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Comment by hnlmorg | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately we aren’t getting a handle on it because those friendly tobacco companies instead just pushed people to vaping instead.

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on the contrary, I strongly believe that tobacco companies are the driving force behind the attempts to equate vaping and smoking. idk about the current year, but tobacco companies had little to no influence over the vaping market during its early years. the hardware was 5% American from small companies and 95% Chinese, the nicotine fluid had local producers everywhere because of how cheap and easy it is to make. almost all early adopters were people who wanted to quit smoking, and a lot of them succeeded.

and it's not harmless, sure, but it's definitely less harmful than inhaling combustion products of pulverized tobacco waste glued together with a mix of a hundred mystery chemicals.

Vaping has its share of mystery chemicals too, though

the flavorants are fairly mysterious, yeah. we know diacetyl is bad to inhale, we don't know how many others are. but if you DIY, only propylene glycol and nicotine are strictly required. vegetable glycerin and flavorants are optional.

I'd choose even the most mysterious Chinese bathtub e-juice over cigarettes though.

Or, maybe do neither?

if you aren't already a smoker? yes, absolutely. but if you are, and you are not the one in ten who has the iron will to quit cold turkey and never relapse, you're better off getting your nicotine fix delivered by ANY medium other than toxic smoke.

Which comes back to my original complaint: vaping has grown so exponentially that there are people vaping who were never old enough to have started smoking.

Flavorless VG is pretty much mystery free. At that point you only need to worry about what’s coming off the actual coils.

I think the argument is that vaping is far more addictive for young people because of exactly what you say. Does not feel harmful and they end up very addicted at higher doses of nicotine than cigarettes

so let it only be sold to adults, sure. I'm just saying that equating vaping to smoking is absurd, because it's not nicotine that breaks your heart and your dick and gives you cancer, it's the smoke.

Vaping is still objectively horrible for the lungs.[0] And I would be slower to argue about the cancer. Do we know yet? It is a young vice.

[0]https://www.yalemedicine.org/conditions/evali

That’s still getting a handle on it. Vaping is not good but it’s significantly better than the tar that comes from burning cigarettes

In the context of the alternative which was “nobody really smokes or vapes” it’s not really a good outcome.

Sure, smoking rates cratered. It was great. But now vaping rates have gone up and it just didn’t have to happen that way at all.

Go back a few years and less people vaped with similarly low smoking rates. Vaping didn’t replace smoking, its net new usage.

I'm not sure this is actually bad. Nicotine, when divorced from the tar of burning cigarettes, has a number of desirable affects on alertness and appetite (as well as less desirable effects like increasing blood pressure) - it's not clear to me that avoiding nicotine as a stimulant is always desirable.

As well, vaping is so much less obnoxious to the people around you than traditional smoking (either tobacco or marijuana). I'm in favor of a lot of the social and legal pressure that has been put on smoking tobacco in public (and I think it should apply to weed as well despite being pro-legalization). But most of the actual issues go away if it's vaping and of smoking (and all of them go away if you're getting your tobacco via a pouch).

I honestly still find vaping obnoxious and I’m clearly not alone here because most places that ban smoking also ban vaping too.

And weird for someone to talk about vaping like it’s a good thing when we already know there are adverse health implications from vaping. What we don’t know is just how serious that is. But why take the risk in the first place?

What adverse health implications from vaping are there?

Still being studied, but the idea that it’s safe seems to be a very odd default.

https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/e-cigarettes/health-effects.html

Why would your default assumption be that putting foreign (and poorly regulated) substances into your lungs is more likely than not safe?

This is especially true since it’s a drug that doesn’t even have much claim to fame for positive recreational or medicinal benefits.

The vast majority of that CDC information page is about the health effects of nicotine itself. There's a relative lack of specific information about the health risks of the vapor. "Cancer-causing chemicals" is vague (I live in California, I see prop 65 signs all over the place, I ignore them like every good Californian). "Heavy metals" is also vague - is the amount of tin that I might inhale via vaping actually a problem? Is it significantly more than if I lived in an area with a tin mine or something?

I'm not claiming that vaping is safe in some absolute sense, it wouldn't be surprising if there are some meaningful health risks. I personally do not vape myself because the times I've tried it, I've found getting the vapor into my lungs to be very uncomfortable. But it does seem like it's a strict health improvement over tobacco smoke, given that the CDC can't articulate a specific harm to the lungs caused by vaping.

Did you scroll down at all? I’m counting at least 5 risks that are not nicotine.

vapor has been used for medicine delivery for a long time, especially for patients who can't swallow pills.

Also gov regulation is not the only form of regulation. Fear of getting sued by your customers into bankruptcy is an effective regulation on putting harmful substances into your vape.

> Fear of getting sued by your customers into bankruptcy is an effective regulation on putting harmful substances into your vape.

Not really:

https://mjalterlaw.com/the-ford-pinto-memo-the-cost-to-repai...

I’m not sure how you could possibly argue that nicotine has mainly desirable effects. Merely being highly addictive on its own is a pretty badly overriding negative effect.

Here’s a paper that talks about the negative impacts on a wide variety of organs: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4363846/

No, the context was getting a handle on smoking, not some alternative goalpost. As lung cancer rates plummet from lack of second hand smoke nobody should ever lament that even if people are doing something else not great.

Classic “perfect is the enemy of good”.

That’s a little like celebrating the reduction of heroin usage while ignoring that fentanyl addition has sky rocketed.

While I do agree that vaping is better than smoking. The real crux of the problem is the addition that needs treating. Celebrating the rise of vaping feels a little like celebrating an own goal. You’ve put all that time and effort into reducing the effects of smoking and yet you haven’t actually solved the underlying problem at all.

This isn’t “perfect is the enemy of good”, this is ensuring that tax money is spent on the right problem and not something more financially comfortable for companies producing these addictive substances.

But without the inordinately deleterious effects of smoking, why is it a bad thing? Nicotine is a powerful nootropic and enhances cognitive function. If there was a healthy way to get it into the body, it would be celebrated as a good thing. The comparison to look at is caffeine and coffee. Is a coffee addict someone we look down on, and hope they would quit?

I'm not arguing that vaping is healthy, just that, culturally, we should examine how much the argument against vaping is because of the history of smoking and the culture surrounding it, rather than an objective consideration of the benefits and consequences of the activity.

(Ftr, imo disposable vapes are absolutely the worst.)

I don’t really think it’s fair to compare vaping to drinking coffee. But there are plenty of people who have given up coffee for health reasons. And it’s much easier to cut down on drinking coffee than vaping (from a dependency standpoint)

Alcohol and alcoholism is probably a better comparison here.

But the thing that worries me the most about vaping is:

1. The frequency in which people vape. It’s almost never just a couple of puffs a day to help with concentration. It’s usually just as heavy as when people smoked. And it’s much easier to lose track of how much you vape compared with drinking coffee (I had a friend who, for months, didn’t even realise he was vaping the equivalent of 40 packs of cigarettes a day because he just bought the same solution each time without thinking about it’s concentration)

2. The fact that you’re pulling hot gas into your lungs. Yeah it’s significantly better than smoking but we don’t really know the long term effect this might cause. And by long term, I mean people who vape heavily for years.

We could all be walking ourselves into another health crisis in 20 or 40 years but “it’s ok because it isn’t as bad as smoking”.

I hear stories all the time about people trying to hack their diet, or brain, or whatever biological. And it so often ends up going wrong. From people adding caffeine to their protein drinks and accidentally ODing, to other people having serious side effects for “herbal remedies”. It’s all just nuts when we’ve already known for millennia what a healthy diet and exercise looks like.

And this is my complaint about vaping. When it’s used to help people from quitting smoking then I’m all for them vaping. But when it’s used as just another recreational drug but sold as a “healthy alternative”, well that’s when I’m going to take issue.

If fentanyl had 1/100th the death rate of heroin we absolutely would be celebrating it. That’s what we’re discussing here. I don’t think you understand how bad smoking is.

I understand it just well. And if people only used vaping as a substitute for smoking then I’d be in your camp too.

But that isn’t what’s happening. New people who never smoked are vaping too. And we don’t know what the long term (30+ year effects) of vaping is. So we could still be complacently walking ourselves into a major health crisis.

So we have to ask ourselves: should we really be encouraging people to vape? And by that, I don’t mean to smokers who are trying to quit. I mean to everyone including those who have never smoked.

People in this very thread have literally talked about vaping like it’s a healthy lifestyle choice. And that’s entirely the wrong messaging.

We don’t actually know the lung cancer rates of vaping yet because the population of people who have been doing it for 30+ years is zero.

I’m not even advocating for banning vapes, just maybe not having free market capitalism for new potentially harmful product categories by default.

There are populations of people that have been exposed to fog machines daily for that duration of time as part of their jobs. This isn’t a complete unknown.

Also vaping isn’t even new at this point. We’re at probably 20 years now of the first vape pens hitting the US mainstream (the ones they made look like cigarettes).

Basically, you’re saying “we can’t walk and chew gum at the same time.”

Vaping and smoking are two essentially separate health concerns. Why can’t we focus on both at the same time? Are we cognitively impaired as a society and public health apparatus?

The fact that the reduction in smoking usage and lung cancer rates is commendable is not mutually exclusive from having a desire not to grow a whole new form of nicotine addiction in a new generation.

If you look at usage graphs, smoking was already declining, and then vaping exploded in popularity in just the last 4 years or so. Smokers have largely not been replacing their smoking with vaping. The majority of picking up vapes are new users who have never smoked.

Citation needed.

There are now vaping bans that have pushed people to pouches.

The pouches are a totally different level of nicotine addiction. People will fall asleep with one in.

And unlike cigarette butts, they stick to the parking lot. Lovely!

The pouches are great, a clean way to get Nic with very few adverse health problems as a result.

Yeah, but nicotine itself can still be problematic for mental health. It really depends on what you consider an "adverse problem".

I had been using the pouches for a couple of years now, and the unbearable anxiety from its nonstop use caused me to slow it way down. I went from a can a day to less than a can a week. I had already quit all other forms of nicotine before the pouches. What a wild ride.

Because the anxiety is unlikely to just be from nicotine alone, I also got myself into somewhat better shape to cope. Maybe some anxiety is healthy if it drives better choices, but it still feels awful. I'm now glad with my current state, but I would not recommend this path to here.

absolutely not true

they erode your gums

and the accelerated rate of nicotine absorbtion probably has side effects we do not yet understand

proof?

Nicotine has both positive and negative effects but the impact on hypertension can cause pretty serious adverse health problems for some heavy users.

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