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Comment by krolden | Hacker News Reader

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).

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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'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.

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.

Many chemicals that kill you do not have carcinogenic elements.

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/

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

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