FDA Denies Authorization to Market JUUL Products
fda.gov
fda.gov
FDA to order Juul e-cigarettes off U.S. market(wsj.com)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31835843
Submitted by kgwgk | 389 points | 662 comments
This article is the FDA doing that.
Beyond that, vaping is so obviously safer than smoking. It strikes me as profoundly hypocritical to ban the less dangerous alternative, while keeping the unbelievably deadly cigarettes on the market.
For most people I know the problem aren't the physical effects of addiction (those are over in a few weeks) but the peer pressure from all your friends who are still smoking.
Since they banned smoking in bars and restaurants in Austria, I saw A LOT of people quit smoking. It's really not that hard when everybody looks at you in disgust when you suck on your cigarette outside a bar.
If you offer vaping as a socially acceptable form of smoking, these people have a lot less incentive to give up nicotine, and will stick with it.
So I think that vaping is slowing the decline of nicotine, and it absolutely should be banned. (At some point cigarettes should probably be banned as well, but it's probably too early for that)
But when I look around me, I see that a lot of people have managed to quit smoking without vaping.
Marketing vaping as a way to give up smoking is very disingenious, because you are just trading one addiction for another.
I know that you can give up smoking without starting another addiction. I did it, my girlfriend did it, my sisters did it, my best friend from high school did it. It took a few attempts, but we all managed to kick the habit. All of us used to smoke a pack a day, and now we're free.
Juul was a last ditch attempt by tobacco companies to keep everyone addicted so they keep paying their idiot tax for their daily dose of nicotine. I'm glad someone is doing something against it.
No, I'm saying that enough people have switched from smoking to vaping to more than make up for the health damage caused by people who only started vaping.
Same thing with the DEA telling me what substances I can consume.
Now instead of having a legal option, your encouraging underground, unregulated options.
How about this, slap a big label on everything from fattening foods to recreational drugs, with " This will fucking kill you, here for a good time not a long time".
Then either raise the enlistment age to 21 or drop the age of consumption to 18.
It's pretty fucking absurd you can enlist at 18 ,but can't consume recreational substances until 21.
What if we start seeing teens go back to smoking cigarettes now?
It really depends on context and a lot of opinion and judgement where people can disagree. It's not some mechanical logic thing.
Also (at least in the US) it's actually illegal for teenagers possess or consume alcohol.
You want to smoke? Vape? Fine. But let's not create a profit motive for anyone to actively work on getting people addicted to this shit.
Smoking bans is not about "doing something" or "doing dumb things", and if you abstract them up to that level in order to compare them you'll lose all fidelity in your question.
(The refrain about "freedom" is a matter of settled law, as far as I'm concerned.)
Edit: I used the word prescription perhaps incorrectly. I believe something like a dispensary would work too. Just a higher standard than a gas station clerk.
If you were starting a fresh-slate society, with no history and all the knowledge/technology we have today, you'd probably ban alcohol and legalize marijuana.
The fact is that alcohol provides a huge number of social benefits to a huge number of people and it outweighs the harms. I’d probably prefer a cannabis-dominant culture myself, but it’s not for everyone.
Yes, but because it provides a safer drinking supply.
We've got water purification plants now.
Also since when is "it's tradition" a defense for nonsensical public health policy?
The other recent announcement from the administration is to reduce the amount of nicotine in cigarettes which a lot of harm reduction specialists are concerned will result in more smoking rather than less.
It doesn't make for good public health policy, but as the pandemic made quite clear, the general population gets a pretty big say in it. People get pretty grumpy when you go against traditions, even for a good reason.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...
Edit: I'll also add that JUUL didn't reducing smoking in teens. Smoking was already on the way out. It was conquered culturally in the US, but JUUL et all has brought at all back.
https://www.alzheimers.gov/clinical-trials/memory-improvemen...
In the end we don’t really know if it makes more sense to be in favour of vape prohibition than alcohol prohibition. But pretending that vaping is in the same category as smoking in terms of potential harms is ignorant.
I wasn’t claiming that nicotine use is appropriate for kids, although there are likely medical uses of small doses to provide sensory gating, and it’s also not at all uncommon for wizened psych nurses to tacitly encourage schizophrenics to smoke/vape since it can provide such a rapid self-administered de-escalation of symptoms. In cases like that and many which are less dramatic than full blown schizophrenia, it’s definitely preferable that vapes are more or as accessible than cigarettes.
More to the point, most people use some sort of psychoactive drugs from time to time as methods of changing state or mood, and all have preferences for some over others. All too often we assume that other neurotypes don’t exist and that everyone else should be fine with our own preferred mixes of caffeine, alcohol, cannabis, research chemicals, plant medicines, etc.. Recognizing that if your own preferences are valid, that it’s likely others are too is a good forward step, and it’s arguable that vapes are less addictive and far less harmful than smoking, and are a win from a harm reduction perspective.
We made a huge shift as a society from nicotine-dominant workforces to caffeine-dominant workforces. There’s no indication that the availability of vaping products is reversing that secular trend in any meaningful way.
Edit: Removing some snark, you’re arguing for some therapeutic benefit to nicotine.
So surely you’d be for a blanket ban on the sale of all nicotine products with the exception of a highly regulated prescription market and subsequent labeling of nicotine as a controlled substance, right?
I type and think fast, sorry. I’m also not trying to convince you as much as provide counters to bad arguments. You’re right to speak is important to me, but I’m practising harm reduction.
> surely you’d be for a blanket ban on the sale of all nicotine products
No. Age restrictions or sin taxes are one thing given the negative externalities, but if someone prefers a light vaping habit over a Frappuccino habit it’s not up to me to push them onto the black market.
Prohibition very often leads to worse outcomes.
I can’t believe my original comment is being downvoted; I enjoy nicotine. I spent most of my early 20s smoking.
It’s pure fantasy and intellectual dishonesty to label vaping as a healthier alternative to smoking. Either way you’re a slave to nicotine. Acknowledge it and be okay with it and the adverse health effects likely to strike you — heart disease, high blood pressure, stroke, kidney disease — or quit.
But don’t lie to yourself that there’s any modicum of an argument to be made about healthy alternatives.
I didn't downvote you, so I don't know, but if I were to hazard a guess as to why it's being downvoted it's the absolutist stance you are taking. Like most things in life, healthiness is a spectrum and your refusal to acknowledge that is frustrating.
>It’s pure fantasy and intellectual dishonesty to label vaping as a healthier alternative to smoking.
The current medical understanding disagrees. A few chemicals inhaled is better than a few thousand chemicals. John Hopkins Medicine, for example, explicitly agrees that vaping is less harmful than smoking [1], but both are still obviously worse than not inhaling anything and if you have the willpower to drop nicotine all-together, that is very obviously the best choice.
>Blaha says “There’s almost no doubt that vaping exposes you to fewer toxic chemicals than smoking traditional cigarettes.” [1]
https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/wellness-and-preventi....
The only dog I have in this fight is what you have graciously pointed out — that the “very obviously best choice” is to quit nicotine altogether.
Kowtowing to nicotine pundits about health benefits of a toxic chemical ends with generations of adults slaves to said chemical, early deaths and ruined lives. I don’t do it and you shouldn’t either.
Lol. I don't vape or smoke, what a weird assumption to make solely because I pointed out that something can be healthier without being healthy.
For someone without a dog in this, you sure seem awfully eager here and elsewhere in the thread.
I just said I do have a dog in this fight. You should too, it’s a major public health issue. Congrats on not smoking! Hope you keep it that way and encourage others to follow in your footsteps.
The abuse of that or the "cigarretization" is the problem.
One thing is to get real organic tabbaco and smoke in small quantities not inhalling only getting nicotine thru gum lininings.
About the benefits in cognition [1][4] alzheimers and parkinson [2], helping with covid [3] and even testosterone [5]
Cigarretes + additives are very bad you can see the difference here [6].
Is tobbaco bad? yes. Is nicotine bad maybe.
Is cigarrete bad? Yes very
Is Cigar bad? Yes but not as cigarrete.
TlDr -> Go for pure nicotine or cigars if you need neuroprotection.
[1] - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1579636/
[2] - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1859921/
[3] - https://openres.ersjournals.com/content/7/2/00713-2020
[4] - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9006184/
Eh, probably not. The real situation is probably that they were late, and tobacco cigarettes were established before society got hostile to nicotine products.
Smoking rates have been steadily dropping over years and decades, but there's recently been an explosion in teen vaping.
If marketing doesn't do anything, why was Juul marketing to them? (Bonus points: Why is anyone marketing anything to anyone?)
And if it did nothing, then surely banning it would not hurt Juul in the slightest?
Fun fact, the cigarette companies lobbied the government to ban cigarette advertising. That way, none of them would be able to market and get ahead of the others while all of them would save money on the marketing that was no longer needed. A corresponding drop in sales did not occur.
Sitting in a cloud of someone's exhaust is really just as gross to me as sitting in a cloud of someone's smoke but it's just not nearly as obvious by smell.
For what it's worth (unless you're balling out in a private flight), that's highly illegal and a federal offense in the USA [1]. Not sure if you're in another country, but I do question the legitimacy of that comment if in the US. None the less, I do agree vaping is gross/annoying.
https://www.faa.gov/newsroom/faa-levies-161823-against-eight...
They even have a small ad campaign to celebrate their leniency: "You could have spent $35k on a brand new truck, but instead you are paying a fine because you punched a flight attendant":
https://www.faa.gov/data_research/passengers_cargo/unruly_pa...
I agree no one should be subjected to gross smoke against their will, but you can make a better case being accurate in it's effects.
Spirit airline?
including regarding genotoxicity and potentially harmful chemicals leaching from the company’s proprietary e-liquid pods
– that have not been adequately addressed and precluded the FDA from completing a full toxicological risk assessment of the products named in the company’s applications."
I'm guessing this is why it is Juul specifically. Other companies may be next, or maybe the FDA hopes using this mechanism to take down the biggest player will strike enough fear in the market that the other vendors fix the issue overall.
This is probably a good thing though. It sounds like Juul will still be able to operate in this market but will just have to provide better data in future applications. Having high standards for FDA approval is something I'm in favor of, as long as they're not setting such a high bar that there aren't any options for people who are trying to quit cigs.
Its the same strategy that some companies use where they work with the earliest stage companies, i.e. Stripe, and they grow with them. In an extremely perverted view, big tobacco just wants to grow with their customers hahaha.
Last I heard vaping was generally considered to be safer overall because it lacked the extra carcinogens found in cigarettes, but it came out in the wash as people tend to vape far more frequently than they used to smoke and vapes are also a more direct punch of nicotine.
I’ve heard that a pipe is probably the best way to smoke if you have to do it: Tends to have a more pleasant smell to those around you, is a much purer tobacco product, and it generally isn’t inhaled. I think pipes raise the rate of various mouth cancers though.
1. https://www.fda.gov/tobacco-products/premarket-tobacco-produ...
They also provided incomplete and fraudulent data about the ingredients in their liquids, which is the actual justification for the FDA revoking authorization (FTA).