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Comment by Bayart | Hacker News Reader

> Are you implying they're much less terrible?

It's outright benine. No need to frame it in a negative way (« much less terrible »).

> I like to say that vaping is slightly less terrible than combustible cigarettes because it is very clear that you. should. not vape. unless. you. smoke. cigarettes.

Sure. And vaping shouldn't be made to look dubious or suspicious to smokers who would otherwise wildly profit from switching off cigarettes. Drawing an equivalency relationship between smoking and vaping is really bad from a public health perspective.

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I'm not sure what your point is but i'll just repeat: if you do not smoke combustible cigarettes do not vape.

People can debate if vaping or nicotine is good or bad or moot from a health point of view but a simple salient fact is:

A small percentage of people who never smoked cigarettes before start to vape and then switch to combustible cigarettes. That is bad.

I'm sure it happens. But I'm not sure it's statistically relevant and deserves tailoring public discourse around. It just sounds like « think of the children » nonsense to me. I've certainly never seen it happen. In fact I've never seen anybody vape who wasn't previously a smoker, that just doesn't exist in my area. That's anecdotal, but I doubt you're basing your opinion off broad empirical data either.

I am basing my opinion on data. The nicotine industry spends hundreds of millions of dollars per year on studies discussing the incrementality of "years of life saved from switching to vaping from combustible cigarettes minus the years of life cost from net new people starting to consume nicotine"

Also this comment is correct that a poorly regulated and operated vaping industry fuelled a youth nicotine crisis: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31836842

>youth nicotine crisis

What are we doing to address the nation's ongoing caffeine crisis?

You seem to have a particular fixation on nicotine and haven't taken an opportunity to look at any of the counter-evidence a dozen different people in this thread have tried to show you. The primary enemy here is inhalation of combusted materials, followed by inhalation of just about anything, followed by nicotine.

Cigarette smoking is a crisis. People applying nicotine patches will almost certainly never be a crisis. Trying to conflate the two, as you're doing, doesn't make sense. Trying to conflate tobacco smoking and nicotine vaping is slightly less senseless, but still irresponsible.

There absolutely is a massive risk of people who've never smoked starting with vaping and then moving to cigarettes, but you're only falling back to that as a motte to your "nicotine is a harmful molecule" bailey and aren't making it the center of your argument.

Good grief — for one thing, teenagers vaping is a crisis.

That alone appears to render your entire comment moot, but I'll add that all of my comments today have been incredibly consistent: smoking cigarettes is really really really bad and vaping nicotine is really bad (because its addictive, there are longterm implications of inhaling nicotine, ...) - to put it another way, if you smoke combustible cigarettes then you should switch to vaping ASAP. But if you do not smoke combustible cigarettes do not start vaping because nicotine is highly addictive!

PS: equating nicotine to caffeine is incredibly stupid and offensive towards the millions of people that battle nicotine addiction every day.

I mean caffeine and nicotine are roughly comparable, sure caffeine is less bad but it's still an addictive substance that's incredibly hard to quit, gives you crippling withdrawal, and has long term negative health effects, and is really easy to OD on if you ever stray from natural sources and commercial drinks with measured doses. People would be battling quitting caffeine everyday too if there was a huge push to do it.

You're allowed to acknowledge the odd double standard the world seems to have where because the most popular delivery methods for nicotine are extremely harmful that we treat nicotine itself as more harmful than it really is and say that we would still be better off simply banning nicotine. If it was an established cultural norm that gum just had nicotine in it and you had to buy "denic" gum like decaf there would never have been a massive push for people to quit.

Also, I think you're overestimating how many young people vape. I promise you it's not that cool.

Respectfully, it feels as if you're not reading my or anyone else's posts in this thread. Yes, I do not advise someone start vaping nicotine if they're non-smokers. From everything I understand, there really isn't more harm in applying a nicotine patch a day compared to drinking a cup of coffee a day, assuming average/recommended doses.

Yes, nicotine can be addictive. Caffeine can also be addictive. Yes, nicotine can cause certain health problems - as can caffeine. I'm surprised you worked at a company that sold nicotine products and yet have such a moral panic mentality around a fairly mundane, mild cholinergic stimulant out there.

Smoking is terrible for one's health, but smoking cannabis is possibly not much healthier than smoking tobacco; people just smoke tobacco far more frequently per day than cannabis, typically. At least one study shows cannabis smoke is actually more likely to cause lung cancer than tobacco smoke when taking that into consideration. Odds are burning and inhaling the leaves of many other kinds of plants will have similar risks. This is not a defense of tobacco smoke on my part but rather an attack against any kind of combustion-based smoking period.

I have. And besides the anecdotes, you can just look at the fact that vaping became a super hype amongst kids, kids that at least in my country were not smokers and couldn't have been because cigarettes are taxed to be totally unaffordable for kids, and even if they can afford them they're hard to buy because it's illegal to sell them to kids.

Everybody knows that some teenagers vape. The question is whether vaping (which has minor health affects) is leading people into smoking (which has severe health effects.)

I live in NYC and pre-pandemic I would see many high school age children vaping on the street and on the train platforms. I can't recall seeing any high school age children smoking cigarettes. I'm sure it happens but vaping is starting in middle and high schools prior to cigarettes.

So we've both seen different things and both are anecdotal. I don't think it should be banned BTW.

The statement was about whether some vapers graduate to cigarettes, which seems completely unrelated to whether some high school kids vape (what you stated) which is trivial to verify is true.

I can confirm there are tons of young folks <20 who are strong vape smokers. I can guarantee you most if not all are not on it due to weaning from long term cigarette addiction.

Cigarettes here are not cool anymore to young (great), vaping unfortunately is.

OMG, now that you put it that way, you're right! People making personal choices you disagree with is the worst thing ever!

That is a truly miniscule group of the population, to the point where I would wager that those people would have eventually ended up smoking even in a world where vaping didn't exist.

The benefits of vaping over smoking even ignoring health concerns are simply massive. It doesn't smell nearly as offensive, it's vastly more palatable, you don't need to litter or look for an ever-dissapearing batch of ashtrays, there's vastly less social stigma, and if you're so inclined you can get much heavier nicotine hit.

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