Juul bought an entire issue of a scholarly journal
prospect.org
prospect.org
Should non-smokers pick up vaping? Probably not. But in this one instance it was a good move for a smoker.
I'd like to see more studies in this area and some more regulations on the "juice" for vapes. The quality, and I assume health effects, vary widely between different juices. For example: I bought him a non-refillable vape by another company and he started coughing and complaining of soreness in his throat.
I also think the arguments against the flavored juices are hysterical/hypocritical given the variety of flavors of liquor one can find.
Disclaimer: I think all drugs should be legal.
That aside, the collective balance is: - how many cigarette smokers will switch (benefit)
- how many people will start vaping instead of smoking (benefit)
- how many people will switch from vaping to smoking (harm)
- how many people will start vaping but wouldn't have started smoking (harm)
Perhaps someone with expertise can explain the current state of research. IIRC I saw a study arguing that the beneficial effects were less frequent and vaping as an entry to smoking was shockingly prevalent.
I would be surprised to see that inhaling any kind of smoke or non-water aerosol is good for your lungs, so I'd expect at least a minor harmful effect.
This study, for example, claims increased risks for heart disease [1] (disclaimer: I'm not a medical doctor and cannot evaluate its credibility)
[1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40138-020-00219-0
However, by comparison, tobacco smoke is like "what if we could engineer the perfect lung assailant."
Tar causes inflammation, damages DNA directly, intercalates DNA and induces replication errors, collapses alveoli, and paralyzes cillia, making clearance of all those chemical assailants from the lungs even harder.
Vaping might have social and physiological benefits which outweigh the harm also.
You want to classify sugar as harmful? It's physiologically addictive (go a few days without carbs altogether and tell us how it goes).
What about caffeine?
But some harmful things are worth the tradeoff if you can maintain a low enough dose (sugar or caffeine)
Caffeine is also addictive and if you drink enough, stopping gives you withdrawal headaches. But in my experience not drinking caffeine at all makes me just as alert as getting used to the daily dose I thought I needed before.
So yeah, I'd totally classify both as slightly harmful.
Even the physical addictiveness of nicotine is not that strong when separated from the rituals of smoking compared to e.g. caffeine (where addiction is also massively affected by rituals).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicotine
> Nicotine is classified as a poison. However, at doses used by consumers, it presents little if any hazard to the user.
The articles I saw (years ago) claimed that vaping was a gateway to smoking, but the data showed that vaping just replaced smoking for teens. That is, once e-cigs became available, the same amount of teens were doing one or the other, but more were using e-cigs than cigarettes. So, if the amount of teens doing one or the other remained stable, but e-cig use largely replaced cigarette use, I think you have to consider the teens using the e-cigs. If you removed e-cigs as an option, would they smoke cigarettes or abstain altogether? It seems to me that they'd be more likely (as a group) to smoke cigarettes.
Disclaimer: I switched from smoking to vaping in 2013 and haven't smoked a cigarette since. I use unflavored e-liquid for a few reasons, but, as I understand it, inhaling flavorings meant to be ingested is the primary health risk with vaping. Last I checked, this issue was still under debate.
> Should non-smokers pick up vaping? Probably not
Yeah, I imagine that its a lot better than smoking cigarettes, but still worse than not smoking at all. So for your father, its a benefit because its something he finds sustainable (I assume quitting would be even better, but maybe rather difficult), but for a non-smoker, they would do themselves damage (even if not as much as smoking cigarettes would). So definitely good for smokers, but maybe not the best for non-smokers (although I'd love to know how it compares to other common unhealthy things we do like alcohol or fast food)
I have heard some negative things about vaping, but I assume its like you say: the quality and health effects vary widely between the "juice".
In any case, regardless of overall "good" or not, it seems to be a benefit for smokers, so that's a good thing!
I would assume a significant difference in impact between putting flavor substances in your lungs and putting flavor substances in your esophagus/stomach.
I haven't ruled out that they were trying to target youth with their products, but having nice juice flavors is the furthest thing from a smoking gun, and yet it was presented as one.
People do make these arguments, and they catch on from time to time. There was a moral panic about alcopops in the 1990s in the UK [0]. They weren't banned by regulators but several supermarket chains stopped selling them.
The government increased the tax on alcopops several times, but in the 00s the big drink companies started promoting Swedish i.e. sugary cider. Now your 1990s alcopop has some ös in the name and 10% added apple juice.
(Referenced paper: http://tobacco.stanford.edu/tobacco_main/publications/JUUL_M...)
Juul bought ads on socialstudiesforkids, dailydressupagames, and collegeconfidential: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/12/health/juul-vaping-lawsui...
It saved her thousands of Euros and she is much fitter, and her breath smells delicious, haha. But she doesn't use big brands, she mixes her liquid at home and tries to lower the dose over years.
But every time she can't vape, because her machine broke, or she lost it, or whatever, she get's quiet angry and smokes a few regular cigs.
1. Buy a big boy vape, roll your own coils, maintain and clean it, the whole shabang. Or 2. Smoke cigarettes
I have seen many people choose option 2. The big vape systems are sometimes large, heavy, and clunky, require sometimes very publicly dis and re assembling a little contraption, carrying juice on you, lots of things that put fellow people off. Ive seen people be ridiculed for carrying around so much vape stuff. It kinda falls into the neckbeardy categories at least for my place/time, just because the first people to do it made it their whole lives and refused to talk about anything else, it got a reputation. It's both easier and less socially risky to just buy some cigarettes.
Though I will say smoking cigarettes is not without social risk. Typically women will heavily dislike the habit except for the ones that do it themselves. I've seen whole houses get addicted to cigarettes just because one person went out to smoke when they drank every weekend. I have never seen the same phenomena with vaping. Though I very nearly missed the target generation for things like juul.
Source: I’m friendly with a few people that have run vape shops/companies and got out because they can’t afford to lobby against Phillip Morris or comply with pmta with annual revenue in the tens to low hundreds of thousands of dollars. Blame Juul for the vaping crisis in schools, and shut them the duck down. Then let adults have their safer and less expensive alternative to cigarettes back. I’ll take cotton Candy clouds over cigar smoke every single time.
Apparently juul can no longer ship to private addresses in my state, so I guess I'll have to start looking at other alternatives or go to the tobacco shop to pick up refills regularly.
I'd like to step down my nicotine dosage gradually, but juuling is unfortunately not very conducive to that - only 5mg or 3mg, so I'll probably have to roll my own solution, which is less convenient so I worry about compliance.
In a separate but similar case, the same thing happened to me with marijuana smoking. I never had an issue with the 'smoke' aspect of consuming cannabis, but now that I have tried cannabis vaping products (e.g. precision heating dry plant material or liquid concentrates), I nearly gag when I try smoking it again and I am immediately aware of and irritated by the awful smell that clings to me afterward.
I think there's a real attitude among a small number of non-smokers that quitting without some form of sustained suffering is "doing it wrong" and that addicts of any kind deserve pain to atone for the sin of being an addict. This attitude is extremely unhelpful and should be condemned along with all other types of moral puritanism in my opinion.
I was always confused about that particular part of smoking culture, it's got this mixed message of bad-boy persona and defiance yet it's very much a corporate curated habit. Nobody should have ended up addicted to nicotine, it was entirely unnecessary, and now here we are again even after all those lessons learned.
I am glad it's not nearly as harmful as cigarettes, but people are once again being sucked into an addiction in order to buy product and that stinks.
Custards, a popular group of vape flavors, was the main source of it.
The catch?
Diacetyl is also a byproduct of cigarette smoking.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.3109/10408444.2014.88...
The risk was not considered to be noteworthy among cigarette smokers and food workers who had higher exposure to the chemical diacetyl...
> Further, because smoking has not been shown to be a risk factor for bronchiolitis obliterans, our findings are inconsistent with claims that diacetyl and/or 2,3-pentanedione exposure are risk factors for this disease.
So basically... vaping causes popcorn lung = FUD.
There have always been products to battle nicotine addiction. They should compare this to those.
Or we could trust the adults who chose one product over the other to make those decisions.
People like to go to both extremes wrt. vaping - "but it creates new addicts" vs. "but it's effective tool for breaking addiction", forgetting about the biggest benefit vaping brings: letting smokers who don't want to quit to keep smoking, without risking lung cancer.
I'm definitely against marketing vaping to non-smokers. But I'm fine with converting existing smokers to vaping without any talk about quitting, because smoking e-cigarettes is strictly better than smoking analog ones.
I do.
> but it doesn't do anything to get you off your nicotine addiction, which people usually mean by "smoking cessation product"...
OK but what does this have to do with expressing ourselves accurately?
How can a society allow marketing vaping as a healthier way to smoke without allowing marketing that makes non-smokers think vaping is a healthy way to smoke?
(Especially considering that the marketers are eager to market to non-smokers.)
These are conversations that belong in a physicians office. Advertising is a scam on both sides and destroys instead of creates value for humanity. Historians will look back upon advertising the way many look back upon slavery.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/12/health/juul-vaping-lawsui...
It's all about power.
There are so many things it would be useful to quantify and compare:
Does anybody know the difference between the percentage of non-nicotine users who begin smoking cigarettes and the percentage who begin vaping? It sounds like the percentage for vaping is higher, but how much higher? Is it as much higher as the risk of dangerous health complications smoking has over vaping?
Never mind the question of why nicotine addiction is so dangerous it must be prevented on a federal level, but alcohol addictions aren't? How much more dangerous is nicotine than alcohol?
Important distinction: I didn't say anything about banning sales, just marketing, which we've already done for both smoking and alcohol.
> How much more dangerous is nicotine than alcohol?
According to the CDC, "cigarette smoking is the leading cause of preventable death in the United States...causes more than 480,000 deaths each year in the United States" while "excessive alcohol use is responsible for more than 95,000 deaths in the United States each year, "
https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/heal...
https://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/features/excessive-alcohol-death...
Edit: as for vaping specifically, the risks are not yet fully known, but some health authorities argue "a growing body of evidence shows that smoking e-cigarettes, or vaping, may be even more dangerous than smoking cigarettes".
https://www.nm.org/healthbeat/healthy-tips/emotional-health/...
Inhaling smoke is very bad for you. Lots of people die this way in fires. Like, you cut the victims open and there is soot in their lungs. So, no surprise smoking cigarettes is also a bad idea even if it's less bad than being in a literal burning building.
Nicotine is poisonous, but so is booze. There may be other things about vaping which are bad for you, but it seems pretty clear that the main problem is the nicotine, which is why people are doing it anyway, so, fine.
Booze has another important difference though: The ones drinking aren't always the ones dying. That can be because they're impaired while operating machinery (e.g. someone has "a few beers" then drives home, next morning they don't remember anything about how they got home, but there's a blood red stain on the bumper and someone else is found dead in a ditch) or they might just become violent and cause deliberate harm to others.
The question was about nicotine; it is not generally the _nicotine_ in cigarettes that kills you. That's what keeps you smoking them (to a large extent) but it's not what kills you.
Would you agree that exposure to THC, in itself, causes serious lung injury?
(Yes, I know, vitamin E acetate (an oil) in cannabis vaping products was likely the cause of a number of cases of lung injury.)
Also, "An FDA analysis of e-cigarettes from two leading brands found that the samples contained carcinogens and other hazardous chemicals, including diethylene glycol, which is found in antifreeze." Diethylene glycol is also used as "a humectant for tobacco, cork, printing ink, and glue. It is also a component in brake fluid, lubricants, wallpaper strippers, artificial fog and haze solutions, and heating/cooking fuel" as well as an industrial solvent. This statement is largely meaningless unless you know how much is in there: "The U.S. Code of Federal Regulations allows no more than 0.2% of diethylene glycol in polyethylene glycol when the latter is used as a food additive. The Australian government does not allow DEG as a food additive; it is only allowed at less than 0.25% w/w of DEG as an impurity of polyethylene glycol (PEG) even in toothpaste." (Wikipedia)
Juul is a product of one of those big tobacco companies.
If you divorce nicotine from its problematic delivery systems, nicotine itself is a pretty good drug (albeit very addictive). It's potentially protective against diseases like Parkinson's and Alzheimer's, it's associated with weight loss, and it improves short term memory and attention.
It's also great in combination with caffeine, and it speeds up caffeine metabolism.
I first got interested in the nootropic properties of nicotine long before I took up the pen when I came across Gwern's article on it. In particular, the possibility of reinforcing habits using it was the biggest thing that made me look into it. However, he uses gum instead.
What's the lastname of this Society guy?
It's kind of hypocritical to wrap your personal wishes and desired in the veil of common good, care for others, etc.
Legislature would be its lastname, I suppose. As in [nation] legislature, [state] legislature, etc.
Alarmingly there are also many people, especially young people, who believe that vaping is safe, and if educating them is "consent manufacturing" then let's manufacture some consent on this issue.
If impossible meat makes vegans start eating burgers, you can't just argue "well, it's still better than meat".
> I'm definitely against marketing vaping to non-smokers.
But this is the whole point, they do attract non-smokers. They should explicitly detract them instead.
No it’s not. Meat isn’t addictive. People don’t “quit” meat and develop a habit of impossible burgers. People don’t wake up every morning feeling shitty about enjoying meat.
I fully support vegan and vegetarian lifestyles. To compare tobacco to meat is foolish.
But by that logic, smoking could be called a weight loss product.
Other people have a more complex definition, which precludes cigarettes from being considered a health product, despite their appetite-suppressing properties.
And it was! The difference is that smoking isn't really healthier than obesity, so it's not a very good way to lose weight overall.
This is magical thinking. Do we apply this requirement to healthier alternatives in any other market?
For example: I really like McDonalds fries, but I mostly don't eat them because they're unhealthy. However anecdotally some "heavy users" eat them 3 to 5 times a week.
Imagine if McDonalds introduced "Beyond Fries" tomorrow, equivalent in every salient way, but less unhealthy (say, baked potato-level healthy). Would anyone apply the standard above, calling for it to be _only_ a "fry cessation product" for heavy users, and expecting it to explicitly repel the abstaining-for-health-reasons users like me?
I can't see how it's even possible to achieve both goals at once. A healthier alternative to _anything_ is going to draw some former abstainers-for-health-reasons into the market. And smoking has a _lot_ of abstainers-for-health-reasons.
By all means let's call vaping a smoking cessation product, but I'm not sure it's reasonable to assume that we can have our cake and eat it too here.
Edit: sense
Attitudes around smoking in general are grounded deeply in magical thinking. People have been raised on anti-smoking rhetoric so deep, with such little cultural push back toward sanity, that it's tough for most people to think let alone discuss the subject with any objectivity.
I started smoking when I was 18 (2004), picked up some of the first vapes in 2009 (they were horrible), and finally stopped smoking in 2012. But I don’t want to stop vaping. I don’t like the modern mainstream ecigs like juul (I mix my own liquid and build my own coils on a dual 18650 battery device), but I’m just glad that vaping exists, because, if all my fruitless attempts at quitting were any indication, otherwise I’d still be smoking a pack a day.
[0] https://newsinhealth.nih.gov/2020/05/risks-vaping
[1] https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/wellness-and-preventi...
[1]: "Vaping Is Less Harmful Than Smoking, but It’s Still Not Safe"
[1] has some problems. It seems to be conflating the vitamin E acetate issue with vaping in general. ("However, there has also been an outbreak of lung injuries and deaths associated with vaping. As of Jan. 21, 2020, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) confirmed 60 deaths in patients with e-cigarette, or vaping, product use associated lung injury (EVALI).") The section on "Research Suggests Vaping Is Bad for Your Heart and Lungs" focuses on nicotine. Which raises your blood pressure. And not much else, according to other sources.
I think the evidence is out as to what, if any, are the harms of vaping. But it’s not arguable that it’s better for you than smoking.
[0] https://www.newscientist.com/article/2120440-switching-from-...
https://vaping360.com/vape-news/105656/how-will-the-pmta-dea...
If that’s not enough detail let me know, I’m happy to dig up other old articles for you. This small business destroying charade by the fda has been well documented and publicized. Though not as well as the fear mongering about children juuling.
Why is that fear-mongering? My anecdotal evidence is that it's rampant with teens. Do you have any stats that are not anecdotal so I can educate myself?
They went back to cigarettes.
Mission accomplished I guess.
Furthermore it is much more socially unacceptable and awareness of the harms of cigarettes has never been higher.
Insofar as teens if eciggs were to become as hard to get as heroin tomorrow nicotine addition of teens all cause would be liable to decrease because your mom is absolutely going to know your smoking actual ciggs and have something to say in the matter.
I once knew an adult smoker who smoked about 1/2 a pack a day. She also didn’t want to smell like it, he had methods she employed that would leave absolutely no smell on her.
If your kid wants to hide smoking analogs then they can easily, just stand in front of a fan and wash your hands and face after.
What you say is correct you could certainly decrease the chances of being caught but on net out of 100 smoking teens 90 will end up getting caught trying to smoke real ciggs whereas hiding a non scented vape is so extremely trivial that the situation is reversed. 90 will escape detection.
There is a distinct difference between those two circumstances.
My wife when she was smoking would go all day without smoking only to smoke at home. Also one of my school grade friends was a smoker at 13 or so, and he only smoked at home.
Also vape’s have a smell, it’s just not as pungent.
What you’re really saying is you can’t watch your kid 24/7, you don’t trust them, didn’t teach them why smoking is bad and now you want everybody else to suffer.
I think the entire industry ought to be taxed out of existence like boiling a frog not because I want other people to "suffer" but because I don't want people to suffer.
I don't even know what to make of this. How many other things do humans do that are dangerous that we all have to pay for?
> They have clearly marketed themselves to young people who otherwise wouldn't have taken up smoking.
Why do you think this? Is it because of flavors? Do you not realize how many adults prefer flavored vape liquid? Or is it cause they ran commercials?
> I think the entire industry ought to be taxed out of existence like boiling a frog not because I want other people to "suffer" but because I don't want people to suffer.
So then you naturally try to force your opinion onto others. Why has society devolved into forcing others to do what we want? Do you think banning vapes will keep people from returning to cigarettes? Do you think addiction is just a switch one can easily turn on and off? You will cause more damage than good "taxing them out of existence like a boiling frog" (seriously wtf with that statement?) than realizing they are helping people and just minding your own business.
Because the only way to provide for the health of a society is with socialized medicine. Most of the civilized world has settled on this conclusion and even we have basically half and half.
In that context allowing people to be stupid as they want to be is ultimately allowing the stupid people to spend everyone's money.
Is this a country you want to live in?
Also we don’t yet have, and hopefully will never get, socialized medicine. Why do we prepare society by starting to implement the boot on the neck when we’re not even sure if it’s needed yet? Seems a bit assumptive and preemptive no?
Below you accuse stories about harm to children of "pushing an agenda"; might this be pushing one?
Basically, the wrong people were making money, and the regulators fixed that. Now the money is flowing to the right people and no one gives a shit that teen smoking rates went back to higher than they were before vaping. Harm reduced, a slow clap to our regulators.
I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but I'll just point out the observation that there are a lot of perverse incentives to keep the tobacco money flowing, public health be damned. Hell, remember back 2019 public health officials were running made-up 'e-cigarettes are causing lung injury' scare which turned out to be entirely caused by contaminated black market THC cartriges? SF still hasn't walked back their e-cigarette ban that led to a doubling of tobacco use by high schoolers[1].
To give an idea of where priorities are, the state of California does 10x the number of checks to make sure stores are paying their cigarette taxes as they do to make sure stores aren't selling to minors.
[1] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/...
And that's a bad thing?
Why do people have to stick their noses in things that don’t affect them?
If your product causes harm in any way—regardless of the benefits—you're going to have a difficult time getting regulatory approval. It will also greatly affect access to the product, as not everyone has access to good doctors, and most items that are FDA-regulated requires prescriptions.
For a product which is a superior, healthier option to cigarettes, it's a massive regulatory burden that could kill the business. I can't imagine anyone would defend that as preferable to the status quo.
Question stands, is that a bad thing?
Besides not everything FDA approved becomes a prescription medication. On topic; nicotine gums and patches as smoke cessation products are widely available as OTC.
In this case, we would certainly have to consider the potentially increased harm of non-smokers taking up vaping to assess the overall harm being done, but I see the merits of the basic argument at least.
The first nicotine gum, Nicorette, began as a prescription-only product in the US.
What the DEA (a totally different governmental organization with different motivations and biases) thinks about marijuana is reprehensible, however.
Exactly. They have approved 3 niche pharmaceutical industry replacements. Meanwhile they have kept their head in the sand regulating the 26 state cannabis industry, and we have no universal standards for contaminants, potency, etc. beyond state imposed regulations.
The CBD industry, which has been commercialized in most states, is also totally unregulated.
Long story short, I can imagine a lot of valid arguments pointing in every which way here.
I don’t think this is true. I can buy Nicolette all over the place without a doctors note. In the US at least.
Oh and it tastes like shit, to save the children.
There are countless products from weight loss to joint pain to "improve your memory" that sidestep the issue with those 9 simple words. I don't see why it would be any different for Juul.
Nicotine will count as an active ingredient, you can't just slap these 9 words to any random drug and just sell it over the counter.
Note: this came after initial warnings from the FDA years ago that they were going to ban the product unless.
This is precisely how I remember e-cigarettes being marketed when I first heard about them 10 years ago. I was a smoker then, so my ears perked up.
They clearly switched their marketing to target kids who didn't even smoke to begin with. 'Juul' was synonymous with teenagehood during the mid-2010s, at least if my recollection of IG memes from that time are accurate.
A young priest asked his bishop, “May I smoke while praying?”... The answer was an emphatic “No!”
Later, when he sees an older priest puffing on a cigarette while praying, the younger priest scolded him, “You shouldn’t be smoking while praying! I asked the bishop, and he said I couldn’t do it!”
“That’s odd,” the old priest replied. “I asked the bishop if I could pray while I’m smoking, and he told me that it was okay to pray at any time!”
I first heard it from an Alan Watts talk, but couldn't easily find the quote, so I used one from r/jokes, at ”https://amp.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/3q2h1a/a_young_pries...
Juul and their competitors were genius product managers paired with irresponsible to the point of malevolent product marketers.
I would like someone to do a "Years of life saved" calculation that tallies the expected years save by switching smokers to vaping balanced against those who were attracted by vaping who eventually went to smoking. My guess is even with the new entrants the years of life saved would be extraordinary.
My understanding is entire high schools are getting addicted to vaping, where before smoking was a relatively minor phenomenon. I suspect vaping is causing multiple times as much harm as it is providing relief, especially since they target young people for new customers.
I know plenty of people that have never smoked in their lives that vape regularly. I actually don't know a single smoker that switched to vaping, but I think that latter part is rare and unique to me.
So, if I'm correct, I don't think it should be "years of life saved" but "years of life lost," and I'd bet it's astonishingly high since many of those high school kids will be addicted for life. Don't forget Juul got billions (not millions) in funding from the cigarette companies in exchange for 35% ownership, so it's all the same to them - addiction is money.
I will say that when those juul kids come to college, very specifically my college, they hit the reality that everyone there still looks down on it and that they're basically just broadcasting their "highschoolness", and then they realize how hard it is to quit. We had smoking at my non-smoking campus, just behind one of the buildings, but it was by definition not popular. Vaping existed but if you were walking around blowing huge clouds of cotton candy shit, people would both actively avoid you and look down on you. It was the culture at the time.
Disclaimer: I left a couple years ago, that was my experience, things could've greatly changed by now
To talk about "years of life lost" is quite off from what I know about it. And I never vaped, just smoked.
We already know vaping causes popcorn lung. I suspect 1:1 between vaping and smoking that vaping is safer, but who knows? We won't know until we have decades of data about mortality related to vaping. It seems plausible that it increases lung cancer rates and we just don't have enough data to know yet.
https://www.cancertherapyadvisor.com/home/cancer-topics/lung...
Not true. The data we have shows that it was being caused by Vitamin E acetate, which was used by off-brand THC cartridges. None of the major nicotine vapes used this chemical.
Also, this attitude of "oh we don't know" could be extended to any new product anywhere, including the vaccines we are using now. All of the current data supports vaping to be significantly safer than cigarettes, so let's proceed with that data and if the data later changes, we can update our guidelines.
Otherwise, you are killing people in the meantime.
What? I'm arguing vaping is more dangerous than not vaping. I specifically said I believe vaping is safer than smoking.
For what it's worth, I believe all drugs should be legal. I don't care if you want to vape or not. I don't care if you want to inject fentanyl into your veins or not. It's your body.
See the problem with this type of rhetoric? There have been tons of studies done at this point with regards to vaping. Everything shows it as being safer. This is not equivalent to the tobacco companies lying to the public. Juul never makes any claim as to their product being 100% safe, just look at the packaging.
On top of that, you also repeated a known falsehood that vaping causes popcorn lung.
My point is that repeating these arguments and casting doubt on vaping being safer further promotes these bans on vaping, which in turn will kill more people.
> I'm arguing vaping is more dangerous than not vaping.
There is no need to argue an obvious fact that 100% of people will agree with.
> There have been tons of studies done at this point with regards to vaping. Everything shows it as being safer.
I haven't seen them, but there were also lots of studies that cigarette companies touted to show how safe their product was until they could no longer deny it. And seeing as how those same companies just invested a shitload of money into Juul, it doesn't seem crazy to think they'd use the same playbook. We also have no reason to believe vaping isn't purposefully designed to get people hooked on nicotine only to later sell them another product like cigarettes or something else they later develop. In fact, there are studies suggesting exactly that (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6652100/). There are many ways vaping could prove to be more harmful than we can currently see because it's a relatively new product.
I get your point about vaping potentially being helpful by getting people off smoking if it's safer, but it's simply unproven. Like I said if people want to vape let them, but I'll wait for the data before concluding whether or not it's safer. I suspect it's more dangerous and I'm sticking to that until the data proves otherwise. Similar to how you suspect it's less dangerous and will stick to that until the data proves otherwise. The common thread is we're lacking data and neither of us can confirm our hypotheses.
In other words we disagree and it's impossible to know who's right until we have more data. From my perspective your stance is just as harmful as you perceive mine to be.
Not sure what you mean by this, but I think everyone should be vaccinated unless you have some health condition that prevents you from doing so.
The reason I'm making that comparison is that there is an ongoing public debate about vaccines and long-term health effects that use very similar arguments to yours. All of our current data shows that getting vaccinated is a better risk tradeoff than potentially getting covid. Just like all of our current data shows that vaping is safer than smoking. Both of the counter arguments center around "but we don't know what the long term effects are" and can be applied to both these new vaccines and to vaping.
Let's just agree to disagree.
Not implying that you wanna ban it, but that's the reason why I'm so in favor of it.
> Let's just agree to disagree.
Agreed.
That's a different, less well understood respiratory problem. Some ecigarette liquid contains (or used to contain; it's banned in Europe but maybe not in the US?) diacetyl as a flavouring; that causes popcorn lung and various other problems.
Regardless, neither of these are a concern where not present, which they generally aren't.
We know that vaping fluid with a particular flavoring chemical caused popcorn lung. That chemical is now rare.
"The chemical that gave this condition its nickname is diacetyl. After workers at a factory that packaged microwave popcorn were found to have bronchiolitis obliterans more often than other people, some companies stopped using diacetyl as a flavoring. But it's still used in some electronic cigarette flavors in the US. Many e-cigarette makers state they aren't using this chemical in their products and its use in e-cigarettes is banned in Europe." (https://www.webmd.com/lung/popcorn-lung#1)
It gets a pass because of it's relationship with smoking, giving them a believable reason to keep the nicotine, but if I started putting nicotine in bottled water there would be a class action in a week.
OTOH, being older, I have never met someone who vapes that didn't smoke before, and know several smokers who quit and switched over.
I think I'd want a citation for that. It's been a long time since I was in high school, but smoking was incredibly common (if reasonably well concealed) back then. I can see vaping as being somewhat more popular (if not "entire high schools"), but...
> I'd like to see more studies in this area and some more regulations on the "juice" for vapes.
Remember the media chaos when the "vaping lung disease" was making the cycle? This was likely due to the juice they were using. It contained vitamin E acetate and was found primarily in THC vape juice. Normal e-cigs have standard VG/PG, nicotine and food grade flavoring. And that's it.
https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/basic_information/e-cigarettes/s...
He smoked 4-5 packs of Benson & Henson Menthols/day.
He stopped when he was 64, but it was to late. He didn't die of lung cancer, but they just stopped working one night in his sleep.
He had some undiagnosed psychological problem that I believe added to his constant smoking?
I must have asked him to cut back a 1000x.
I don't like nicotine, but I'm glad these are still legal.
(That said, I had him go a doctor to check his coronary arteries. They were completely clean. I think the only thing that saved him besides good genes, he didn't eat much.)
This is a great story. But it can be legal and restricted -- prescription only, just like Nicorette gum was when it was first introduced.
> He had some undiagnosed psychological problem
There is definitely a correlation between schizophrenia and smoking. I dont know if there are studies on it, but ask any psychologist experienced with schizophrenics if they see that pattern.
"In recent years, e-cigarettes have become a very popular stop smoking aid in the UK. Also known as vapes or e-cigs, they're far less harmful than cigarettes and can help you quit smoking for good."
https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/quit-smoking/using-e-cigarettes...
Poor behavior by Juul, marketing to youth, makes me wary that I’ll have this stopgap regulated away. I wish they’d stop bringing negative publicity to vaping as a whole. The temp ban on delivery doubled prices when they were only available in retail shops. I’m always concerned it’ll be taken from former smokers who want to quit.
- "E-Cigs are the greatest public health invention of modern times!"
- Oh wait! "Think of the Children™"
- "We need to full on demonize e-cigs à la '90s anti drug style!"
This is pretty much what went down. It was recognized as miracle, but the fear of kids getting addicted was too great. So instead we're going the path of full on propaganda against it, while kids get addicted anyway.
I was out with some friends and two people I had never met before, and they immediately hit it off on their shared habit. I guess that's kind of like the social aspect of cigarettes. It's an interesting thing to see, and it's less intrusive than cigarette smoke for sure, so to each their own.
Also, as a smoker, I've never "hit it off" with somebody because we smoked. Hitting it off with someone in the smoker's pit outside a bar is just shooting the shit with someone that's in a common area; folks that vape and vegans are very similar in that it's a major point of conversation, as if they've assimilated it as part of their personality.
All that being said, vaping is fine, but the uptick in high schoolers smoking (because it's still smoking under a different name) is a bit alarming; and will be interesting to see how that consumer pipeline changes as regulation of them changes.
Nicotine salt is much easier to vape and feels less harsh. I.e I can easily vape 50mg/ml nicotine salt, while above 10mg/ml freebase gets uncomfortable for my throat. That might have been the reason for your dad coughing.
But I still agree, besides the salt/freebase aspect there can be different aspects of the ingrefients, each affecting health differently.
The only issue I've had was with propylene glycol, a main ingredient of most juices, to which I've got a mild allergic reaction (it essentially gives me bronchitis). Your dad may have something similar, it's quite common.
Anyhow, all the FUD in the US about vaping, its cultural association there with irritating types, the rush here in the EU to tax it as if it was cigarette (it isn't), and the growth of corporate trash on top of it has been incredibly discouraging. It's putting a barrier in front of smokers for something that's for all intents and purposes the most effective medication.
If you have a product that people enjoy using and has associated dangers, some people will use it anyway. If you have a second product that replaces the first product with less danger[1], more people will use it. That's simple economic reasoning.
The hysteria over vaping is largely a product of a puritanical mindset---the horror at the thought of someone, somewhere, enjoying themselves. People have made their peace with tobacco itself[2], alcohol[3], and marijuana[4].
[1] "Evidence so far indicates that e-cigarettes are far less harmful than smoking as they don’t contain tobacco or involve combustion. There is no smoke, tar or carbon monoxide, and studies looking at key toxicants have generally found much lower levels than in cigarettes. They do contain nicotine, which is addictive, but isn’t responsible for the major health harms from smoking." (https://www.cancerresearchuk.org/health-professional/awarene...)
"In September, a paper in The Journal of Clinical Investigation described mice exposed to e-cigarettes for 4 months, nearly one-quarter of their life span. Farrah Kheradmand, a pulmonologist at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, who led the work, says that, at first, "There was absolutely no emphysema, nothing" in the animals that inhaled aerosol from e-cigarettes. That finding jibes with earlier research showing combustion products are the cause of airway inflammation in smokers." (https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/11/how-safe-vaping-new-...)
[2] Ever seen one of the bans on the sale of vaping products associated with a similar ban on cigarettes? I didn't think so.
[3] Here's a toast to those who collect the statistics on the externalized costs of anything.
[4] Smoking marijuana has exactly the same dangers as smoking tobacco. (You do have a filter on that reefer, right?) The same particulates, the same "tar", and the same assortment of combustion by-products, right?
2. It was (and is) a fairly successful effort:
https://news.gallup.com/poll/1717/tobacco-smoking.aspx
https://www.statista.com/chart/20385/cigarette-sales-in-the-...
I would say "it's working" rather than "it worked" but his point is valid.
The only "option" is to ban vaping outright. But then you're also banning the best smoking substitute.
That's not the only option. So much of the deserved vitriol against Juul is because their marketing and everything else about their product (e.g. fruit flavors) were specifically designed to get kids hooked.
Juul's marketing should be the poster child for the banality of evil.
As far as their marketing targeting children, I haven't seen any examples of that. Using millennials in your adverts does not equate to targeting children.
https://www.vox.com/2019/1/25/18194953/vape-juul-e-cigarette...
Minimalist design, tasty flavors, colorful ads, and using social media does not equate to targeting kids.
The kids aren't getting hooked on Juuls because of advertising. They're getting hooked on them because they give you a buzz and are convenient.
Well, we clearly just agree to disagree. That article I think shows well how the early Juul marketing followed the cigarette marketing so closely, and there is voluminous evidence that cigarette marketers know you need to target young people because hardly anyone starts smoking after their early twenties.
2) Juul, being run by a bunch of amateurs, will continue to operate in an extremely sloppy manner like this and go bust eventually, and Altria & Co. will be there to benefit from the mess in the end.
We spent decades trying to get rid of carcinogens from cigarettes. What's the problem with cigarettes without carcinogens?
Also aren't there a LOT of other problems from smoking and nicotine alone, in terms of lung health and hypertension, heart stuff etc
Probably. Weed isn't good for you either. Neither is Alcohol. At some point, you got to let people make some decisions.
If this special issue was peer-reviewed, people donated their time for free to publish 11 studies with potentially severe conflicts of interest.
If the issue was not peer-reviewed, then the editors handed out free publication for money, which is what predatory journals do.
There is no way to spin this as remotely related to good scientific practice, which would mean:
- Funding is independent of results
- Double-blind peer review
- Pre-registration wherever possible
> Smoking Trajectories of Adult Never Smokers 12 Months after First Purchase of a JUUL Starter Kit
https://www.ingentaconnect.com/contentone/png/ajhb/2021/0000...
The survey conveniently only asked about cigarette or "Juul" use, take note how it doesn't ask if users switched to a different vaping product.
Though the study was described as
> “JUUL customer online survey about JUUL vapor products, vaping and smoking.”
Makes me wonder if they conveniently left out some questions to get their p-value right.
At least they made it open access. At first I thought they bought out the entire issue so that people couldn't read it.
I was unfamiliar with that term and googled it: it's described as "excessive belief in the power of scientific knowledge and techniques". I'm struggling a bit to understand how a belief in the importance of scientific knowledge and techniques equates to a religious mindset.
In an ideal world, I would absolutely prefer my government to make decisions based on facts and methods of finding out more facts. Currently, that's only one small part of our governmental decision making process, with the other notable parts being powerful special interests and public opinion.
Could you elaborate a bit on what exactly you meant by this?
Some people believe in science. They don't take the facts and understand them, they just say "Science says this is true. Anyone who disagrees needs to be shouted down." They will shame people for expressing any doubt against a "scientific consensus". This is actually the opposite of science.
For instance, the Theory of Gravity. I know people who take it to be a law, even though science itself hasn't moved it into that category. If you dare to suggest that there might be some as-yet-undiscovered mechanism for gravity, they will literally get louder and louder until you stop arguing. They won't provide any evidence, they'll just keep saying the same thing over and over.
And it happens for this that are much less certain, too.
> For instance, the Theory of Gravity. I know people who take it to be a law, even though science itself hasn't moved it into that category. If you dare to suggest that there might be some as-yet-undiscovered mechanism for gravity
There is no scientific consensus on the mechanism that is causing gravity, at least not on the level you suggest. There is consensus on how gravity behaves, in regimes we can currently observe.
The problem with suggesting "some as-yet-undiscovered mechanism" is that you can generate arbitrary many such mechanisms, because there aren't good options yet for experimental corroboration. We all have favorite ideas for how gravity might work behind the scenes, and it absolutely is fun to speculate. But if your goal is to actually make a contribution, your need to come up with an idea that can be falsified.
In my opinion you are completely within your rights to make claims that contradict empirical findings or theoretical frameworks. There often are holes in our knowledge, and continuously re-examining established science is absolutely part of the process. Of course, the burden of proof is on you in that case. But science is absolutely meant to be a living process.
You mean Newton's Law of gravity [1]?
I'm not sure where you get the idea there are "theories" and "laws" in science and science moves things from one category to the other.
The closest I can find is this distinction: "Scientific theories explain why something happens, whereas scientific law describes what happens." [2]
By this description, laws generally happen first, then theory, because observation makes it clear what happens before we understand why it happens.
In which case law and theory go hand in hand in pretty much every single law and theory I can think of (and the page lists zillions)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton%27s_law_of_universal_gr...
What exactly is this link demonstrating?
Almost literally every physicist since Newton has believed that there is some sort of underlying theory which explains gravity. Its hard to imagine how anyone could get the idea that the matter was somehow settled.
I'd love it if you could share more context.
To compare it to an actual hot-button issue, we know more about the mechanisms of evolution than we do about the mechanisms of gravity.
We know kind of how it behaves at various scales, but we don't know why it does. We don't know what makes gravity. Why do denser objects have more of it. Why is it weaker than other forces, yet felt on larger scales? Does it actually exist or is it an emergent property kind of like the centripetal force (or is it centrifugal, I keep getting those flopped)?
A suggestion that there may be a yet undiscovered mechanism for gravity isn't useful to science. It's imaginative perhaps, but without a piece of math, or a suggestion for an experiment by which to test it, it's just science fiction. Ideas are cheap.
How do you know the impact of something that's undiscovered? Also how do discover new things but by looking where others aren't?
Science is a powerful contributor to the sum of human knowledge, but it's absolutely not the only pillar of human knowledge and there's a lot of people who think that scientific advancement means we can just do away with philosophy, politics, and other fields like that altogether, as though one day with the right equations all of ethics or culture is just going to pop out of physics. These people don't just throw the baby but the whole nursery out with the bathwater in my opinion!
Adding to this, belief in science actually means believing in the _process_ of scientific discovery, i.e. believing that _eventually_ the "truth" will be discovered.
As you correctly point out, questioning the current consensus is a fundamental part of the process, but not all challenges to scientific knowledge are legitimate. Many (most?) concerns you hear in the mainstream media are not legitimate but based on logical fallacies, strawmen, ad hominem attacks, etc. I found this list [1] quite useful to guard against such unfounded attacks.
[1] http://utminers.utep.edu/omwilliamson/ENGL1311/fallacies.htm
"Theory" does NOT mean "unproven". That's "conjecture".
Often it's just an equation that fits some data for a range of values.
Almost all laws are found in the physical sciences. Some examples are: Ohm's Law, Universal Gravitation, Coulomb's law, and Kirchhoff's laws. None of these are perfect descriptions of reality.
What a strange example. Has this ever happened to you? Additionally, does General Relativity count as "an underlying mechanism for gravity"?
Doubt based on what? This is the classic “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge”. The scientific consensus absolutely can be wrong on something, but people that read a few Facebook articles and think they’re argument holds any weight whatsoever deserve to be shamed. You want to question the scientific consensus? Conduct a study or get in a lab, have it peer reviewed. If you want to say “I think the major experts and accumulated understanding in this field are wrong ” then you are going to have to bring more to the table than some random doubts and suggestions.
> For instance, the Theory of Gravity.
Wonderful example. As almost every physicist has stories of people that send them their pet theories about theoretical physics models. Have they done mathematical models? Of course not. But they are sure their theory is going to crack this unifying theory wide open. Maybe ask yourself “if I disagree with all the experts, have they all misunderstood what I am seeing or do I not understand the subject as much as I think I do?” Shame is the cousin to humility.
But you misunderstand what the words "theory" or "law" mean in scientific usage such as the "theory of gravity".
https://www.livescience.com/21457-what-is-a-law-in-science-d...
Over reliance on science as guidance has also lead to some of the darkest chapters of human history, like phrenology and its use to justify racial supremacy.
Take 17th century science... most of it would be ludicrous by any standard today. Now imagine applying that science onto humans/society... Science as a tool to deal with present knowledge, should not be used solely to manage societies or human situations with irreversible consequences.
But of course, evidence-based decision making should not be turned into decision-based evidence making; science alone is not a basis for politics.
Maybe some nice corp would be willing to buy an issue of a journal so that you can publish and distribute the solution!
I have a medium article in draft over 3 months on this exact topic. That's why my wording of the issue came out sounding more complicated. But other commenter saying "science alone" and me saying "using science solely" are basically pointing to same understanding.
There are many examples in history for the said situation leading to social catastrophes; see Malthus (or Thanos' ideology if you like pop-cult), or Darwinian take on managing societies. Some lead to racism, some eugenics etc etc.
Like the original commenter said; science is myopic and highly focused on the present body of knowledge available. But once we applied those results onto people and cause suffering, and 10 years later find some of those were wrong, we can not undo the human suffering.
There needs to be a balance; when science is treading closely to the human dignity, well-being, life in general.
Could you clarify this? I understand that humans committed terrible atrocities in the name of "racial supremacy". I also understand that the same people used science as a fig leaf to justify their actions. But you seem to be saying that over reliance on science lead to these atrocities.
I simply can't imagine someone saying "I like these people and normally wouldn't hurt them, but the scientific consensus is so strong therefore I will kill/maim/throw them into a concentration camp." It sounds more likely that the racist ideology was there first, which caused both the racist science and the atrocities both. In other words racist people wanted to commit atrocities and they manufactured excuses for themselves to do so.
But I'm far from an expert on human history, so please correct me if I'm wrong.
I mean the current slew of flat earthers, anti-vaxxers/maskers, bleach eyeballers andsoforth also cite Science as their source - lending credibility to their arguments, making their thing not just emotional or gut feeling.
And religious people will take (parts of) the bible as a scientific fact as well.
Science is not a state of knowledge.
Science is a process for getting better (or less bad) knowledge. Eventually.
I think we all agree that many studies are flawed and/or wrong. But I also think most people agree that there is a realistic expectation that we will find out over time [1]
[1] Caveat emptor: With sensible scientific methods, see my other comment on this post.
The scientific method doesn't include the word "belief" at all. If you reduce it to belief, it's not science anymore, it's religion.
> In an ideal world, I would absolutely prefer my government to make decisions based on facts and methods of finding out more facts.
Science is a process, not a collection of hard facts. The only hard facts (or the claim of them more accurately) come from religion.
Science concerns itself with building speculative models that have predictive power, and trying to match observation with prediction of the models. Redundancy (peer review) is used to REDUCE (not ELIMINATE) errors. Social and cultural factors can result in false positives and false negatives in peer review.
That's it in a nutshell. The models don't reflect reality, they only reflect an approximation of aspects of reality in given contexts.
Anyway, the problem is that people do have a religious instinct. And when they're incapable of perceiving science with all its subtleties, they simply reduce it to a religion, which requires the belief that it's basically flawless, it provides hard facts, the best solutions, and that it's uniform (and any contradictions are just examples of "interests" corrupting it).
While politics are very corrupted and often result in incompetence rising to the top, even it weren't the case, those competent politicians have no single place to turn to to understand what "science" thinks on any given problem of society. Science isn't a guy, so it has no opinion.
There were so many studies for example about cancer along the lines of "eating apples reduces cancer by 5%" and then you see people start eating apples for this reason. Somebody wrote a paper to get a publication with questionable results and people blindly believe in the power of science.
Don't forget that a lot of the papers are also written in unintelligible scientific jargon and that scientists would massage numbers because their writings directly affects their job prospects and salaries.
Religion didn't necessarily start from being a highly politicised power-hungry beast it became in middle ages. Bible says a lot about being a better human being. So is science - the scientific method does allow us to learn new things; but academia is a political entity which is only going to be growing in it's power and thus corruption.
This is the problem with interpreting results... you can set up a study witn n=100k people, and find out that people who eat apples die 5% less from cancer, correlation is shown, and somewhere in the conclusion "more research is needed to find exact cause".
In practice, people who eat more fruits probably take care of themselves better, eat better diet,... etc.
I understood the parent as people believieng in something, without actually looking at data itself, thinking about it, considering other posibilities, and of course, declaring others (opposers) as heretics... for example, spring, last year, my government (and our scientists, and probably yours too, depending on where you live) said that masks are useless for fighting covid, even detrimental, so "believers" called the people who bought and wore them fearmongering paranoics.... then a random saturday came, masks became mandatory "from monday on", and those same people called the "antimaskers" conspiracy-theorists and worse for not wanting to wear masks.
Reality is of course a mixed bag... cotton masks prevent you from spitting everywhere, but don't actually block a lot of virus in the air. Surgical masks were practically impossible to buy back then. Masks outside, away from people are useless. etc.
You quoted it yourself: scientism is "excessive", or, more correctly, it treats scientists as authoritative sources of truths that should not be questioned. This form of blind trust goes against the scientific method.
Also scientism can make categorical error in the type of questions that can be answered e.g. journalists asking physicists about "god particles" and such
> I'm struggling a bit to understand how a belief in the importance of scientific knowledge and techniques equates to a religious mindset.
I think the poster refers to dogmatic mindset. Assuming that all religions are dogmatic is incorrect.
Can you give an example? There is something called "the god particle" but a journalist asking about it wouldn't be a categorical error.
This policy by science simply doesn't seem very effective. It largely provides cover for bureaucrats who can say that they followed science while doing what they wanted to do in the first place.
> In the real world it means treating a study on 31 American undergrads as scripture
My opinion is that scripture shouldn't be treated as scripture to begin with.
> This policy by science simply doesn't seem very effective.
As a tool for making policy decisions, science gives you access to solutions that might work based on the evidence. Now, that evidence may be completely bogus, so there is no getting around the need for evaluation. But saying that data is a bad basis for goal-oriented action planning is a self-defeating position.
Policy by science is not a meaningful concept on its own, policy action requires a component we haven't talked about yet: a value system. Science can give you the data, but your goals determine what actions should follow. You're certainly correct when you say that politicians are getting some cover from improper data, but overall I find they seldomly hide their motivations.
A common fallacy is that "absence of evidence is evidence of absence". For a government this might mean "There is no definite scientific evidence that substance X causes cancer, so we do not ban it.".
Let's say a chemical X is used in baby food production. There are no studies that show that it is harmful, because no studies have been done yet. Many chemicals with similar structure have been shown to be harmful.
Scientifically speaking you would be correct to say that there is no evidence that chemical X is harmful. There is no way yet to accurately model the interaction of any chemical with your body without any actual experimentation. You can make an argument that chemical X might be harmful because similar chemicals are harmful, but that would not be science.
I would not buy that baby food with chemical X if given a choice. Best case I don't lose.
Finding conclusive evidence in science often takes lots of time to gather enough data because there are so many different variables to consider. So absence of evidence means a lot more when you have been looking for a long time and invested lots of resources.
I wouldn't say that's true, if chemicals with a similar structure are harmful then there's weak but real evidence that X is harmful too.
Just because science says something doesn't mean it's true. Truth must be verifiable. It's possible to easily and cheaply verify basic physical concepts like gravity. This inspires trust. Professors routinely reproduce physics in classrooms:
Reproducing some medical experiment is hard, expensive and time consuming. Once a study is published, a huge number of people will simply assume it is true. Very few will actually check the methodology of the study. Virtually none will attempt to reproduce it.
I don't mean to sound condescending, but if science as a concept 'says' anything, it is exactly that truth must be verifiable.
There absolutely are problems with how study results are weighted. Starting from the way the press reports on findings, up to and including the uncritical acceptance of questionable material by many members of the scientific community.
However, there is no workable alternative to the process of science, because defaulting to whatever people personally like and discarding any inpportune data is certainly not how we move forward as a civilization if we have any ambition to continue our ascent (and we might in fact not have that ambition, but I do like to pretend that we do).
Studies and data in general must be weighted. Sometimes the proper weight is zero. I see little other options but to continue stumbling towards improvement and knowledge. Acting on data will always be an imperfect process on a sliding scale, very few people would disagree with that.
Edit: I would also say that there is a distinction between the opinion that we're generally moving too fast and the opinion that we have severe deficits in how we weigh incoming data. Both of these can be addressed, although the solutions appear to be way easier in the former case. We need to be honest about which camp we're in though.
On the contrary, truth must be falsifiable [1]. The value of a theory is not in how easy it is to verify, but in how easily it could possibly be refuted.
[1] https://science.jrank.org/pages/9302/Falsifiability-Popper-s...
In science as cumulative evidence, studies can in fact be harmful. If they are wrong or highly ambiguous, or if they make it hard to uncover errors, then they make it more difficult for future research to be correct.
The reasons include publication bias (rejecting studies with null effects and/or contradicting previous literature), p-hacking and so on.
That's why it is so important to apply rigorous standards everywhere: Transparency, data sharing, peer review, replication, pre-registration. In other words: There is no alternative to open science.
We do see some of that in some of today's arguments, I think.
Querying public opinion is a method of determining facts, even special interests provide facts. 'Scientism' consists of what Feyerabend called 'methodological monism', believing in the notion that there is any privileged authority to 'speak facts'.
Someone who properly understands 'science' understands that the processes to produce knowledge are as dynamic as facts themselves. All efforts to produce some sort of privileged methodology produce bureaucracy and standardization that closes science off from avenues that can produce knowledge. Elevating this bureaucratic caste of scientists to political authority is scientism.
(This is a hypothetical government official. Any resemblance to real-world government officials is coincidental.)
It really has nothing to do with science.
Capitalism, an economic tool (and a useful one), has become state religion and now capitalists control everything.
The flavor ban completely destroyed Juul as a company, and I would argue Juul is already dead, and more sinister products are taking its place.
Vaping (and Delta 8) markets are now ran by a bunch of Chinese companies now, and their safety standards are much lower than American companies.
With Delta 8 exploding in popularity, I would much rather prefer large and established American companies (such as Juul) making the product with American safety standards.
But after most of the Juul flavors have been banned, Juul is now an empty shell of a company compared to what it once used to be, while Chinese are still cracking out those flavorful vapes, but now they're also disposable (which is even more appealing to kids) so you throw out a battery and plastic shell when the cartridge runs out of vaping juice.
I miss the days of DYI vaping where you would have to build your own coil and cotton - maybe even mix your own fluid - and the whole thing was more akin to a hobby.
While since some decades cigarette smokers go outside, many ecigarette users spread funny smells without any empathy.
Maybe kebab also creates poor air quality and sticky residues, but in my experience people don't tend to eat kebabs continuously every 5 minutes through the day.
I'm all for e-cigarettes as an almost-certainly-better alternative to real cigarettes (banning vaping but not smoking is ludicrous to me) - but allowing using them indoors does have a real impact on everyone else. Perhaps some are discreet, but the cloud chasing guys ruin it.
If the impact is big enough sure, but it makes little sense to me to treat them harsher than anything else.
Not everyone is as able to ignore sounds and smells as you might be.
In particular the sound of someone vaping over a headset/phone makes me shiver.
"Even if it doesn't, it's no worse than the smell of kebab which people are allowed to eat indoors."
Shouldn't it be me to decide instead of you?
That and the cigarette companies just bought into the industry. Altria (AKA Philip Morris) owns 35% of Juul.
I agree if you have no intention to quit, juuling is much safer than continuing to inhale smoke.
But you might want to be careful using it as a smoking cessation tool. I smoked about 7 cigarettes a day but after I picked up juuling the sheer convenience of not having to go outside, being able to use it in bed, etc. got me up to 1-2 pods (equivalent to 1-2 packs of cigarettes) per day in nicotine consumption.
My lungs caught a break by vaping but my nicotine addiction was uncontrollable. I eventually used nicotine gum to quit and it was absolute hell. I suspect it would have been much easier if I wasn't so used to a constant stream of nicotine 24/7.
Ended up just quitting cigarettes instead which ended up being easier after getting over the mental block that makes you think it's so much harder than it really is. Everyone's mileage varies though of course.
So I, a total non-smoker, started experimenting with nicotine a few weeks ago. First I tried gum which did nothing but give me an itchy throat. Then I bought a vaping device and some juices. Why? I think I'm low in dopamine (I am not depressed, though) and had read nicotine provides a temporary boost (until you get hooked) and I was intrigued to feel the difference.
I can't really tell what's happening. I like the taste and mouth feel of the smoke but the nicotine itself is a bust. Perhaps a very mild caffeine-esque feeling at a push. It hasn't proven addictive as it's been sat out in my car untouched for the past four days! Perhaps the nicest sensation is that of taking a truly deep breath.. but that feels just as good without the vape!
I remain intrigued what this means and hope to speak to someone medical about it one day. There's nicotine because it stings the throat if you hold it there (versus a zero nicotine juice) but whatever this amazing sensation people get has clearly passed my receptors by.
As someone who stupidly started smoking later in life, that's pretty much how it goes. Nicotine addiction isn't like on TV where you smoke a cigarette or puff a vape and suddenly you're hooked. It's a slow process you find yourself doing more and more often until you realize one day, it's every day all the time.
What's hard to quit are the motor memories/habits. Get in the car, reach for your ... wait no we quit that. You start realizing how many little habits you have that way.
I did end up moving to dip (Skoal) however and that worked. It was never more than a minor buzz but at least it did something. For me it was incredibly relaxing. I quit dip years ago as well but I still find myself with urges to put one in while driving, and especially after meals. Highly addictive stuff and you don't even see it coming.
If you're thinking of trying it though, it is really easy to overdo it and end up dizzy or sick. This is especially true on your first dip. If you're going to try it, take a small pinch first! If you overdo it, lie down and take a nap and sleep it off.
The only thing I've ever taken that's given me a true buzz plus relaxation is doxylamine which is a common OTC sleep aid in the US. The only problem is shortly thereafter it also knocks me out well into the next day so isn't exactly something to take with any regularity(!)
Not feeling anything is good…
Apart from yourself others have noted the meditative aspects of cigarette smoking. Beside the chemical addition aspect when giving up smoking you're losing a ritualistic break where you can spend a few minutes away from what you're currently doing, usually alone, to do a deep breathing exercise. This ritual is often a contributor to the difficulties in giving up.
For some time, perhaps, you smoke or vape merely socially, experimentally, after a whisky at a party. Then, suddenly, perhaps after one too many the night before, ferocious withdrawal threatens. It is not a slow process, but a sudden toggle.
To me this is by far worst than any potential cancer risk.
(I smoked for 15 years and stopped 3 years ago, if that precision can add any value)
EDT: Juste to add that realizing this gives you motivation when you quit. And the freedom gained is also rewarding.
Right but you don't need smoke for nicotine - that's the point.
Nicotine is still harmful, but it isn't as lethal as smoke.
And more critically - smoke is dangerous to people around you, while nicotine is just your problem alone. If we can get people off smoke but still on nicotine, that's better for everyone.
I think anti-smoking/vaping organizations should put more focus on this. I never realized how much this aspect of nicotine takes over your life.
Personally, my thought process was always something like: Lung cancer and all those other health effects are scary and all, but they're gonna happen decades from now, and I'm gonna quit by then so it doesn't matter.
Whereas focusing on the immediate effects of nicotine addiction and how it drives your day-to-day life, that's not talked about enough.
I quit for seven years. It was one of the hardest things I’ve done. Starting again was the worst decision of my life, but I was in crisis at the time. Quitting a second time, with full knowledge of the first, is even more daunting. I’m happy to have something in between while I try to reduce dependence.
Saying that vaping is not a legitimate path toward reducing the harm of cigarettes is like saying there’s no use for the patch or nicotine gum. They’re better than smoking, even if a crutch.
Tobacco is more than nicotine delivery. It contains harmaline alkaloids, which among other effects, is a monoamine oxidase inhibitor. Quitting a cocktail of nicotine and MAOIs, while those stimulants are "treating" underlying conditions, is a way harder task.
For these folks, vaping is absolutely a step up, and allows them to wean off the tobacco MAOIs, especially in conjunction with treatment such as bupropion.
Were I to switch to vaping alone, it would be far easier to quit, mainly because the nature of conditioning relating to a vaping habit (hitting my juul at my desk) is very distinct from cigarettes (going on the roof and having a smoke triggered by certain events). The latter is far more "attached" to specific event triggers and lasts a specific amount of time, while the former is a more "ambient" act with much less habituality attached.
I’m going to come down on the opposite side and say that a garbage journal that nobody reads publishing garbage research for money isn’t news. Though it is certainly a good example of why you shouldn’t believe something just because it is published.
Edit: but I also don’t want to argue this point too much because impact factor is not a good measure of the quality of a journal
Nature Scientific Reports has 5-year impact factor ~4.5 and it's very low quality megajournal with tendency to publish junk science. The peer-review is designed to be very low quality (scientific importance is not criteria for example).
It’s a test to see what they could get away with. If this wasn’t a story then juul would move up to a non-garbage journal and try again.
Well maybe it's because Juul bought the journal or maybe the researchers found no correlation between Juul's profits and public health.
This is the 21st century equivalent of attempting to disprove the links between smoking and cancer.
The undercutting of understanding the risks of cigarettes was happening when the risks would have been blatantly obvious to researchers, unlike with current vaping products. So while the PR technique is similarly appalling, the context is different.
Vaping for fun can be done without nicotine, though. They could place some more visible stickers that say "Smoke only nicotine free - same fun, no stupid addiction!" or something.
And locking e-cigarettes behind a prescription would just make people continue smoking the freely available tobacco products. Nicotine patches failed to gain wide adoption in part because of that.
But yes, the hysteria over flavors is uncalled for. Flavors are useful. If you don't prefer the taste of your vape to the cigarettes, you're not going to switch.
The amount of juul pod junk under my feet in my city seems to be growing exponentially year over year.
At least cigarette butts are biodegradable!
They should be forced to make these things out of cellulose or a similarly biodegradable product as their consumers are going to treat them as butts and just chuck them on the ground when they're done.
Disposable vapes are gaining in popularity, and some of those disposable vapes even come with a USB charger (even though they're not designed to be refilled without fluid).
This means every time someone is done with the vape, they throw away much larger piece of plastic (compared to Juul pod).
When comparing the price-point of a refillable vape (or Juul), disposables are around the same price or cheaper, without the hassle of getting fluid on your hands.
Disposable vape buyers tend to ignore the price of refills is cheaper than buying a whole new vape, so most of the clientele are kids.
Disposables are also very popular for products such as Delta 8 - since Delta 8 has higher price point compared to Nicotine - the disposable plastic is just a marginal part of the cost.
That's only true of the device. JUUL pods contain 2ml and a 4 pack is ~$20, about the same price as a 30ml bottle of juice for refillables.
Why did they agree to this? Why aren't they afraid of damaging their reputation? I'm not an health researcher or medical professional, but I would think if I were one, I wouldn't want to publish in this journal afterward, take seriously articles written in it, or be associated with it. They lost three editorial board members at least. Maybe AJHB will be an example that $51,000 isn't worth trashing a reputation that took decades to build.
Surely as hell I support investigating marketing to teenagers but in this case it would seem to me more adequate if they would rather investigate the cases of the sickness and find out what exactly was causing it. I even doubt the sick were using Juul.
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2019-09-24/hiltzik-ju...
Edit to add this article, too:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kathleenchaykowski/2018/11/16/t...
I think my mum would disagree
I really wonder why industry didn't do that. No industry wants their own products to be banned or legislated about by regulators - and paying a few more scientists to find replacements for ingredients that cause lung cancer would seem like a no-brainer.
> „This product contains nicotine. Nicotine is addictive“
made me wonder…
Maybe social media needs the same?
> „This Facebook product contains dark patterns and is engineered by a team of psychologists to maximize time spent scrolling the news feed. It is highly addictive.“
Big difference between inhaling a heated liquid vs combusted solid. And yes the nicotine is mostly harmless. I rather enjoy my nic addiction with good black coffee.