why should you have the right to do anything at all that put yourself or anybody else at risk of harm?
It was implied in my answer. Smoking and vaping have nothing but negative outcomes. Driving to get somewhere on the other hand, has both a benefit and a risk. We're also constantly improving safety ratios with things like safer cars, automatic braking systems, and autonomous driving sometime down the line hopefully.
All the examples you listed are practically a necessity for modern life, again, a benefit-risk tradeoff, and there are always improvements in safety being developed. Smoking and vaping aren't a necessity, and zero good comes out of them.
In simple words, vaping once optimized over a few device generations has the potential to be at least as harmful as hard drugs (heroin/coke/etc), while masquerading as safe and socially acceptable. Therefore, they need to be regulated. An outright ban might not be advisable, but banning certain chemicals or device designs might be preferable.
Vaping itself doesn’t have any proven harmful affects. I’m not saying it definitely won’t turn out to have any at all, but nicotine is not carcinogenic, and doesn’t have anywhere near the same potential to harm as the narcotics you mentioned. This is really just speculation.
> An outright ban might not be advisable, but banning certain chemicals or device designs might be preferable.
Sounds good to me. I’ve got no issue with the FDA making sure my food is safe to consume, nor any with this suggestion. It’s a sin tax or other ridiculous restrictions that seem unjustified to me. I expect the truth behind a lot of the regulation talk is really that the government doesn’t want to lose tobacco tax revenue. Which really just makes the whole thing even more tyrannical.
Natural selection won’t do anything about smoking for the same reason it doesn’t do anything about cancer or heart disease.
I'm trying to tease apart how much of the plagiarism is to be expected when you're an academic, whether Juul was being more manipulative or lazy, and is paying schools to teach this a token gesture, an insult, or inception marketing.
Last I checked academics have the same rights under copyright as the rest of us.
Another interesting case: works done by government contractors are eligible for copyright protection, and the copyright can be transferred to the government, which is, I think, how parts of OpenStack can be copyrighted by NASA. By that argument, professors (or anyone else) with government grants should definitely be able to copyright their work and keep copyright.
There's certainly an increasingly-popular argument that publicly-funded research work should be publicly accessible / open access, but there's no law or even norm about it yet.
JSTOR. Because you should pay for it twice.
Ask yourself how much more existential crises kids these days are facing.
Global warming is happening and the adults aren't doing anything.
They're seeing their family get crushed by medical debt and the adults aren't doing anything. Not only that they're actively voting for people who support the current system.
The world is fucked for these people and the adults are blaming stuff like how it tastes instead of the structural issues these kids are going through.
It's the later, obviously. Anybody who says otherwise is either deluded or trying to delude you.
Before WW2 even the richest society in world history, the US, was by modern standards fairly poor. People died of diseases we just don’t worry about now because we have antibiotics.
This generation is not special. Everyone has to deal with shit.
Frankly, I think they do it because they’re bored and it’s an easy way to differentiate as part of an in-group, but it’s been long enough since I was a kid that I don’t recall for sure.
Either way, the insistence that kids were smoking/vaping (but curiously not drinking) for the watermelon flavor always seemed dubious. But until some solid research on actual motivations becomes known in a widespread manner, the ‘solutions’ will probably remain political and lobbyist-informed.
Everyone has to deal with shit, but as long as the global population continues growing every subsequent generation is relatively special.
I hope for the day when this trend reverses and our economies are no longer dependent on continuous growth. But until then, I'm afraid every new generation really is dealing with a tougher problem.
When the Falklands War started in 1982, and the British warship was sunk, I seriously thought this was the start of WW3. So yeah, the shit was there too.
I believe "how it tastes" might be a root cause to trying it.
Anecdotally I know many people who, as kids, tried their dad's or friend's cigarette or pipe, said oh-hell-no and lost interest for the rest of their childhood.
Global Warming, Student Loans, Terrible Jobs.... Who on earth wouldn't be seriously depressed just thinking 5-10 years into their future?
Do you have data/studies suggesting the claimed extreme danger of vaping commercially available nicotine products (especially considering their obvious use as smoking cessation aids)?
Sadly vaping becoming trendy among kids has had the consequence of deleting a lot of the progress made in underage smoking. Because yes, after starting with vaping, kids are way more likely to move on to cigarettes afterwards.
What makes me really mad is that it does not seem like it would have been extremely hard to do not market to kids. That's an extremely low bar and that's already too much for scummy companies like juul.
From the NHS website...
Leading health organisations including the Royal College of General Practitioners, British Medical Association and Cancer Research UK agree that e-cigarettes are far less harmful than smoking. Based on the currently available evidence, Public Health England and the Royal College of Physicians estimate they are at least 95% less harmful.
When I was a child, Reagan kicked off the drug war into high gear to protect me. Millions incarcerated, even more families ruined. I wish he hadn't. We were hysterical then too.
It basically just talks about how hard it is to find a definitive study since there are so many different products.
Relatively nice journalism by Buzzfeed, but I think there are better topics to report on Juul if you're appealing to ethics.
They didn't just plagiarize the slides, they neutered them, and then attempted to pass them off as Stanford endorsed research; all without permission from the author.
So they're derivative works of PPT slides? Does that count as theft? How much do you need to change a slide before it's a new work?
>attempted to pass them off as Stanford endorsed research
As in falsifying a conclusion or reinterpreting the data?