As I understand it, being addicted to nicotine isn't worse than being addicted to caffeine.
What kills smokers is the uncountable number of toxins in tobacco smoke.
What kills smokers is the uncountable number of toxins in tobacco smoke.
While it is true tobacco smoke contains many carcinogens and toxins that are the likely sources of many cancers, there is evidence that nicotine itself promotes tumor growth and proliferation.
Nicotine also accelerates atherosclerosis and vascular disease.
Here's a study on Caffeine. I haven't read it all the way yet, but so far the effects are not nearly what nicotine is. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5445139/
As for sugar, that's an interesting debate. Sugar is pretty bad for you. The short answer seems to be that sugar kills more people than tobacco and nicotine and lots of other things. But sugar comes in many forms and is hard to regulate, I guess. It's a tough one for sure.
Should nicotine be _more_ regulated than that?
I generally err on the side of freedom, even if it's potentially self-harming once someone's an adult.
Would adding more law around advertising be too much? I don't think so. Labels on packaging? Sure.
Should we make it illegal altogether, or make non-bland flavors illegal, like some states have done? No. I think that's a bridge too far.
That article is a review of a bunch of cell line data and animal tests that are suggestive of "adverse effects".
It says nothing about the magnitude of the effects or actually shows data from human trials.
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/vaping-smoking-heart-car...
direct link to study: https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/JAHA.119.014570
"Our findings suggest that e‐cigarette use is not associated with a more favorable vascular profile..."
What? That doesn't follow at all. You want to compare the LD50 (and other effects of consumption) to the amount normally consumed, not to the LD50 of some other substance. "LD50 is 1 mg/kg" is completely meaningless if you can't consume more than 0.005 mg/kg.
If you read the Wikipedia page I’d previously linked to[1], it has this quote: “58% of e-cigarette calls to US poison control centers were related to children 5 years old or less.”
I’d personally witnessed a tragedy like this in my neighborhood many years ago, and because of that, I don’t let people come with packs of cigarettes into my house, because I’ve got a toddler.
Addiction is generally a result of some failure in a person's social life and social structure that negatively impacts them to the point of developing a coping mechanism.
Or at least so say the Rat Park experiments.