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Comment by rgbrenner | Hacker News Reader

If you smoke cigarettes, then yes they’re less terrible. But e-cigarettes are expanding the market by marketing to teens and adding flavors like bubble gum. You can say Juul didn’t mean to market to kids, but the reality is that e-cigarettes appeal to kids and it’s a growing market with kids. Intentions are irrelevant.

E-cigarettes are not better than not smoking anything.

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The funny part is that JUUL discontinued their "fruity / sweet" flavors years ago. Meanwhile, that market has been taken over by dozens of competitors that have every dessert flavor you could imagine at every gas station in the country. These devices are single-use which means you throw away the entire device (including the battery) when it's empty. This is worse for the environment, easier for high schoolers to use discreetly and, importantly, enables evasion of regulations that were written specifically to target pod + rechargeable battery systems like JUUL.

Tobacco-flavored JUUL pods are mainly used by former smokers as an alternative to cigarettes. High schoolers are vaping hot pink, mint bubblegum flavored, one-time-use Puff Bars now. They won't even notice when JUUL is banned.

This is spot on. There’s an abundance of disposable e-cigarette brands here in Canada that resemble something I could manufacture in my garage. It’s scary. When I was using them — to quit smoking — some clearly had a worse and almost immediate impact on my lungs than others. There’s no consistency. How did banning Juul help us here?

There’s other rechargeable vapes available now like Stlth, which seem far better than the disposables, but it’s still madness.

My sample size is not large but I know more people at my high school who vape weed than nicotine.

So ban those too, what's the problem?

ban all the things! think of the children!

The idea that a flavor like bubble gum is ~only~ attractive to minors seems wildly off-the-mark to me. Adults enjoy bubble gum, and also enjoy flavors that are not tobacco-like.

I've never paid attention to Juul marketing, so perhaps they were committing faux pas in their targeting, but the existence of a bubble gum (or other enjoyable flavors) should probably not meet the threshold as readily as we allow it.

Exactly, it's so weird to see people talk about fruit flavors as if they're designed to appeal to children. I'd say most of the vape liquids on the market in Germany have some kind of sweet flavor, because guess what, adults like them.

Not to mention commercial availability of flavorings.

Juice companies, for the most part, are just throwing together vegetable glycerin, propylene glycol, and a couple of commercially available food/candy flavorings.

People love to bring up the "Adult flavors" argument like it's as simple as deciding to make juice that tastes like coffee, like they've forgotten that some companies have trouble producing coffee that tastes like coffee.

Some of the criticism against Juul were that they marketed directly to kids because their ads used colors. That's it. Colors.

I abhor the tobacco industry. I wish their execs had been thrown behind bars decades ago. They've proven that they'll put profit over human life and that they're willing to lie to our faces while they do it. They've earned all the skepticism and scrutiny they get, but I can't get over how baseless and absurd that argument against them was. Ads with colors and young adults in them aren't targeting children. There is plenty of evil to point at without getting ridiculous.

It's consistent with the FDAs current stance to also ban menthol cigarettes.

Yes... hypocritical in almost every way. They should just ban cigarettes and alcohol and caffeine and sugar.

100% I am an old man and all I vape is bubble gum juice

‘Bubble gum flavour’ is just a less common variant of mint. We have some of it growing in our garden - wintergreen. There’s nothing inherently childish about mint.

I've had lots of mint gum, but not sure I've ever had a mint bubble gum.

> ‘Bubble gum flavour’ is just a less common variant of mint.

"Bubble gum" flavor is a combination of fruity flavors. No mint.

https://www.thrillist.com/eat/nation/what-is-bubblegum-flavo...

> People think it’s a made-up flavour but it isn’t.

It is a made-up flavor, originally created by Thomas Adams.

> No mint.

Other sources disagree.

https://candyflavor.com/How_To_Make_Bubble_Gum_Flavor.html

> the key is really in the wintergreen, cinnamon and clove

Interesting, I've never tasted a minty bubblegum flavor. I have had "bubblemint" flavored gum, which tastes quite different to me.

It’s mint botanically but it doesn’t taste of mint gastronomically.

It tastes a bit of bubblegum!

Oh, wow! TIL

Lest people be misled, the full recipe as listed:

> 3 parts banana flavor, 3 parts pineapple flavor, 2 parts wintergreen, 1 part cinnamon and 1 part clove.

>Adults enjoy bubble gum, and also enjoy flavors that are not tobacco-like.

If the public benefit is that current tobacco-smokers will switch, then the experience only needs to be better than cigarettes - broad appeal beyond that is only a net negative for society.

How is it a net negative for society that some people enjoy something?

Smoking, and thus e-cigarettes, seems to have become a culture war issue. The plausible post-hoc rationalized reason that people didn't like cigarettes is because they are extremey unhealthy - now that the topic of discussion is e-cigarettes, which have little evidence of being significantly unhealthy, and people still seem to despise them suggests that there is something much more interesting going on sub-perceptually.

Wild theory: perhaps some people for their own reasons don’t like being around people vaping.

I put up with it like I accept that people fart. Being around “vape smoke’ is something between discomfort and disgust (smell, smoke, etcetera), Ugggh. Yes: I have close friends that vape. No: I don’t complain to them or make faces or anything.

Even if I were hypothetically shown it was a purely nonsensical psychological dislike, that doesn’t mean I could stop disliking it.

> Even if I were hypothetically shown it was a purely nonsensical psychological dislike, that doesn’t mean I could stop disliking it.

I think there is great value in considering this possibility, and all others. The problem I am trying to get at is that people have a tendency to not be terribly interested in what is true.

Yea, the flavor thing is weird to me too. When I was in the Navy, a lot of the people I worked with swapped over to vaping and even 45 year old Senior Chiefs were vaping some dragon fruit passion shit.

I credit vaping to helping me quit cigarettes and nicotine entirely. The flavors were amazing and were a great alternative to cigarettes. Vaping allowed me to wean myself from nicotine over the course of about a year. Once I worked down to a 0% solution, I quit vaping easily - and I'm not the type of person that gives up habits easily.

Taking these tools away from consenting adults is morally criminal. If your main argument is "think of the children" I'm going to doubt your sincerity.

I completely agree. I don't like the company, but see always saw it as a viable cheap alternative to pricy nicotine gum/patches.

I've always felt the reason why most people fail quitting any drug America deems unsafe, is because of this all or nothing approach they have to quitting. American black and white thinking.

I've seen so many people quit a drug (Alcohol, nicotine, benzos, opoids, and even meth) by going cold turkey. It has dismal failure rates. Yes there are people whom have one cigarette, and they are up to 4 pack a day. Yes--there are people whom have one beer, and are buying 1.75 L of Jack daily. Those addicts are not typicical.

Tapering down over a long period of time seems to make more sence. And then allow the recovering patient access to a very low dose of their drug of choice forever.

Sorry about my speech. Personally, I have found cutting way back on a dangerous substance has been successful. And the way our government handled this opioid crisis has me seeing red. Yea--just make it impossible to get any regulated opioid, and then wonder why we have people dying by the hundreds daily due to street fentanyl.

>E-cigarettes are not better than not smoking anything

Technically true but there's barely any health risks from vaped nicotine. The number of serious injuries are in the low thousands (total, not per year) and are mostly associated with THC vapes of questionable origin.

Very untrue. Nicotine increases hardening of the arteries, increases blood pressure, and seems to contribute to other elements of artery disease.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-nicotine-all-b...

Huh. Sauce?

>increases blood pressure

So does caffeine.

So does eating a meal. Digestion is quite the active process.

Sounds like sugar

There are potential risks to inhaling any gaseous substance, but in terms of the molecule itself, nicotine probably isn't riskier than caffeine. Nicotine patches are likely safe, for example.

https://www.gwern.net/Nicotine

Source? "I am best known for work on the darknet markets & Bitcoin , blinded self-experiments , dual n-back & spaced repetition , and anime neural networks ."

In the post.

>Another example is a breathless media article “Children Exposed to Nicotine in Utero Have Lower Reading Scores” on Cho et al 2012: here we can’t blame the media or Wikipedia editors because the paper itself (a longitudinal correlational study) has “nicotine” in its title and abstract (a total of 8 times), though the abstract quietly mentions it is actually a study of “maternal smoking”

Respectfully, he includes at least a hundred different sources in this post. Asking "Source?" when each claim he makes is accompanied with sources is a little confusing.

I wouldn’t suggest nicotine is safe, but patches are likely safer than vaping excluding risks associated acute nicotine poisoning.

The non nicotine components of vaping are also harmful. Smoke machines operating on similar principles are a known workplace safety hazard. It’s likely decades of inflammation from vaping would present it’s own unique hazards.

Yes, there are lots of other things to consider in tobacco and nicotine vapor solution. Just in terms of the single molecule itself, nicotine doesn't appear to be more harmful than caffeine. Acute caffeine poisoning can be fatal.

That’s another consideration, in pill form people do OD on caffeine. It’s rare, but so is consumption of canine pills. Generally caffeine consumption is in food or drinks at levels which limit consumption.

From that perspective patches and vaping are probably closer to a pill than coffee and as such represent increased risks over the nicotine it’s self.

I'm an adult with moderate ADHD and use nicotine gum as my treatment. I've been on Concerta and Adderall and find the gum works just as well but with no side-effects at all. I also don't have to request a refill every 30 days and it's MUCH cheaper.

I've never smoked a cigarette or vaped in my life. The dose required to alleviate my symptoms is so low (6~8mg a day) that addiction is basically non-existent. I don't take it on weekend unless I'm working and am totally fine.

I get salty when people demonize nicotine, it's made my life tolerable.

Can you go into some detail as to how nicotine improves your symptoms?

I can definitely see how there could be some overlap, although I've never actually had nicotine sober. Still, seems hard to believe it could be as effective for significant ADHD considering the standard suite of amphetamines is a bazooka by comparison.

Still, the symptoms that get grouped together as ADHD are so diverse that I could see it helping people. Biggest issue is probably relative addictiveness, since after 15 years of adderall use I feel absolutely no desire to take it on weekends or vacation, and that's probably not totally the same for nicotine.

Not the op, but nicotine seems to reduce my tendency to be involuntarily distracted at random noises and other stimuli. However, I don't have a diagnosed ADHD (never bothered to, I have only very mild signs of it).

> so low (6~8mg a day)

That doesn't sound like a very low dose for a non-smoker? While addiction to gum is very unlikely, the probability of developing tolerance is high. How long have you been using this dosage?

That's a pretty low dose for a daily basis. A single cigarette varies a lot on how much nicotine it has but on average it's around ~12mg and most smokers probably don't smoke a single cigarette a day so 6-8mg is quite low.

Sure, but smokers shouldn't be the baseline for what is healthy behaviour.

The absorbed dose from a cigarette is closer to 2mg, so 6–8mg is 3–4 cigarettes per day. That's an order of magnitude down from the dosage of heavy smokers, who smoke multiple packs (of 20 cigarettes) per day. But it's not the half-cigarette's worth you're suggesting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicotine

Nicotine patches are probably a less addictive option than gum, but gum itself is much less addictive than smoking.

"barely any health risks from vaped nicotine."

Heard that for a century from tobacco companies. I guess we will see after 50 years of vaping.

Inhaling combusted plant matter is worlds different than inhaling a nicotine/glycol aerosol.

"The potential hazards of chronic inhalation of propylene glycol or the latter substance as a whole are as-yet unknown."

What possible harm could come from chronically inhaling a viscous agent into our lungs?

You mean the one asthmatics have been safely inhaling for sixty years?

These are asthmatics, reminder. If propylene glycol was a problem for lungs, we would know.

Which medications?

Ventolin does not use propylene glycol: https://www.drugs.com/pro/ventolin.html

Airomir did not.

Maxair? Nope: https://www.drugs.com/pro/maxair-autohaler.html

Even pro-vape sites recognize that this is BS.

> There is one study looking at the potential to use PG as a carrier for an inhaled medicine (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18158714) and another which mentions that PG or ethanol may be used as a cosolvent (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12425745) in nebulizers, but no evidence presented of an asthma inhaler or nebulizer that is actually used today containing PG.

There's also a huge difference between 3-4 puffs a day of a smaller amount, than chronic hundreds of puffs a day with vapes.

Not which medications, which device: nebulizers.

They routinely use propylene glycol: you're wrong, I'm right. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12425745/

Severe asthmatics will be on a nebulizer five or ten minutes at a time, several times a day. Far higher volume than the most committed vaper.

Cigarettes are directly marketed to kids and have been for decades. I still remember the DARE posters from high school THAT WERE MADE BY THE TOBACCO INDUSTRY, and were specifically designed to have the opposite effect.

I also remember that a solid quarter of the student population smoked. So good luck with your abstinence policies, they have such a strong track record.

Speaking of which, does abstinence only education result in less teen pregnancy, or more? I can't quite remember.

Smoking prevention has been going well for decades. This graph[1] shows a consistent year-over-year decline in adult per capita cigarette consumption since about 1970, bringing it to around a quarter of its peak level in the 1960s. I had more trouble finding good graphs for teenagers, but it looks like teen smoking had a resurgence in the 1990s and has been in decline since then, with a sharp rise in vaping in recent years. (See Figure 2 here[2].)

Before e-cigarettes came along, it sure looked like the United States was well on its way to eliminating tobacco smoking altogether.

[1] https://kottke.org/14/07/the-rise-and-fall-of-american-smoki...

[2] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/su/su6901a7.htm

Vaping is not smoking. This should be obvious, but you apparently are totally unaware that vaping is not smoking.

Oh, give me a break. It's nicotine, it's inhaled, it's made by corporations who market it to children so they'll become addicted before their brains finish developing. Vaping might do less damage to the lungs, but aside from that the problematic parts are the same.

Why eliminate smoking entirely? Some people want to smoke and that should be their business. The risks of smoking have been known for decades and some people accept those risks because they enjoy it. Instead of harassing them, how about we accept that personal freedom means that some people won't always make the choices you would like.

Smoking, at anything like the scale it currently happens, is not in any way a deliberate, rational acceptance of risk vs. reward. Almost all smokers start smoking when they are teenagers (i.e. children), when their brains are not fully developed. Nicotine is highly addictive, which makes it very difficult to later make a rational decision to stop. And teenagers who do start smoking do not do so as individuals in a vacuum, they do so with other teenagers due to peer pressure and other social factors.

Marketing a highly-addictive carcinogen to children is not about "personal freedom".

Your argument boils down to "think of the children" which I do not find compelling. I can rationalize taking all kinds of things away from people with that logic.

You're setting up a straw man for yourself to knock down; the points they're making are more nuanced than just 'think of the children' and you're being excessively reductive when you frame it that way.

Make another argument then. There are lots of ways to protect children without limiting the liberty of consenting adults.

So tell that to my stepmom that made me sit in a car when I was 13 years old with the windows rolled up while she chain smoked on a 2 hour drive because she was on the phone and couldn't hear with the windows down. Despite my protests...

Your freedoms end where mine begin. If you want to smoke, fine. Do it in a location where I NEVER have to breathe it in.

My point is that "consenting adults" aren't really involved here. A "think of the children argument" is when you argue for banning something that adults do because a child might be exposed to it and might suffer harm as a result. An example would be wanting to ban porn (something for adults) because a little kid might see it and warp their fragile young mind, or whatever. The key part of this scenario is that the little kid's exposure to porn is neither intentional nor desired (on the part of porn producers) or common.

Starting smoking, on the other hand, is something that, for the most part, only children do. The entire goal of tobacco companies is to get children addicted so they'll keep buying nicotine for the rest of their lives, without any adult decision-making involved. Here are some numbers for you:

Almost 90% of people in the US who smoke tried their first cigarette before they were 18[1]. Effectively all of the rest did before they were 26 (most by 22), which is around the age where the human brain's capacity for risk assessment and long-term decision-making is fully developed. Two thirds of daily smokers started doing that by the time they were 18, and over 95% did by the time they were 26. Over a quarter of daily smokers started before they were 15. Furthermore, people who start smoking are most likely to do so with the help of their peers (i.e. other children), not adults.

The concept of rational free choice is a bit murky even under the best circumstances. When you add in addiction, it gets a lot more complicated. And when you're talking about children getting addicted, I don't think it's a helpful framework. Children are not capable of consenting to a destructive long-term addiction, and in practice, almost nobody else does.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/n/surgtobyouth/pdf/ See chapter 3, especially Table 3.2.

Your “personal freedoms” end when they cause you to become a burden on the state. If you want to smoke I’m totally fine with that as long as you agree to be banned from using any public health services ever, no Medicaid no Medicare no social security. As you said, the dangers have been known for decades, so everyone involved can make a rational decision.

When your choices cause others problems they’re no longer just “yours” and you need to consider how you’re affecting the wider society.

>Your “personal freedoms” end when they cause you to become a burden on the state.

Orwell, is that you?

>If you want to smoke I’m totally fine with that as long as you agree to be banned from using any public health services ever, no Medicaid no Medicare no social security.

This is something that people who harass and spit homeless people would say.

>As you said, the dangers have been known for decades, so everyone involved can make a rational decision.

You think drug addition is in any way rational? Wake up.

Governments only really started to care about vaping when teen smoking started to plummet. Those teens were going to become a valuable revenue stream!

Also, governments have a perverse incentive to maintain tobacco sales. There are 10x as many enforcement checks for tobacco taxes being paid as there are for underage tobacco purchases.

The less people smoke cigarettes (vapes are not part of the deal), the less the states get from the Tobacco master settlement case in 1998. There is a significant financial incentive for governments to keep people smoking.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobacco_Master_Settlement_Agre...

E-cigarettes can't get in the way of eliminating tobacco smoking, because they aren't tobacco and they aren't smoking.

It's the smoking that's deleterious to health. Nicotine is an addictive stimulant but if it's otherwise harmful it's very difficult to demonstrate this.

That depends where. Here in the UK, cigarettes cannot be marketed at all. To kids or adults. That seems like a sensible middle ground to me. Allow the product to be sold, but don't allow advertising that pushes people into buying it.

I feel like abstinence campaigns work somewhat better with cigarettes than sex/alcohol because cigarettes are legitimately bad for you, and many users of cigarettes genuinely regret taking up smoking (whereas barely anyone will tell you they regret drinking or having sex).

Drinking significantly increases your risk of certain cancers. While smoking is more of a cancer risk, drinking inhibits judgement and can lead to all sort of issues in addition to cancer risk - drunk driving, violence, etc. In short, alcohol is legitimatly bad for you.

https://www.icr.ac.uk/blogs/science-talk/page-details/when-i...

Yes, it is. Alcohol shouldn't be allowed to be marketed either.

> Cigarettes are directly marketed to kids

Can you provide a recent example of cigarettes being marketed to kids in USA?

Not in the US, but "Winners Don't Quit" is a tobacco company marketing campaign from 2019 on.

Then why only ban Juul and not all e-cigarette products? The article points out that the company is no longer the most widely used among children (Juul is now fourth in market share among high-school-aged users), and I can assure you that Puff Bars are inferior in quality and probably less healthy.

There are no carcinogenic chemicals in vape liquid. So how are they so bad? Yes nicotine is addictive but the only serious health effects come if you consume insane amounts of it daily (usually cardiovascular, it basically just raises your blood pressure).

I think it's mostly a moral panic from seeing so many kids using it, rather than an accurate assessment of the dangers

This is just false. Go read the literature on nicotine. It helps create artery disease, both in terms of blockages and having them explode (hardening of the arteries) later.

So does sugar. So what's exactly the argument? If we forbid everything that might be dangerous the world would look very different. Half our food would vanish. Cars get banned...

To have a fair discussion I think we should compare to other substances we legally consume.

"So does sugar" is not an argument.

Neither is "if we forbid everything that might be dangerous".

Let's try to move beyond Page 1 of the textbook for Logical Fallacies 101, please.

The difference between sugar and nicotine is that sugar isn't addictive (at least, no where near as addictive as nicotine) and is naturally present (in many forms) in lots of nutritive foods.

Re: cars, cars have upsides. What's the upside of nicotine?

re sugar not being addictive.... i smiled at naivety... it took me years to get off sugar in my tea :)

regarding upsides of nicotine - one may improve mood, alertness, calm down anxiety. These are acute results. Long-term - I believe there are quite a few papers on nicotine usage being associated with decreased chances of alzheimer's. (just one off top of my head, there might be more.)

Yes, that might be a real difference. (But I, personally, find sugar very addictive. YMMV) But what happens if we compare the health implications? Obesity, and sugar as one of many parts of this problem, might be more deadly than nicotine. The thing is... I don't know! But it is startling how different the discussion in the UK is compared to the US. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/e-cigarettes-an-e...

There is so much politics and misinformation in this discussion. That's not good.

ps: For me the upside of nicotine is fun. The same with alcohol. (I say this as someone who is vaping once a month and uses nicotine as a drug but does not want the downsides of cigarettes.)

Yeah sugar is very bad for you, almost certainly worse than non-tobacco nicotine. We badly need to regulate it.

> For me the upside of nicotine is fun. The same with alcohol.

I'm with you 100% on this one; I love to drink haha. But alcohol is pretty tightly regulated most places, both culturally and legally. I guess I'm fine if vaping/smoking/drinking/sugar are in the category of "we know they're bad for us but we like it, so we'll have some kind of regime where we can enjoy them in moderation"?

Nicotine is not intrinsically addictive. The form in which it is consumed has a significant impact. Nicotine in the form of patches, gum or lozenges is not addictive.

> What's the upside of nicotine?

Nicotine is potent cognitive enhancer.

> Nicotine in the form of patches, gum or lozenges is not addictive.

No. Nicotine in these forms is "a lot less addictive" than inhaled forms. It just doesn't seem that way to step-down users.

Sugar is absolutely addictive, and if you've ever used just nicotine (not tobacco, which contains a range of drugs that synergize to make the product significantly more addictive) you'd probably find that it is less addictive than sugar.

Nicotine is naturally present in at least as many foods as sugar is, albeit in very low concentrations.

Nicotine on it's own has a nootropic effect in normal doses, and a sedative effect in larger doses and is a very useful compound. It is at least as useful as alcohol, and the vast majority of the downsides of using nicotine come from using tobacco, not nicotine itself.

> Sugar is absolutely addictive

Maybe in some sense of the word [0], but definitely not like nicotine [1]. [1] also addresses nicotine replacement therapies, finding that nicotine on its own is still addictive.

> Nicotine is naturally present in at least as many foods as sugar is...

Definitely untrue, it's like eggplant, potatoes, tomatoes, cauliflower, and a couple others.

> ...albeit in very low concentrations.

The amounts are comically low:

> ...you need to eat 5 kilograms of eggplant, 12 kilograms of fresh potatoes or drink 9.5 liters of tomato juice to get [a cigarette's worth of nicotine, or 3mg]. [2]

I don't really think there's an equivalency between 30kg of eggplant and 20mg of nicotine in a vape pack.

> Nicotine on it's own has a nootropic effect in normal doses, and a sedative effect in larger doses and is a very useful compound.

We have other things for this. Is there a need for nicotine as a sedative? Do we need to satisfy that need with bubblegum Juul?

[0]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5174153/

[1]: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7724697/

[2]: https://thisnutrition.com/food-products-containing-nicotine

> The difference between sugar and nicotine is that sugar isn't addictive

~40% of our population is obese and another 35% or so are overweight and we don't regulate it at all in any capacity (marketing to kids, packaging, etc).

Oh I'm super on the train that sugar needs to be regulated. But the sugar industry has strongly corrupted US legislation, so good luck.

While I agree obesity etc. are problems, I would argue that this is due to sugar's ubiquity rather than its addictive qualities.

The argument is that after weighing the costs and benefits, they think nicotine products should be more strictly regulated or banned or whatever. Not that everything dangerous should be banned. That calculation would look different for sugar or cars; you can’t just substitute the word sugar for nicotine and have the same discussion.

I mean, it is the same discussion right? It's just the costs and benefits are different. Obviously some people feel more strongly about some of the costs, and some people feel more strongly that the government should allow people to make their own decisions.

It just seems oddly specific and too "big government", why is one specific vaping product being banned when the science has shown that they're less harmful than cigarettes, you can still buy cigarettes, and there are almost certainly other more harmful substances (like alcohol) that have a bigger impact on the health of the USA that are not banned.

I don't feel like anyone would argue against more regulations, but an outright ban of sale feels super weird.

>To have a fair discussion I think we should compare to other substances we legally consume.

To have a fair discussion you should compare both the costs and benefits of an item, not just a simplistic downside that is not even at that simplicity equivalent. Comparing damage from nicotine to the damage of sugar while ignoring that sugar is also necessary for human life shows the problem with your line of reasoning.

I don't think this is the argument you want to be making. Sugar comes out on top for overall healthcare costs incurred over a more or less nootropic a notch above caffeine.

I swear we could cut down on 80% of the comments in this thread if people took a minute to learn that essentially all the health risks from smoking are the result of combusting plant material and not the effect of nicotine.

Moving the goalposts to costs and smoke doesn't change sugar is required for life, nicotine is not. It doesn't change that unrequired nicotine does have significant bad health effects.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4363846/

Source?

There might not be any human carcinogens in cold vape liquid, unless it was produced by organized criminals and introduced into the bootleg market, which is quite common. But once heated, which is how an e-cigarette works, even the non-carcinogenic solvents react to form probable human carcinogens.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5307352/

There's a sibling comment outlining the negative health effects of nicotine, but there are also significant financial effects: maintaining a nicotine addiction is expensive. Should we really be a society that allows products whose only role in the market is to get consumers addicted to them, providing a profit stream in perpetuity? What's the upside to that?

Its only expensive because the regulations made it that way. I was buying a litre of unflavored pg+VG with the nicotine already mixed in (I got to pick my own flavors to mix in) and it coat me pennies on the dollar compared to buying a 100ml bottle of shitty premixed juice at the store. They put an end to that when they made shipping nicotine to consumers through the mail illegal.

Many chemicals that kill you do not have carcinogenic elements.

You have no way to know that there are no carcinogenic compounds in vape fluid, unless you make it yourself.

If you're serious about ensuring that you know what goes into your body, just mix nicotine with USP food grade vegetable glycerin at desired concentrations and vape that, no flavors.

Don't forget environmental waste. The amount of pen-plastic vapes that get tossed is so polluting. There is nothing recyclable in those products.

Adults like candy and different flavors too. Back when e-cigs had to be imported from China, people were on forums and Twitter sharing DIY e-juice recipes that usually used candy flavoring. Flavored e-cigs used to be marketed as electronic hookahs. It doesn't make sense to me that the government goes after flavored nicotine products but they're seemingly ok with a huge variety of fruity alcoholic beverages.

I think the less you try to make sense of it the better of you'll be, because they have no damn clue what they are doing.

I don't think anyone can say, in good faith, that Juul didn't mean to market to kids. That doesn't even pass the laugh test. Every single facet of their brand design, products, and marketing were clearly and obviously intended to appeal to kids from the very beginning. Let's just be honest about that, at the very beginning of the debate, and move forward from there.

I used to have a philosophy of, "what happens if my kid screws up worse than me?"

What world would they find themselves in?

I don't smoke regularly, but if my kids did, could they get a healthier alternative?

What if they fell into heroin?

It would be terrifying, but could they be safe?

I no longer can make that argument. I'm susceptible to the taxation attack. Ten years ago I would have gladly paid all the taxes for my kids and a dozen others. But as some have pointed out, I don't make enough money.

It's a good conservative argument, I can't pay for that.

So, I'm sorry, I can no longer take part in this discussion.

You're right, abstinence is better, because unlike the responsible conservatives who are paying for necessary services like education, I can't help as much.

I'm so sorry. I wanted to pay more. We could have had scientific discussions on risks of food grade propylene glycol or something. Would it make a good hair gel? Sorry, some light-hearted kidding.

My new dream is to not ever have to engage in this discussion again. Because the idea of others wasting time in this divisive acidic discussion is sadder. Thank you.

You are correct.

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