Smoking a cigarette is like taking a fast acting but short duration antidepressant along with a mild/moderate stimulant simultaneously, which has been specifically engineered to go from lungs to brain in the shortest time possible.
Switching to vaping from smoking has a transition period ranging from a few days to just over a week while the brain adjusts to receiving the nicotine much more slowly. Vaping relieves nicotine cravings, but at normal doses in an ex-smoker barely scratches the surface of the instant relief/rush delivered by a cigarette.
Nicotine itself and on its own is relatively harmless to an ex-smoker. But should still be avoided by non-smokers.
Most of the harm caused by cigarettes are related to the tobacco-specific nitrosamines found naturally in tobacco which are carcinogenic, combined with additional carcinogens and harmful compounds created when tobacco combusts.
That said many of the flavourings used in e-cigarettes are harmful to health, especially when heated. Most notably sucralose, which itself partially decomposes into carcinogenic compounds when heated to temperatures reached by vaping. But that's another problem, my main point is that nicotine is only about as harmful as caffeine when consumed alone outside the context of a cigarette.
Why is this meme so popular on HN? There's nothing 'harmless' about it, and a few minutes of Googling makes that incredibly clear. Even in the absence of tobacco compounds, nicotine unquestionably wreaks havoc on pulmonary and cardiovascular function, and promotes vascular calcification and arteriosclerosis. It's also implicated as a cause with a plethora of other horrible medical issues.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicotine_poisoning
However for nicotine addicts the e-cigarette is certainly a better method of delivery than the cigarette, as you're not getting exposure to known carcinogens like benzo[a]pyrene etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benzo(a)pyrene
> "Benzo[a]pyrene is a polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon and the result of incomplete combustion of organic matter at temperatures between 300 °C (572 °F) and 600 °C (1,112 °F). The ubiquitous compound can be found in coal tar, tobacco smoke and many foods, especially grilled meats. The substance with the formula C20H12 is one of the benzopyrenes, formed by a benzene ring fused to pyrene. Its diol epoxide metabolites (more commonly known as BPDE) react with and bind to DNA, resulting in mutations and eventually cancer."
My guess is because people who claim this rarely have any references, and when they can dig one out, it's very bad.
Chewing tobacco is about just as fast without I assume engineering or maoi.
It's like when we talk about alcohol consumption. Yes there are negative effects from the calories and other stuff in beer, but the main negative health effects come from the alcohol in the beer, so we talk in terms of alcohol consumption not beer (without the alcohol) consumption.
Nicotine is the same thing, it's far worse than the simple act of smoking. It changes the brain chemistry to be dependent on it, it hardens your vessels and leads to long term systemic hypertension (high blood pressure) that can cause tons of other issues.
Smoking is a form of nicotine consumption. If cigarettes didnt have nicotine we wouldn't smoke them.
Smoking causes X number of preventable deaths per year, which is the most preventable deaths in any one bucket. There are other forms of nicotine consumption, which also cause preventable deaths which add to that number. So Y number of additional deaths due to chewing tobacco, Z additional due to vaping nicotine and the systemic circulatory issues that come with that. It's a simple fact that X < X + Y + Z
Your argument sucks. You should feel bad about that.
> It's not that A implies B. It's that B [did you mean A?] is contained within B.
"A implies B" and "A is contained within B" are equivalent statements. For example, if you are Catholic, you are a Christian. Being Catholic implies being Christian. Catholicism is contained within Christianity. However, you can't go the other way. Being a Christian doesn't imply that you are a Catholic.
Regarding alcohol consumption, we talk about about consumption, compared to beer consumption, because we know that alcohol consumption has the same general risk profile whether or not you're drinking beer, wine, or spirits. The important part is that alcohol has been shown to have negative effects. Because alcohol has been shown to have negative effects, we can extrapolate that beer has the negative effects associated with alcohol, However, if only beer had been shown to have negative effects, we couldn't automatically assume alcohol was the cause because there is a lot of other stuff in beer that distinguishes it from wine and spirits.
Now the same thing applies to smoking. Smoking is known to produce over 9000 chemical compounds, 70 of which are known to cause cancer. At least part of the causal link to cancer is specifically tied to the compounds from combustion specific to smoking. Therefore, we can't automatically assume that nicotine is harmful just because its present in smoke and we know smoke to cause cancer.
Here is an overview from Cancer Research UK: https://www.cancerresearchuk.org/about-cancer/causes-of-canc...
> Nicotine is the chemical that makes cigarettes addictive. But it is not responsible for the harmful effects of smoking. Nicotine does not cause cancer, and people have used nicotine replacement therapy safely for many years. Nicotine replacement therapy (NRT) is safe enough to be prescribed by doctors.
So, in short, just because smoking is known to cause cancer, doesn't mean you can assume that nicotine would be responsible for the same number of deaths if you replaced smoking with some other form of nicotine consumption.
I'm not talking about a hypothetical comparison between smoking and vaping.
I'm talking about my original statement, and your misunderstanding of it.
My original statement was not to say that if you replace smoking with vaping. Of course vaping is less bad than smoking.
My original statement was to say that smoking nicotine is the leading cause of preventable death, so if we add in deaths by chewing and vaping thats even more deaths. That's all my original comment and subsequent replies are referring to - not a comparison of vaping vs smoking.
See, you've assumed that A implies B means B implies A again. Smoking tobacco is the leading cause of preventable death. Nicotine is in tobacco, but that doesn't mean you can replace "Smoking nicotine" anywhere you see "Smoking tobacco." Hope that clears it up.
Weed is addictive too. Smoking plant matter of almost any variety increases cancer risk.
If you're eating 100+mg a day you will have physical withdrawal symptoms. This kind of consumption just hasn't been possible, or more likely affordable, for a large swath of the population until a few years ago.
I think your bigger concerns at 100+mg a day will be paying for your habit, and having a life outside of melting onto the couch and watching dumb YouTube videos
In this study 57% out of 1000 persons seeking treatment for drug and alcohol dependencies said that quitting smoking was harder than their problem substance.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/37628...
From this article: 'Heroin addicts say it is easier to give up dope than it is to give up smoking,'' says Dr. Sharon Hall, a psychology professor
https://www.nytimes.com/1987/03/29/magazine/nicotine-harder-...
I dont have personal experience with opiates, but do with nicotine and I can say it took 10-15 years before I didn't have a regular desire to consume nicotine. It was the hardest thing I've ever done.
(I originally said 1k, which appears to have been misremembering.)
Vitamin A is far too thick to vape in a Juul type pod system. The only use it has is as a thickener for concentrates which use a whole different type of wicking system.
Concentrate cartridges use a ceramic stone with a heating element inside or encased. This ceramic greatly reduces the flow rate and allows slower vaporization of the concentrate.
I ran a vape shop for years I am more than happy to discuss safety of vaping but won't participate in whataboutism.
But how can you convince others of this view if you're "not particularly interested" in the relevant facts?
https://www.google.com/search?q=how+many+people+died+from+va...
also, vitamin e acetate was used to cut black/grey market cannabis vape products, not nicotine. nic juice is so cheap to produce that there's no reason to cut, vitamin e acetate is probably more expensive.
i quit an 8 year smoking habit the first day i purchased a vape. it's depressing and frustrating to see this option removed for others.
[0] https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/heal...)
This would be like saying Coors Light is dangerous because your cousin's moonshine had methanol in it.
https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/basic_information/e-cigarettes/s...
> National and state data from patient reports and product sample testing show tetrahydrocannabinol (THC)-containing e-cigarette, or vaping, products, particularly from informal sources like friends, family, or in-person or online dealers, are linked to most EVALI cases and play a major role in the outbreak.
Incidentally, smoking has been a pretty significant cause of car accidents. People drop them while driving and panic.
I think there is nobody in this comments section who would disagree with banning the use of Vitamin A Acetate as an additive to vape products, and also nobody who wouldn't want those responsible for the deaths to be held accountable.
None of those are in a Juul cartridge. Vitamin A Acetate is also not in a Juul cartridge.
This is literally just looking at pathways and saying "yeah that seems possible".
Not to mention there are tons of published papers that are worth less than toilet paper. This is a huge problem and pubmed is a central database that doesn't exert anywhere near enough curation, it is meant to be used by professionals of targeted interests who can exert proper critical judgement, not by random people.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6148641/
>Recent reports that PubMed, one of the world’s leading biomedical databases, includes predatory journals and their publications1,2 is cause for concern. PubMed handles millions of queries daily and represents a key source of knowledge for health researchers worldwide. Much medical research that underpins clinical practice relies on the findings generated by peer-reviewed studies that are retrieved via biomedical databases, in particular, those that are free to search such as MEDLINE and PubMed. Thus, it is imperative that these databases are free of contamination by the outputs of predatory journals with their critically flawed peer review procedures.3 We analyze why this is happening and identify some possible solutions to stop the penetration of predatory journals and publishers into biomedical databases.
https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/critical-thinking-health-a...
>Andrew Wakefield’s fraudulent paper linking the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine to inflammation of the colon and to autism, and upon whose illusory foundation the modern anti-vaccine movement rests, is listed on PubMed (though it is marked as “retracted”). There is a journal called Medical Hypotheses whose articles are also discoverable through PubMed. The journal’s purpose is to publish theoretical papers, and its editors will consider “radical, speculative and non-mainstream scientific ideas” as long as they are written in a way that makes some kind of sense. One such paper proposes that ejaculation might be a potential treatment for a congested nose. Another argues that this handy intervention is “inconvenient, unreliable and potentially hazardous.” Both are, you guessed it, found on PubMed.
Just because it's on pubmed doesn't mean anything. There are so many terrible studies published and listed there that only a researcher of the studied field can tell whether it's any good or bad.
>Nicotine itself and on its own is relatively harmless to an ex-smoker. Why is this meme so popular on HN? There's nothing 'harmless' about it, and a few minutes of Googling makes that incredibly clear. Even in the absence of tobacco compounds, nicotine unquestionably wreaks havoc on pulmonary and cardiovascular function, and promotes vascular calcification and arteriosclerosis. It's also implicated as a cause with a plethora of other horrible medical issues.