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Comment by Swarming | Hacker News Reader

I’m a UK vaper (former smoker) and while I’m sure I’m going to find this annoying (disposables are helpful in a pinch when your proper vape has run out of battery or liquid), it’s clearly the right thing to do.

The e-waste involved in that sub-industry must be absolutely horrifying. Tens of millions of tiny little batteries, surrounded in plastic, lingering quantities of nicotine-rich liquids…

Glad this is happening.

I’ll take the inconvenience on the chin lol

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I'm not sure how it is in the UK, but in the USA it's also next to impossible to find a disposable vape that doesn't have an insanely high amount of nicotine. If anyone is unfortunate enough to try a disposable as their introduction to nicotine, they'll be as hooked as a pack a day smoker in no time. I switched to vaping after the pandemic and saw in realtime vapes come out with higher and higher nicotine levels, replacing the lower nic vapes on the shelves.

The only reason I had to use disposables was that I couldn't get replacement coils & nicotine juice for several months. They can't use traditional shippers, and the services they use vary wildly in quality; I probably still have a shipment gathering dust in a storage warehouse after several failed delivery attempts. For anyone trying to quit smoking, my best advice would be to go to a vape store that has a lot of custom vape equipment and not just peddling disposables. They should be able to tell how much nicotine salt / freebase liquid you should use given your current smoking habits and goals for quitting.

I was an occasional nicotine vaper, usually when taking a T break. The flavor was alright, and I couldn't feel much if anything from the hits in the 3-5% concentration range for e-juice. I never had problems just putting the device away for weeks at a time while enjoying other vices. I picked up some disposables while traveling and the experience was completely different. The flavor profile was much more rich. Things actually tasted fruity. More like a juice than the hint of a flavor I was used to from the freebase liquids I had tried. It hits far smoother. In addition I got a buzz from nicotine in a way I had never experienced before. I was literally high off my first few strong puffs. I don't get high anymore. But I also can't put it away anymore. After a day without, I'm almost constantly thinking about it. Freebase liquids do absolutely nothing to help divert my attention. Supposedly the nicotine salt vape is also only 5%. But holy shit does it feel different.

I switched to vapes for a while and genuinely my lung health was worse than smoking.

In the end it was Allen Carr’s book that got me off them, and it was surprisingly easy.

The author died in 2006 so I wouldn’t even feel too bad about pirating it, I’m quite sure he wouldn’t mind.

My pet theory is that nicotine itself isn't particularly addictive to adults.

I think the combination of additives in cigs is what makes them so hard to quit. I have quit various forms of pure nicotine with no withdrawals over the years, and treat it a bit like caffeine -- a stimulant that I use for a few months at a time before cycling off.

The only time I've _ever_ desperately craved a nicotine product was after 2-3 days of smoking cigarettes. When getting on a near-day-long flight, the whole time back I was thinking "wow, it would be great to have a cigarette right now" every 5-10 minutes.

But agreed on lung health with vaping. Also, my whole upper respiratory tract was in shambles. My throat was so dry, and it made me get sick constantly.

That’s a pretty well established theory: MAO inhibiters in cigarettes (or produced as a metabolic byproduct of smoking or combustion) cause the nicotine to be more addictive [1].

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9424897/

What if it wasn't the ethanol that caused so many horrible health problems in alcoholics, but rather all the nasty additives in the stuff they drank?

Imagine how much adulteration goes on, especially with bargain basement liquors and beers. Surely, pure ethanol is not our lone enemy in this fight.

You’re right that it’s not ethanol alone. In a similar (semantic, not physiological) manner to the MAOI hypothesis for cigarettes shared in a sibling comment, the compound responsible for most of the negative health effects (not necessarily intoxication although it is involved IIRC) is acetaldehyde, the primary metabolite of ethanol.

As to additives, I’m sure certain ones contribute their own negative effects, sodium benzoate and tartrazine for example, but in that regard it’s the same situation as the food industry.

One of the things that stuck with me about that book was the author instructing you not to give it to someone else once you'd quit and to get them to buy their own copy so he may well mind it being pirated from the the grave.

Yeah at this point, nicotine pouches might be the best smoking alternative. But I'm seeing the same thing happen there. Zyns start at 3mg which is already higher than the usual 2mg for tobacco pouches. Off brands are going as high as 8mg+, and I imagine it'll keep rising as their consumers raise their tolerance.

edit: This discussion is really bumming me out; quitting feels hopeless when we're preyed upon like this.

I was able to successfully use Psilocybin mushrooms as a shortcut to quit vaping, all I did was say out loud to myself that I was done using and when I woke up the next day I just didn’t have that deep need to use it anymore. I still had the thought from time to time, but instead of the next thought being “maybe just a little bit” driven by an immobile subconscious need, I was able to refuse myself with relatively little effort. So if you get too fed up, don’t discount the more “magic” solutions (neuroplasticity seems pretty darn powerful). That being said those types of solutions do produce more or less irreversible change, and that change can and does go in either direction.

This is a bit of a US problem. The UK and many other countries limit the strength and amount of vape juice, so they are weaker and give fewer puffs. There's a lot of evidence that this reduces the addictiveness.

UK disposables do still tend to be as high as they're allowed, while bottles of liquid come in various lower amounts of nicotine to choose from.

That may be, but the max strength in the US is 2.5x that of the UK.

Wow, even worse!

I also noticed that the flavors I'd get in disposables taste a lot more "chemical" than the ones you can find for a vape mod. I suspect that people buying them in a pinch makes them a lot less discerning about what ends up in them.

It's also possibly to do with the fact that disposables are almost universally nic salts, where as mod juices are usually freebase nic, and that can affect the flavor.

(Of course, I might be wrong, since it's been nearly a decade since I paid attention to the vape scene)

Would it make more sense to properly tax those negative externalities instead of having some authority just picking one use case as "bad"?

It might work if nicotine wasn't addictive. And because it is, the rational actor hypothesis goes out of the window, and taxing it is just going to hurt poor people who are addicted to nicotine.

This is only banning disposable vapes. The goal doesn't seem to be to cut down on smoking but on waste from disposable vapes.

How would an additional tax address this? Paying more would hardly reduce usage, and definitely won't incentivize users to dispose of vape pens more responsibly.

I can imagine a tax so high that it's effectively a ban, and a tax half that size that might be a compromise between black and white ban/no ban

I would rather the government outright bans things rather than pseudo-banning them via the back door via taxes. At least then they have to expend an appropriate amount of political capital, and there is a proper amount of debate over it.

We had in the UK the sugar tax which was an effective ban on added sugar in soft drinks - you can hardly buy any drink without artificial sweeteners now, all of the old formulations were taken off the market because they were uneconomical. However, it never prior received attention as a ban, it was always described as just a "tax".

The UK taxed tobacco to high heaven and I don't think it did much to actually curb use. It's subject to the usual 20% VAT, plus an extra 16.5%, plus a flat £6.33 on 20 packs, so well over half of the sale price of tobacco is just tax.

https://www.gov.uk/tax-on-shopping/alcohol-tobacco

Tobacco smoking has been on a downward trend since at least the 70s, from 50 to 13%, and taxes have steadily gone up since then in real terms, but I'm surprised to see that the period when the government raised taxes the most is about the only flat part of the curve.

https://ash.org.uk/uploads/Smoking-Statistics-Fact-Sheet.pdf... https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/tobacco-bulletin/hi...

The people I know that would be affected by this just get duty free from corner shops under the table now. Last I heard it's around 8 quid for 50g of rolling tobacco instead of £38 buying legit.

Wouldn't be surprised to find out they smoke more than they used to with it being less scarce.

It would encourage usage of reusable vapes, but still give people the option of a disposable vape of they for example forgot their reusable vape when traveling.

Simply, we should charge for negative externalities (not only for vapes) and let people decide what's valuable to them.

Do bottle deposits (a few cents that you get back for returning empty soda or whatever bottles to the right place) actually work? If they do, maybe the same model would work for this.

Denmark's bottle return system receives 92% of bottles and cans.

It could pay for additional people to clean up the streets, or you have a deposit on them, so that they be returned rather than littered.

I think so but the practical issues are:

Tax is one big pool of money and I doubt the money will be used to fix the issues created.

A similar idea, carbon taxes and carbon credits trading seemed politically dead at least in my country even though it is a fantastic idea.

Edit: what might work is a 5-10 British pound ransom, released on return of the disposible to a recycling centre. Give the used devices free to a reclaiming merchant that operates out of the same country.

IMO the point of charging for negative externalities isn't necessarily to fund remediation of the negative externality but to internalize the cost and force the actor to make a decision about value to them and cost based on the real cost.

If batteries are a waste issue they should be more expensive till we as society feel we are adequately compensated for the externality created. We shouldn't pick and choose what use cases are valid for others. Everyone has different circumstances and preferences.

> The e-waste involved in that sub-industry must be absolutely horrifying.

The human cost of making them doesn't look great either...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQacZNc33r8

Yeah, same. I'm all up for a "free country", and all that. But this was just absurd. I wonder if 30+ years don't the line, if maybe resources are scarcer, we'll think about these and say: "we were fucking crazy"

I dunno.

The earth is pretty big, and vape batteries are tiny, and we keep finding substitutes.

I'm all for reducing waste, but it seems unlikely we'll run out of metals in our lifetimes.

Keep in mind, things keep getting more efficient, and rich nations are finally tending toward using LESS per capita.

Sure, the poor nations might eventually become rich and the global population has not yet peeked, but there's no reason to assume our materials usage will grow exponentially forever.

And, even if you assumed we were going to run out of whatever is in these tiny vape pens - the percentage of all usage going to tiny applications like this is a rounding error. It's not what you would attack if you really wanted to move the needle.

You'd probably try to reduce the number of people buying new cars, for example.

> in our lifetimes

Is the key here. We need to think beyond our lifetimes. We should be treating the earth like we're going to live on it for (tens or hundreds of) thousands of years, because I sure as shit hope we (meaning humans) are going to.

Yes, reducing creation of cars would certainly have a much bigger impact, and should be done. But it's also a lot harder than dealing with vapes.

Anyway, as far as I understand it, the main reason this is happening isn't happening to reduce waste, it's happening to stop a rise in nicotine consumption in children. Preventing waste is more of a nice side effect.

The UK isn't a 'free country' in the way American's use the term. It took me a few years of living in America to understand the nuance. I think the 'freedoms' Americans have raises it's own problems for society (eg guns) and there isn't a right or wrong, just different.

The joke I always like to make is that in the US everything is legal unless the government legislates to say you can't, in Europe everything is illegal unless the government legislates to say you can. :D

> The joke I always like to make is that in the US everything is legal unless the government legislates to say you can't

Guess where the US got that from? Yes, the UK, and it still applies.

I think you're forgetting something called the CONSTITUTION which gives a number of rights that one doesn't have in the UK like

-Freedom of expression (can't be arrested for social media posts, can't easily get sued into the ground for libel[0])

-Right to bear arms (technically legal for citizens to organize their own militant force, though often discouraged)

-Right to remain silent (it is always advised to never talk to the police under any circumstances).

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPEECH_Act

As an American, I'm still often baffled by American Exceptionalism. Often people who say stuff like this have zero actual clue about how things are done in other countries. And it's laughable to call out the right to bear arms when just being suspected of having a weapon is enough to justify an execution by the police.

I recall the time the Japanese imprisoned the CEO of Nissan on trumped up charges and he had to smuggle himself out of the country to escape. Of course the US has Gitmo, but in general the justice system is remarkably fair compared to other countries, since its much harder to get a guilty verdict, which is why so many criminal court cases end with plea deals instead.

Good thing we don't have a history of mistreatment of Japanese nationals. We clearly have clean hands in this regard.

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

Especially considering the fifth amendment was specifically intended to allow for a militia to defend against the government, not to enable students to carry an automatic rifle into school—but here we are

2nd amendment, 5th is the "right to remain silent" etc.

Still, the issue with school shootings is mostly that it targets the wrong people. After school programs, community support for troubled youth, options for local service or a job placement program for kids would all be solutions, but the youth only sees other kids at school as the problem. If the system is so screwed up that a kid feels the need to take up arms to fight against it, then they should, but school shootings are unnecessarily cruel and generally fail to lead to progressive changes; more often than not they become justification for increases in the very authoritarian measures that promote the violence in the first place.

That sentiment originated in discussions of English common law, where it was being contrasted with European legal codes.

> in Europe everything is illegal unless the government legislates to say you can.

That doesn't seem accurate. I'm guessing you haven't lived in a country where that's much closer to reality?

> The joke I always like to make is that in the US everything is legal unless the government legislates to say you can't, in Europe everything is illegal unless the government legislates to say you can.

That's pretty good. It's a succinct contrast of the difference between a citizen and a subject.

That's the joke they made about the Soviet Union; it's inaccurate for Europe. But in Europe the government isn't afraid to make things illegal.

That's just nonsense.

I have a different thought about that kind of stuff in that in 100 years or so landfills will probably be literal gold mines (or whatever else you're looking for).

at least we'll mine them. with helium, we put it in party balloons and lose it to space.

There's plenty of helium in the solar system (granted, a bit further out) and the sun is producing 595 million tons per second.

Let me guess, you have plans that to mine that helium by working at night?

yes, and it'll be very easy to capture in commercial quantities, I'm sure.

What, you've never heard of star-lifting? Or just getting it from Saturn? Commercial/economic quantities are all about the necessity versus scarcity, and helium has unique properties that can't be synthesized in sufficient quantities even if you ran all of Earth off fusion of hydrogen into helium.

> Or just getting it from Saturn?

always love a good laugh in the morning!

I'm as much a fan of sci-fi as anybody, and the last 5 years of space x should make anybody optimistic about the future of space exploration, but strip mining Saturn is a long way away from providing for the needs of MRI machines and other essential modern technology. what will happen first is that the prices will rise and we will stop using it in party balloons, and then it'll be too expensive for the lower 95% of the population for any use at all for decades/centuries - and that's even if we do manage to escape the local gravity well for good. even that's doubtful - space is just unbelievably hostile.

This begs the question: why do you use disposables, then, and will apparently only stop when they are banned if you think they are so bad?

I'm just pissed that my source of free batteries is gonna dry up lol.

Are the batteries any good? What do they have in them? 1100 mAh LiPo?

The cells themselves are pretty good - pretty much only every come across Lipo's even in "non-rechargeable" disposables. mAh basically depends on the size of the vape / the puff count, but yeah I normally find them to br between 500 and 1500 mAh (give or take).

I figured any disposable vape would have its batteries glued in. How straightforward a task is it to remove the battery? What do the batteries generally look like?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N65DpT2nqEI <--- BigClive scavenging cells from vapes. (Basically where I got the idea from)

The cells are generally just "push fit", maybe with some kapton tape or foam to give them a snug fit. As for taking the vapes apart, A pair of pliers and some brute force is typically all that is needed to get them apart.

Cell shape is either cylindrical or rectangular, depends on the vapes shape really. You get the knack of remembering/guessing what the shape will be just by looking at the vape.

Nice, thanks for the info!

EDIT: those batteries look like they'd be very useful for some ESP32/PI2350 type projects.

Yeah they really will be, I need to find a vaper.

Came here to mention Big Clive's salvaging. Haven't tried it myself yet - the feral youth around here tend to be more whippet oriented than vaping, sadly.

My town is more a "active nightlife" town, so while I do see a far number of Whippets cartridges (though, thankfully, a lot less recently), you mainly find more discarded disposable vapes on Saturday and Sunday mornings/afternoons then you will whipped cream cartridges.

Wat? Disposibles have rechargable batteries?

They're cheap but rechargable lithium-ion batteries, as well as a blob of electronics to make it heat an element when a button or microphone sensor activates to vape, and a lot of times, also a fancy screen with animations.

Some disposable vapes even include a USB port to recharge that battery, which is why it's certain that they're rechargable.

Yup.

*vapist

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