One includes the other. Smoking is one form of tobacco consumption. Tobacco consumption includes smoking, vaping, chewing, snuff, etc. So, yes, it is.
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.