>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.
Why does this matter though? Both are still bad for your body and we shouldn't be encouraging them.
Vaping nicotine has some negative health effects, but there's no evidence it leads to lung cancer, because it doesn't generate those PAHs.
Profiting off of driving an addiction with health side effect is abhorrent - to me at least.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We could use even stricter rules (such as making vapes prescription products) to tilt it even more towards the "quitting" market.
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.
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.
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.
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.
True, but we tried "abstinence only" with The Prohibition, too, and that didn't work, either.
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.
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.
Also mint Nicorette taste pretty good.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Is vaping safer than alcohol?
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.
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?
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.
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.