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
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.
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.
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.
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.