But you can still buy tobacco cigarettes? How does this make any sense?
What if we start seeing teens go back to smoking cigarettes now?
What if we start seeing teens go back to smoking cigarettes now?
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.
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.
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.
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.
(The refrain about "freedom" is a matter of settled law, as far as I'm concerned.)
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.
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.
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.
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/
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://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...
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.