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Comment by dottedmag | Hacker News Reader

> The law does not affect vaping, which has already become more popular than smoking in New Zealand.

Isn't the end result the same for vaping?

Commercial nicotine vaping is perhaps 95% less dangerous than smoking (maybe more)[0].

There has been a bizarre crusade against vaping from public health and medical authorities for the last decade. This campaign relies mostly on misleading stats and fear tactics (for example, conflating bootleg THC cartridges using vitamin E acetate with much safer commercially-available nicotine cartridges). Looks like New Zealand saw through that at least.

[0]: https://www.rcplondon.ac.uk/projects/outputs/nicotine-withou...

> There has been a bizarre crusade against vaping from public health and medical authorities for the last decade.

Going from smoking to vaping has a very clear, positive benefit.

There's concern that kids who wouldn't have taken up smoking are taking up vaping, though, which is fairly reasonable. In a perfect world, vaping might be a prescription smoking cessation tool, but in a realistic one it's gonna be impossible to keep it out of non-smokers hands.

Agree, but GP comment implied that smoking and vaping have the same health impact, which they very clearly do not. I assume this is a result of consuming misleading content from trusted sources.

Lying about science is kind of how we got into a lot of the trouble we’re in. I wish public health communicators would knock it off.

I think we're reading that comment very differently; I read it as "the legislative end result", not the health one. That eventually vaping is likely to be similarly banned once there are no tobacco smokers.

No, the health issues of smoking are overwhelmingly the result of breathing in (incomplete) combustion side products, which are extremely cancerous and trivially demonstrated to be so in freshman biology experiments.

What do you mean? Tobacco has well known long term adverse health effects and the article mentions "smoke". Whereas vaping (I'm assuming a good brand) has no active substance other than nicotine, which is no more harmful than caffeine which society consumes in copious amounts, and doesn't produce smoke.

The long term side effects of vaping are still very much in the air. The technology is too new to understand how the chemicals will affect lungs over decades. Don't get me wrong, probably still "healthier" than tobacco, but we just don't know yet.

I did specify a vape that has no active substance other than nicotine. So you can pretty much rule out the "chemicals".

I'll admit I'm not well versed on the subject, but I don't think the vapor is just water, correct? Otherwise the pen would need to get insanely hot to turn it into vapor so you can inhale it. I've seen some pretty tiny vape pens. Doesn't make sense.

Does such a vape exist? One with 100% pure, nothing-else nicotine? No propylene glycol or glycerine?

It's been questioned whether that estimate is low, but the frequently cited LD50 for nicotine is 0.8-1 mg/kg, so by that metric a .7 mL Juul pod of pure nicotine would be more than a lethal dose.

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

Nicotine is associated with considerable adverse effects on cardiovascular health. Caffeine has not been found to have any long-term effects on cardiovascular health.

Not true. There are studies from Sweden where we've got "snus". It's been quite clear for a long time now that that the problem is inhaling smoke from a fire. Which makes a lot of sense when you think about it for a second. Which is why legalizing pot smoking is idiotic, while vaping, cookies, or whatever is a different beast.

This is wrong. I don't think you searched, but if you did you probably didn't go very far. What you came up (I'm assuming you did search instead of just parroting what everyone else says) from your search is the result of decades or propaganda to demonize tobacco, and nicotine was simply a practical scape goat to go along with it -- well, for a good demonizing marketing campaign to work I guess you need to manufacture or choose an enemy that is easy to spot.

I'm pretty sure there's no double blind, placebo controlled trial contrasting nicotine with cardiovascular health. Simply because for any adverse health effects to come up, it would need to be taken for a very long time, and no one would run such a study. As for tobacco, well, obviously. But it's not really controlled for nicotine, is it?

> I'm pretty sure there's no double blind, placebo controlled trial contrasting nicotine with cardiovascular health. Simply because for any adverse health effects to come up, it would need to be taken for a very long time, and no one would run such a study.

Sure, but the conclusion "therefore we can't know" is invalid. This is what we have observational studies and animal models for. You can absolutely do this in, say, rhesus monkeys and draw some reasonable conclusions if the trial results match up with observational results in humans.

You're absolutely right. The possibility of animal models didn't even cross my mind when writing the above comment. There probably are such studies. I'll look for them and get better informed.

This. People naively assume it's the nicotine that is harmful in tobacco. It's really not much more harmful than caffeine. The problem with smoking is the tar. Vapour has zero tar.

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