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I used to vape. I even made my own vape juice, for a time, which is quite a bit easier than brewing your own beer!

Note that the linked Harvard study is from 2015(!); the vast majority of vape juices no longer contain diacetyl. Acetylpropionyl is the replacement and I guess we're not sure if that has similar problems.

In any case, vaping is UNQUESTIONABLY better than smoking cigarettes.

Edit: note that DIY e-liquid recipes often disclose relatively responsibly. See for example, this recipe for "strawberry fog", which I mixed up a couple of times: https://e-liquid-recipes.com/recipe/226322/strawberry%20fog

(My "house" recipe was this strawberry lemonade, which doesn't contain anything even similar to diacetyl: https://e-liquid-recipes.com/recipe/3832603/Strawberry%20Lem...)

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Regulatory capture explains most of these anti-vaping campaigns:

> Some studies have suggested that e-cigarette use can be modestly helpful for smokers trying to quit. For example, an analysis of 61 studies found that e-cigarette use was more effective than other approaches to quitting smoking. The study authors estimated that out of every 100 people who tried to quit smoking by vaping, nine to 14 might be successful. When only using other methods, such as nicotine patches or behavioral counselling, only four to seven smokers out of 100 might quit. A separate study suggests vaping may help smokers who aren’t able to quit reduce the number of cigarettes smoked per day — at least for six months, the duration of the study.

Doubling the chances people can effectively stop smoking is no good for profits.

Source: https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/can-vaping-help-you-quit...

Hm? My understanding is that most of the "Big Tobacco" companies have gone all in on smokeless cigarettes and other nicotine delivery technologies, since that's where the young (and growing market is).

Philip Morris, for example, is the pinnace of "Big Tobacco" and is currently all in on "transforming" themselves into a "smoke-free" company[1].

[1]: https://www.pmi.com/

True, but the regulations they push through often happen to only impact smaller competitors, or only impact things people are actually using to quit smoking.

Also, their VEEV vapes are only available in tobacco and menthol flavors, and those flavors have been shown to be less effective for tobacco cessation. (They also tried to push through laws banning other flavors, if I remember right.)

Pre-empting the "think of the childeren" responses; tobacco marketed to kids continues to be widely available:

https://shipfest.org/vaping-for-kids-the-top-10-vape-brands-...

Check out the Pod Juice Freeze "Strawberry Kiwi Pomberry", for example. If not for the big nicotine warning on the bottom half of the label, I wouldn't be surprised if parents confused it with kids' Pedialyte, or some sort of DIY popsicle mix:

https://www.ejuices.com/

they try offering in fruity flavors: "yall are trying to hook kids!"

they try offering in tobacco flavors: "that's not effective for cessation!"

wtf are they supposed to sell then?!

Per the article, they should reformulate to one of the many known-safe ingredients that don't actively destroy lung tissue, and the FDA shouldn't have inexplicably delayed the requirement for five years.

Also, law enforcement could enforce existing laws against marketing tobacco to kids.

The most effective cessation flavor is supposedly "unflavored". I believe it's been banned (in the same way that strawberry lime pomegranate is "banned" -- not very effectively).

When you make a hedge bet you don't go all in. They are still making normal cigarettes, and last I heard expanding their tobacco productions to take advantage of emerging international markets.

Big Tobacco owns the vape companies. New smokers use vapes many times more than all other forms of smoking combined. Trading a slightly higher churn for a 5-6x more uptick in customers is a great trade. Especially if they churn to another product you own.

Yes, but this is their plan B. Simultaneously working to regulate away the disruptors and also acquiring some of them is good business sense. They hedged their bets.

Anyway, do you have a better explanation for the inconsistent positions tobacco regulators take in the US?

Plan B? Vapes are making them more money the money then it's costing them. And they were already an industry dying out (in the US) as new smoker numbers kept dwindling.

Meanwhile, they own the biggest vape companies.

And I don't see what inconsistent positions are taken. If you tell me them, I'll gladly tell you why.

They don’t own ALL vape companies, just those most heavily marketed.

1000% agree. The whole narrative to non-stop discuss vaping as opposed to smoking is being pushed by the super powerful cigarette companies. Vaping MIGHT be harmful to a person but cigarettes are 100% CONFIRMED to be terrible for humans.

Anyone who tries to tell me vaping might be worse I send them to this YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Pwj6BuS8Ds

Yeah vaping is lit. It's funny how we are 100x more healthy than our grandparents and they are trying to encourage us to do bad things like them like eat white bread, pretemd COVID doesn't exist, and smoke cigarettes instead of vape.

Why are you assuming that our grandparents are pushing the narrative? Money / greed doesn't care about your age group.

> smoke cigarettes instead of vape.

They want you to not smoke or vape.

It's not like you have to choose one or the other.

> 1000% agree. The whole narrative to non-stop discuss vaping as opposed to smoking is being pushed by the super powerful cigarette companies. Vaping MIGHT be harmful to a person but cigarettes are 100% CONFIRMED to be terrible for humans.

Huh? Is anyone significant actually saying vaping is so harmful that you should smoke cigarettes instead?

IIRC, the actual health issue with vaping was that it had been presented as so "harmless" that, after significant long-term declines, nonsmoking teens started taking up nicotine use again in large numbers.

The tobacco companies.

Which tobacco company is not also in the vape business?

Hello there. I just want you to know, I have upvoted every comment I've read from you so far.

Keep up the good work, you're doing the reading, thinking for yourself, and questioning the lies so many people here spew uncontrollably.

> The tobacco companies.

That's not really an answer. Do you have an actual example?

Here's one that made news 12 hours ago. Phillip Morris just hired Holman out of the FDA:

> It's unclear when Holman had recused himself, but it appears to have been less than four months ago. On March 18, Holman signed off on the third generation of PMI's heated, smokeless tobacco product, IQOS.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/07/fdas-top-tobacco-sci...

The article mentions a second recent incident like this.

It's pretty common practice to "passively" wait for a regulator to take a questionable action on your behalf, wait the minimal recusal period, and then hire them to "work" for you for some large multiple of typical market compensation.

> Here's one that made news 12 hours ago. Phillip Morris just hired Holman out of the FDA:

That's just Phillip Morris hiring a guy, it's not Phillip Morris saying vaping is safer than cigarettes so it's healthier to smoke.

OK, now go look at the marketing for the product they bribed this guy to approve.

lmao no. they're on board with vapes as a safer option bc it pulls them out of the long decline to nothing they was on

Anecdote, but a few weeks ago I was on an Amtrak commuter train waiting to get off, and a bunch (half dozen) of smokers waiting near the exit with me unanimously agreed that smoking and vaping are comparably harmful, and some even went to say that vaping is worse.

Selection bias, though, and one of them claimed to be a 2-3 pack a day, for decades.

It's not just the cigarette companies. It's the tax revenue.

You can buy an supply of nicotine and glycol for a few hundred bucks and make your own vape juice for several years. It's healthier (So you pay less on medical bills), you pay thousands a less in taxes, and it devastates profits for cigarette companies. A lot of vested interests stand to lose a lot of money, so it's no surprise they have rolled out the anti-vaping propaganda on all fronts.

It would surprise me if acetylpropionyl will not have similar effects, it is a close analog of diacetyl, and an equally reactive alpha dicarbonyl substance, and for example generates free radicals at a similar rate as diacetyl[0] and at a higher rate than other flavorings. The only difference with diacetyl is probably that diacetyl's harms are more well-documented.

Speaking of beer brewing: diacetyl is actually generated during the brewing process and, although considered an off-flavor[1], is important for the characteristic aroma of some beers, one famous example is Pilsner Urquell.

[0] https://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/acs.chemrestox.8b00400 (figure 5)

[1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/jib.205

From a harm reduction philosophy point of view it's honestly just best to have no flavoring whatsoever. All flavorings used are from food products which have been approved for oral use and not inhalation. We have no idea what these compounds are doing to the lungs or other tissues when bypassing first pass metabolism.

From my perspective it would be the least harmful to stick with just nicotine + PG/glycerol.

I also used to vape.

I still do, but I used to too.

>In any case, vaping is UNQUESTIONABLY better than smoking cigarettes.

Why does this matter though? Both are still bad for your body and we shouldn't be encouraging them.

Because many smokers, probably in the millions, have successfully used vapes to quit smoking.

I would guess all this is propaganda to try to ban vapes but keep cigarettes legal. UK's NHS actually promotes vaping as a smoking cessation as policy.

Here's the NHS page on e-cigarettes. You don't see the constant fear mongering you get from the US. I wonder why.

https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/quit-smoking/using-e-cigarettes...

There is a financial incentive in the US for the government to do this based on the tobacco master settlement agreement in which the tobacco companies give the states money based on smoking rates. Lower smoking rates, less money in the budgets. Ban the most successful smoking cessation tool, get more money when people go back to smoking.

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

Edit: Source: 19% of people who used vapes to quit smoking still weren't smoking after a year. This compares to 9% for other cessation products. It's the most successful cessation product by more than double.

https://www.webmd.com/connect-to-care/vaping/vaping-smoking-...

In 2019, there were approximately 50.6 million smokers, so it would be pretty easy to say at least a million people quit smoking using vapes with a 19% success rate.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33211681/

In 2022, there are nearly 40 million smokers, so in 3 years, over 10 million people quit. If just 10% of those who quit used vapes, that's a million.

https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/index.htm

Unfortunately for me, I'm one of the people who quit smoking using Juul. As soon as they are banned, I will most likely go back to smoking. I wish that wasn't the case, but it probably will be. Bad for me, bad for you, great for state budgets.

If they’re a smoking cessation product, then we should require a prescription so that the companies pushing vapes don’t attract a new generation of users who have used neither.

Ya perhaps. As long as it isn't over-burdensome like typical prescripts are, I'd say 1 prescription lasts a year. Nicorette used to require a prescription, but they stopped it after a decade or two.

Of course that's not the objective. The objective is to ban it. That's why you won't hear any sensible dialog about it.

Nicorette has the advantage of tasting bad. No one is going to buy it unless they want to quit smoking.

Kids don't vape because it tastes good, they vape because of the nicotine. Cigarettes taste really bad, kids don't smoke because of the taste of cigarettes either, they smoke because of the nicotine. The whole candy flavor attracting kids is just some more BS IMO, kinda like the whole "pot is a gateway drug" thing.

Also mint Nicorette taste pretty good.

If vaping tasted like unwashed ass, it would be far less popular.

And smoking is a lot like coffee, some people do enjoy the taste/smell.

And others like the effects more than they dislike the taste.

So the fact that vaping tastes better than both Nicorette and cigarettes makes it an easier sell. No one is doing it because it tastes good, but because it tastes good, it's easier to start.

I can’t help but draw a parallel to contraceptives/emergency contraceptive. Restricting access will reduce the potential benefit more than it will curtail new users (ie smoking rates will go up, with more cigarette use).

Contraceptives don’t kill or maim people.

They quite literally do, but that’s the point (though I’m using that liberally; I’m not intending to argue the semantics of “life”). Preventing children from being born with an awful quality of life is just as/more beneficial than preventing people from taking up vaping.

Theyre pretty easy to DIY. Just look up a video on youtube of some kid doing it. Thats actually a lot more dangerous because now you run the risk of them doing it improperly and having batteries explode.

None of the things you need to DIY a vape can be controlled because its all common of the shelf stuff used for many things.

The only thing you can control is nicotine. And i can also order it from china, and the chinese always forget to label the concentration correctly or mention it at all.

So, i think this wont stop kids, but might stop adults from switching to vaping. Because nicotine free vaping is impossible to effectively ban, trivial to DIY. And the nicotine part that you can try to control (e.g. india does) is only really interesting to existing smokers, but also: chinese labeling.

Last but not least, i'm not sure i would have ever went and gotten a prescription. Probably not. The extremely low barrier of entry and ~100x cheaper were important factors for me.

The addictive part is the main issue. People don’t smoke for 30 years because it tastes good, and I don’t think vapes are any different.

I don’t think kids would ever DIY non-nicotine vapes enough to cause a public health crisis. Kids could have huffed Halloween fog machines in the 90s but they didn’t.

Vapes are very different. Im speaking from experience. Switching from smoking to vaping is way harder than quitting vaping.

I don't doubt that. What I'm saying is that, if health concerns with vaping is justified because it's safer than smoking, then it makes sense as a cessation product. But that's not the way they're currently marketed, regulated, and sold. But, being "safer than smoking" is not a justification for hooking a new generation of consumers who didn't previously smoke.

lung.org is the tell

Approximately nobody is concerned about vapes as a tool to quit cigarettes. Somehow that's not the use case being widely promoted though, basically all vaping advertising I see is much more "hip cool thing for young people", and more popular with the 16-25y-olds than smoking was before vaping took off.

> Because many smokers, probably in the millions, have successfully used vapes to quit smoking.

You don't quote any source, so I'll feel free to use anecdata liberally as well.

I know very few people who have successfully quit smoking for more than 6 months by start vaping; on the other hand, until 5 years ago it had become exceedingly rare to see people under 20 smoking; now I see a whole lot of youth with vapes and e-cigs.

I believe the tobacco industry saw the writing on the wall and found a knew way to peddle habit forming poison to kids.

Smoking cigarettes generates PAH (polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons) and the more you inhale, the more likely they are to cause cancer. Specifically benzo[a]pyrene has been shown to form DNA adducts, which can alter replication and generate cancer cells by damaging DNA elements involved in cell cycle control, or by damaging components of the immune system involved in normal detection and elimination of cancer cells.

Vaping nicotine has some negative health effects, but there's no evidence it leads to lung cancer, because it doesn't generate those PAHs.

Yea so we're all in agreement that vaping isn't as bad as smoking - that doesn't change the OP's point that vaping is still bad and something we should probably seek to discourage. Young folks I've worked with vape a lot I've met people in their 20s that put people with chain smoking habits in their 50s to shame when it comes to stepping out to smoke/vape.

Profiting off of driving an addiction with health side effect is abhorrent - to me at least.

Because vaping is an effective tool for quitting smoking, which is much worse. The physical improvements from smoking to vaping are pretty remarkable - everything from lung function to circulation and skin quality and general energy improves.

It helped me quit my decade-plus long smoking habit, and I'm now 3+ years off of vaping as well. I hate to see vaping demonized, but I also don't particularly care to see kids take it up. It's just as, if not more addictive than cigarettes.

Huh thanks, I didn't know so many vapers were ex smokers. I always thought it was some new fad.

Every vaper I know is an ex-smoker. But I'm also 40 so I don't know many people that would be taking something like this up as a new thing.

I'm close to ~half your age, and every vaper I know started vaping from clean-slate. Absolutely zero of them were ex-smokers or have ever touched a cigarette. I honestly cannot name a single ex-smoker in my circle or a degree or two removed - all of them started vaping to vape. Almost all of them started before 18.

I don't know of a single person using it as a cessation device. Anecdotal, of course, but still, didn't expect such big of a difference compared to your post.

How many of those people would have picked up cigarettes if vapes never existed? Probably a bunch.

I'd be curious too but vapes would have to never exist in the first place probably. None have moved on to smoking, and 100% of my group finds smoking to be gross/smelly/etc "will never, that's disgusting", including the ones that have had a vape since they were 12.

There's always going to be some people who get into a bad habit simply because it's available, but barring one teenager everyone that vapes that I personally know are ex-smokers.

I think, (barring dangerous additives like the buttered popcorn flavorings), that vaping is probably 3-10% as harmful as smoking. Not harmless, but less harmful, if that makes sense.

It's partially generational. Kids don't pick up cigarettes anymore, they vape, so those who came of age after vape was common never smoked.

The older generation, those who were adults in 2010 or thereabouts, all used to smoke. We rapidly adopted vaping for QoL improvements: No more smelling like an ashtray, massively less costs, improved lung capacity, and as a side affect, quitting became massively easier.

Every cigarette user I know that switched to vaping has in turn found it easy to taper nicotine and quit. Vaping doesn't have the same addictive power as cigarettes. I was a 10 year smoker with multiple failed attempts at quitting, vaped for two years, then just stopped.

As for popcorn lung, this was widely known and discussed within the vaping community at the time, basically within a year you could not even purchase the affected flavorings without being very intentional.

It started among ex-smokers, but moved to teens especially as it went from "specialty shops" to "in drug stores". At this point, the number of ex smokers is the minority.

Vaping is an effective tool, but it definitely ruins more people's lives (those who went from nothing to vaping) instead of helping them (people who went from cigarettes to vaping).

We could use even stricter rules (such as making vapes prescription products) to tilt it even more towards the "quitting" market.

I wonder if people are actually having their lives "ruined" by vaping. Maybe. What would be worse is if vaping wasn't available and they went from nothing to cigarettes. I guess you'd say those lives would be "devastated", or something?

> What would be worse is if vaping wasn't available and they went from nothing to cigarettes

Good thing we don't have to worry about it because it's a situation we have data on. You've created a hypothetical that is incorrect. Before vaping cigarette use from people who had never smoked before had plummeted to almost nothing. Meanwhile, 1 in 4 kids from 6-12 grade vapes.

This is still preferable to a situation where 1 in 10 smokes, since tobacco smoke contains various ”boosters” intended to increase the effects of nicotine, including addiction.

Vaping does not generate dangerous particles in the form of second hand smoke — on the contrary, second hand tobacco smoke is around 95% as dangerous as smoking yourself.

The “abstinence only” approach is proven to wholly ineffective. By all means, you shouldn’t encourage non-smokers to take up vaping, but encouraging smokers to switch to vaping is undoubtedly beneficial to their health.

You can replace vaping with “any vice that can replace a similar vice but have less detrimental effects”. You can’t stop free will; you can only reduce the harm.

>The “abstinence only” approach is proven to wholly ineffective.

This isn't sex. There isn't a biological imperative to vape. Abstinence absolutely works with some things. Abstaining from ever trying heroin, for example, is a great way to never become a heroin addict.

> This isn't sex.

True, but we tried "abstinence only" with The Prohibition, too, and that didn't work, either.

True, alcohol prohibition is an example of abstinence not working on something that also isn't biologically driven. I would argue that alcohol probably has too strong of cultural/social foothold for abstinence to work. I don't think smoking/vaping is on the level of alcohol though.

Everything is bad for your body. At what level of danger do we start banning it (for adults)?

Is vaping safer than alcohol?

Obesity kills more people than even smoking old fashioned cigarettes, so in my opinion it's all a farce. The government doesn't care about your health, they care about taking your money.

We've made it deeply unpopular to discourage obesity in society.

Obesity is much harder to deal with. You can't stop eating food.

>Everything is bad for your body.

Slippery slope. Just because everything is some degree of bad, it doesn't mean there are very large differences in the degree of bad. Reasonable people are able to draw lines between those degrees and be roughly in sync with each other. The philosophical exercise of saying everything is bad is not very interesting to me.

>Just because everything is some degree of bad, it doesn't mean there are very large differences in the degree of bad.

Says the guy that said:

>Both are still bad for your body and we shouldn't be encouraging them

Have you stopped to use your own logic for a second, and maybe conclude that encouraging smokers to quit via vaping (if they cannot otherwise) would be a good thing? Because they have very large differences in the degree of bad?

If you read my other posts, you'll see that I only learned in this thread that many vapers are ex smokers. I was speaking from the perspective of young non-smokers picking up vaping.

>If you read my other posts,

I tend to avoid reading usernames when replying, so I possibly read them but did not realize that they were also written by you. If you've refined your viewpoint based on other comments here, specifically in regards to vaping as a smoking cessation, my reply was not necessary.

> The philosophical exercise of saying everything is bad is not very interesting to me.

That is why I, explicitly, pointed out alcohol, which is something that's currently legal and is known bad for people in, basically, any quantity.

It doesn't need "encouraging" consuming nicotine to feel good is something humans have done for centuries. People like nicotine, same way they like drinking, like smoking week, or like eating a donut. None of those things are healthy, but humans like it and like the way it makes us feel. It isn't about encouraging it, it is about driving demand to safer pathways.

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