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Comment by prohobo | Hacker News Reader

People don't understand that cigarettes are self-limiting because they literally hurt your throat and lungs. Most people simply can't chain smoke and they need about an hour break in between smokes.

With vaping that limit is completely gone. A vaping addiction can keep escalating until you want a puff every 30 seconds, especially once you start breaking down mental barriers like "no vaping indoors" or "no vaping while on the computer", etc.

So in terms of pure addiction I would 100% argue that cigarettes are better than vaping.

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Are you speaking at all from experience?

>Most people [...] need about an hour break in between smokes.

I've never seen anything like that. When there's a group of social smokers standing around, it's very common for something like "Oh, I just finished mine and you're only half-way through yours, I'll light up another one to keep you company" to happen. I've seen plenty of people who aren't chain smokers (yet), but can easily go through 2-4 cigarettes in a row if they're suddenly in a stressful situation and smoking "to relax".

>So in terms of pure addiction I would 100% argue that cigarettes are better than vaping.

But that's not a metric that's in any way helpful for a health decision. Nicotine in and of itself is not particularly physically harmful - it's toxic at high doses and elevates heart rate for a bit, but that's about it. The delivery method is what causes most of the harm, and smoking is 100% known to cause a lot of harm in a lot of different ways. And "With vaping that limit is completely gone" is also not accurate. Unlike the Navier-Stokes equations, dopamine receptors don't experience infinite blowup in finite time. So choosing a delivery method based on the amount of nicotine taken daily is not going to change much in terms of addiction (if you're already heavily addicted, you'll remain heavily addicted), but can have a huge impact on physical health.

Speaking from personal experience, vaping is far more addicting. For one the amount of nicotine, especially in the US where 5% is the standard, is easily 5-10x the amount from a pack of cigarettes a day.

Second, its much easier to take a puff than it is to find a suitable place to light up a cigarette and smoke for 5-10 minutes. You can very easily end up becoming psychologically conditioned to taking a puff litteraly once every 20 seconds, all day long from waking up to going to bed.

I too have considered picking up smoking to quit vaping. I remember of the times I did, I could smoke 3-4 a day and be fine. I don't know the long term effects of vaping physically, but just mentally the amount of nicotine is absolutely draining and at this point I rather do some damage to my lungs than keep this going.

>Speaking from personal experience, vaping is far more addicting.

Sure, and I'm not disagreeing with that. I disagree that "degree of addictiveness" is the metric that's wise to use when choosing a nicotine delivery method. Obviously the #1 choice should be NULL, not smoking at all, but if one is already addicted to nicotine and not ready to quit it at the moment, smoking cigarettes is, as far as we know, the worst option. Even intermittent smoking, or low-volume (like your 3-4 a day) causes non-linear harm. See this paper for example: https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.109.9... .

Do we have the numbers yet on the effects of vaping all day every day on cardiovascular health and lung cancer?

Also nicotine itself is not without harm. I always thought these drugs only affect the brain, but they're metabolized by the whole body and have consequences on all your cells https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4363846/ Trading the terrible effects of burning tobacco versus the insane amount of nicotine from vaping seems like an unknown tradeoff to me

>Do we have the numbers yet on the effects of vaping all day every day on cardiovascular health and lung cancer?

Not that I know of, and I grant that this is an unknown, and we could end up learning about extremely bad 20-/30-/40-year effects in the future. That said, there are very clear, very significant, and very well studied harms of cigarette smoking. Research is being done on vaping, and so far all harms identified are significantly lower than smoking.

>Also nicotine itself is not without harm.

Sure, and thanks for the paper. I'm not well versed in bio enough to tell the significance of everything in there, but, correct me if I'm wrong, for the most part this is showing there exist harms, but they're not particularly well quantified yet, especially in terms of human subjects? For this to really matter, you'd need to quantify the surplus of nicotine you get from vaping vs. smoking, and then compare the relative harms of those two doses. Could be that 5x the dose causes 5x the harm, or could be that the smoking dose passes some threshold, and 5x the dose from vaping is just marginal additional harm on top of that. And then still compare that to the other differences between smoking and vaping in terms of harm.

Keep in mind 5x the dose is relative to being a pack a day smoker. We're talking 20x if it means smoking 4-5x a day.

Then there is the negative effects of I dunno how many multiples of volume of vape in your throat and lungs, which I assume is non-zero even though I personally believe its 100x better than burning tobacco.

Then there is the question of what that much nicotine does to you mentally, which is equally, if not more important. To put it in perspective, I usually wake up feeling pretty good, with some hopes and dreams of what Ill be doing that day, and Ill take a puff and immediately want to go back to bed for another hour. I cant sit in meetings for more than 5 mins or have conversations with people if it means I cant be vaping. Its like basing your whole life based on whether you get your fix of nicotine or not. Work from office? I don't think so buddy...every ten minutes Id have to go to the bathroom/outside. I seriously wonder where my life would have been if I never picked up this habit.

We'll see in another 10-20 years I suppose.

> Do we have the numbers yet on the effects of vaping all day every day on cardiovascular health and lung cancer?

Even when we don't have the numbers for everyday long-term use we already know the chemical and biological mechanisms that make smoking so harmful and carcinogen and we can measure that these substances are almost entirely absent in vapor during normal use of a vape because almost all of the problems with smoking come from burning tabacco and inhaling the fumes and vaping is simply way cooler and there is no fume but vapor (hence the name) and we know that the potential of vapor to do harm is way lower than fume. We never have any long-term data for anything new. But to make an argument for not consuming something you would at least have some reasonable mechanism through which it could be harmful and a lot of those known to be harmful mechanisms are present when smoking but absent when vaping. Even the British National Health Service agrees that vaping is at least 95% less harmful than smoking and this is a reasonable position.

> Trading the terrible effects of burning tobacco versus the insane amount of nicotine from vaping seems like an unknown tradeoff to me

This is just black rhetoric that is not evidence-based. How do you know the amount of nicotine is "insane" during normal use?

All available evidence points to vaping being at least one magnitude less harmful than smoking and this is backed by what we know about chemical and biological processes of the chemicals involved and through medical reports about people who replaced smoking with vaping. It would be irresponsible to deny smokers who can't quit a way to harm reduction just by claiming we don't have any long-term data. We know enough about combustion, vapor and the chemical and biological implications to be quite confident that vaping is much less harmful than smoking.

That doesn't mean we should promote it to anybody who is not already a smoker. But as a means to reduce harm for someone who seems unable to quit smoking it should be considered.

I think you read my comments as some self assured statement or argument whereas I was genuinely asking questions.

I dont doubt given an equal amount of vaping to equal amount of smoking, vaping is far healthier. But to what end? Is smoking 1 cigarette a day worse than vaping 2-3ml of 50mg/ml nicotine? How about 3-4?

As far as I know the academic consensus is that taking in more nicotine, even a lot more, doesn't turn vaping into something as harmful as smoking. Addiction is the main established "harm". Nicotine, even very much of it, is not considered a carcinogen. There are studies that suggest it could promote tumour growth but it hasn't been shown in humans. There is also decades of data from nicotine replacement therapy and Swedish snus users and it shows little to no increase in heart attacks or strokes in otherwise healthy people. Another risk is accute poisoning, i.e. swallowing large quantities of liquid by children. As far as I know even the more alarming voices regarding nicotine do not regard it as harmful as inhaling fumes from combustion.

Also I don't think that there are many people that overdose nicotine regularily because it causes nausea and dizziness so people are normally self-regulating the nicotine dose automatically. So the scenario you are proposing doesn't seem to be something we can actually observe as a common consumption pattern.

Too much nicotine is far closer to drinking too much coffee than to smoking and has similar acute effects which is why almost nobody does it on a regular basis.

Vaping definitely isnt healthy for you.

It's not really the nicotine that causes the obvious damage though. Studies have shown that the vape smoke stimulates the vagus nerve which causes changes in the cardiovascular system that could likely cause heart disease

On top of that it’s obvious that what goes into the lungs generally stays in the lungs, and vapes are full of all sorts of weird flavours and e numbers

But the truth is even if you were vaping water all day it would likely still damage your cardiovascular system

> Vaping definitely isnt healthy for you

nobody claimed otherwise

> Studies have shown that the vape smoke stimulates the vagus nerve which causes changes in the cardiovascular system that could likely cause heart disease

Can you name this study? Are you talking about "E-cigarettes and their lone constituents induce cardiac arrhythmia and conduction defects in mice"? This study did not find what you claim. All it found is that in mice the heart rhythm during and right after exposure increased. This is far from claiming that it "could likely cause heart disease" in humans. Also human switching studies point the other way. smokers who move to vaping show improvements in blood vessel function within weeks. I don't know why people really need to twist study results to depict vaping more harmful than it is. Yes, it is not healthy and you shouldn't do it. But all scientific evidence conclusively points to vaping, even heavy vaping, still being way less harmful than smoking because we already know that basically all harm comes from inhaling the residues of combustion, not from the nicotine. Condeming vaping as being equally bad as smoking is irresponsible and unscientific and prevents proven harm reduction for heavy smokers.

> Condeming vaping as being equally bad as smoking is irresponsible and unscientific and prevents proven harm reduction for heavy smokers.

I never said this did I.

Also you’re talking about smokers moving to vaping, whereas at the moment plenty of people are going straight to vaping due to people over arguing how harmless it is compared to smoking.

Also I want to mention, I feel like there is too much emphasis put on length of life and not enough on quality of life.

If smoking 3-4 a day is far worse on my body BUT it means Im not a nicotine fiend with a brain fog all day every day with zero motivation, Ill take it.

But smoking cigarettes shortens life. Why would you want to promote vaping as improvement on the quality of life? Also, why do you write nicotine fiend - you are aware that tobacco plants contain nicotine? Vaping may be less damaging than smoking. I fail to see how it is healthy anywhere at all. Why do people here on this sub promote either thing as an exclusive or? That makes no sense. People need to stop sugar-coating crap. I also noticed this with weed. Weed users always say how weed is no problem, but it ALSO is a problem. Their brain tricks them into becoming a promo-individual for weed suddenly. Weed changes the brain pattern too.

I think you misread. I am saying vaping 5x the amount of nicotine is far worse mentally. Even if smoking 3-4 a day is worse physically, if I am going to do one or the other, I rather smoke 3-4 a day.

But in general I am saying, even for the quitting smoking/vaping ad campaigns there is not enough emphasis put on how dramatically it reduces your quality of life. Its always about dying of cancer or heart disease and living shorter amount of time 20-40 years down the line. I mean shit in a lot of cases I rather die at 70 than live to 80. Youll feel better EVERY day in a month is a muucch stronger motivation for me.

Addiction is a disease, not a "choice"

And "not ready to quit it at the moment" is such a wildly inappropriate dichotomy I really wonder what experience you have which informs your decision to discuss this topic.

> where 5% is the standard

What? 50mg/ml is the standard? Or am I miscalculating something here? When I switched from cigs to vaping (back in 2012, not really comparable to now, but still), I went with very high nicotine levels of 36mg/ml which was pretty harsh on the throat, and within a year I was at 3mg/ml. Nowadays I’m at zero.

For the disposable vapes, yes it is. 5% salt nic, in the US youd be hard pressed to find lower. Most countries Ive been to limit to 2%, which the US absolutely should do. Its criminal 5% is sold with no alternative.

Im not going to link you 500 products but heres a pretty standard vape sold. You can check the rest of the products, theyre almost all 5% with no other option https://vapordna.com/products/flum-melo-20000-puffs-disposab...

15ml at 50mg/ml is 750mg of nicotine. That thing would last me a week. A pack if cigs is ~25mg. Per week ~170mg versus 750. Insane

I used to vape the box mods 3mg. It was great, but now I cant go back to it after trying these damn things because the 3mg is almost a joke. Even cigarettes feel like nothing to me compared to these things

I keep finding out about new crazyness for modern vapes. That’s insane. I’ll keep vaping at 0 nic with hand-built coils and DIY mixed liquids ;)

Good dude, good ole days. These modern vapes are all from the same tobacco companies, hence the craziness. Cant fight em? Join em.

Instead of having to sell cigarettes with throat cancer on the label, they get to make all this colorful brands with an even more insane nicotine delivery system with the "health benefit" of quitting smoking...

Dont ever ever try this crap.

Yes, but a market with only 5% is more likely to generate addicts, err, I mean, higher ARR.

For context, I vape because nicotine helps me focus. There's a lot more to it than that but I'm not going to elaborate because if I do, I'll get about a zillion replies from preachy, argumentative people who don't know anything about me and I just don't have the time for that today.

Anyway, one of those big 5% disposables lasts me about 6 weeks at the rate I use them. I deliberately seek out the high nic content because I don't want to ingest more glycol or whatever than is necessary. Nor do I want to sit there and chain vape all day like I used to back when freebase liquids were all you could get. I can limit my intake to 2-3 puffs every 1-2 hours and that's what works for me.

Of course it helps you focus. Thats a known fact. Its incredible you can do only few puffs every hour or two. No judgement from me.

... Huh, I had no idea of this. Yeah, limit in Europe is 20mg/ml, and practical limit on what you can buy, at least in Ireland, is 18mg/ml (I suspect this is manufacturers giving themselves a safety margin, but seems to be pretty standard).

Have you tried nic pouches like zyn's instead?

They are also absolutely addictive as fuck, BUT I will say because they come in different strengths I found it relatively straight forward to quit them via tapering.

I was using 20 x 10mg per day and then bought strength 9mg, 6mg, 3mg, 1mg quit.

It was much much easier than trying to cold turkey which I also tried.

I was tempted to just start smoking again, but I found that if I was distracted or my hands were busy I could go without vaping for hours at a time.

It took a few tries, but once I really decided to quit I was able to get past the worst cravings in a few days and now it's been almost a year.

Vaping to smoking is like shooting heroin is to doing a line of coke. And I say this as someone who has smoked and vaped.

Smoking is addictive and was kinda hard to quit. Vaping is insanely, insanely addictive and about 100X as hard to quit (for me anyway). It took me about 3 tries to quit smoking. Its taken me about 100 attempts to quit vaping.

Also, you end up vaping all day and night since there is no reason you can't do it anywhere. In the toilet at work? Vaping. In bed at night, Vaping. Jerking off? Vaping.

It's just insanely bad.

Opposite here. Taken me hundreds of tries to quit smoking (none worked, vaping was the only thing that allowed me to), vaping I sometimes just don’t do, never had that with smoking, where I sometimes switched to menthol so I could keep smoking while sick…

I had a very different experience. I would start smoking again for various personal but uninteresting reasons and found that it was much easier if I went to vaping for a week or two before quitting completely.

Yeah, as an ex-smoker with lots of friends who are still smokers, I don't think this 1 hour limit thing is a thing at all.

> Unlike the Navier-Stokes equations

deep cut

This is not true.. you can chain smoke for hours if you get used to smoking. Drunk people do it all the time. When your nicotine addiction ramps up enough you'll get cravings to do that always.

Maybe that's the case for you, but that would make you the exception. In the 80's when and where I grew up, it was very common for adults to estimate cigarette consumption in terms of, "packs per day."

There is probably some truth to what you're saying, but also keep in mind that tobacco contains more active compounds than nicotine alone, including MAO inhibitors in the form of harmala alkaloids. These can synergise with nicotine and make it more addictive.

Also, I'm dubious about your claim that most people need breaks, or at least any more than vapers do. I was a smoker for over a decade. I don't remember ever feeling like "that's enough, my throat hurts". It's just that smoking was triggered by the onset of withdrawal, which begins after about an hour, and becomes urgent after maybe 2-3 hours. So I'd typically smoke at an interval of 1-3 hours depending on how convenient it was to do so. And cigarettes are expensive, so that factors into it too.

Sometimes though, especially when drinking, I could chain smoke for a couple hours straight while hanging out in a park with friends, especially in the summer.

After I switched to vaping though, I have at times ended up puffing so enthusiastically that I've made myself nauseous from the nicotine. So there's certainly a limit there too.

Edit: another interesting thing I've noticed. Nicotine withdrawal seems much less severe after I switched to vaping. It takes several hours longer to become noticeable, and also feels less intense. When smoking, it took me 1 hour to start craving a cigarette, by 3 hours I'm becoming irritable with strong craving, and by 5 hours I'm extremely irritable, light-headed, and the only thing on my mind is smoking, completely incapable of focusing on anything except how to get some cigarettes and how to get to somewhere I can smoke em.

For vaping, it takes me maybe 7-8 hours to get to the 3 hour mark for smoking. I certainly get cravings long before that, maybe starting at 2-3 hours, but I'm able to push it out of my mind much more easily, for much longer. I don't know why this is. My theory is something to do with the lack of MAO inhibitors. It's also possible that it's a pharmacokinetic phenomenon, but that seems counterintuitive. If I'm ingesting higher doses of nicotine compared to smoking, blood levels will take longer to go to zero. But then I should also have higher tolerance, and therefore a higher threshold for the onset of withdrawal, since tolerance and chemical dependence are more or less the same thing.

I've vaped so much I've physically thrown up, and that never happened with smoking. In fact, I've vaped until I've not been able to walk I've been so dizzy.

Vaping is equivalent to shooting heroin or doing crack, it's so much more intense and addictive than smoking. I found quitting smoking to be incredibly easy compared to quitting vaping.

> Vaping is equivalent to shooting heroin or doing crack

That’s a feature of the juice the mainstream products come with, not of vaping in general.

If you smoke enough you get over the terrible feeling in your throat and the smell, but those effects are definitely bad enough that they act as a meaningful deterrent to wanting to smoke more.

If I smoke a cigarette now Ill usually regret it cause Ill be thinking about the terrible taste in my mouth the next 20 mins.

Vaping? Its like eating fucking candy with a million different flavors to try when youre bored of one

> Nicotine withdrawal seems much less severe after I switched to vaping.

I noticed this too. I was a chain smoker. I became a chain vaper, managing to quit tobacco in the process.

Eventually, I was able to cold turkey vaping in a way I could never manage with tobacco.

It took being sick for about 2 weeks so I couldn't vape. Once I was better, I just didn't do it again, and it was... actually kind of easy.

Similar situations have happened to me over the years when I was on tobacco, but I could never just walk away like I did with vaping.

Maybe part of it was that, with tobacco, you really organize a lot of your day around it. Going to the store, going outside for breaks, driving a little extra so you can fit in a smoke in the car, etc - vaping can really scramble all that up so you have fewer situational triggers.

Yup. This was my main takeaway from vaping in the 2010s, after I 'quit' smoking.

However, the vast majority of my nicotine usage after quitting was chewing nicotine gum -- for 11 years! It also has the qualities you mention. You can be chewing all the time, anywhere, everywhere, and without any of the vaping restrictions places have.

Nicotine gum isn't for everyone, but if you're one of the people for whom it really takes as an addiction of its own, it's that much more difficult to quit because it's discreet, there's essentially no stigma, and you can do chew absolutely anywhere, doing practically anything.

> Most people simply can't chain smoke and they need about an hour break in between smokes.

Major skill issue.

I helped a friend quit vaping with the nicotine patches for smoking. I had to do some math because a vape hit is not 1:1 with a cigarette hit, and found that the highest dose of a patch was too low for her to start, and had to start with a few max dose patches.

Those patches aren't cheap, albeit neither is the addiction either, but just like the jump from cigarettes to nicotine gum is a good jump, so is vape to cigarettes sometimes. It was a long and painful journey for my friend even with my help, so I don't envy anyone with it worse than her (or even less of the addiction)

>> People don't understand that cigarettes are self-limiting because they literally hurt your throat and lungs. Most people simply can't chain smoke and they need about an hour break in between smokes.

That wildly contradicts the experience of every cigarette smoker I've known across several generations.

There is no inherent self limitation from cigarettes beyond the time it takes to smoke a cigarette. I’m not sure who you knew that smoked but I can say for certain that long-time heavy users don’t need an hour break. Quite the opposite. Abusers will hack up a lung after minutes without a cigarette puff and will wake up in the middle of the night to smoke, repeatedly.

This thread (outside your statements) is such a bizarre conversation to me that somehow people have deluded themselves into the argument a cigarette is a better option than putting in work to quit. Heroin could probably help someone stop smoking pot…that doesn’t mean it is a better choice just because “it’s harder to afford when you’re a junkie and therefore takes longer to get a hit than finding a J”.

I get the capability to abuse is easier than a cigarette, no disagreement. It’s probably similar to when smoking was allowed everywhere including on planes and in restaurants. I don’t see how the solution to ease of use, ease of access, and manufacturers adding far too much nicotine is “start smoking a different product with proven worse health consequences, including cancer, rather than vaping too much and possibly having some negative health effects”. These days nearly all major vape companies are owned by tobacco companies. They have a lot of experience in pushing the addictiveness boundaries for significant profit from the past 100+ years, and they are doing it again with vapes.

I say all this as someone who smoked for 15+ years, up to a pack and a half to two packs a day, vaped increasingly more nicotine over 5 years, and quit vaping over the course of a year by mixing 0mg nicotine liquid -- almost every vape liquid manufacturer offers it -- in fractionally increasing ratios each week until I was only vaping zero nicotine. I continued vaping 0mg for years after because I actually enjoy the act of smoking, but I finally just decided not to anymore.

Choosing not to quit and choosing not take any responsibility or steps toward battling your addictions are vastly different from not being capable. Everyone has the capacity to battle their addictions when they choose to, and small counter-examples or lack of success do not negate that premise.

Vaping definitely increased my nicotine addiction, mostly because I could do it indoors all day while working, in the car, at night, etc.

The only limiting factor was the nausea of nicotine overdose, which I remember occasionally from chain smoking indoors.

I totally disagree with you here. Cigarettes are by far 100% worse on every level than vaping. Now, I tell people to not do either one, but since you tried to promote vapes over cigarettes here - you did not mention the damage to DNA and the rise in cancer by cigarette smokes. They literally lose many years of their life when smoking. Also, "need an hour break in between smokes", clearly shows that you never saw a chain smoker on a party. They don't need any downtime. They just continue to smoke. Even when coughing.

But also your comment of "pure addiction" is simply wrong, because nicotine is more addictive than what you have in a vape (at the least with regards to level of concentration). I don't know why you think cigarettes would be better anywhere than vaping. It's just wrong. And both should be avoided anyway; people should not fall for the lie that vaping is better, but even less so that cigarettes is better. Why promote damaging substances anyway? Damage to lung cells exist via vaping too. People seem to forget that. They did not even know that asbesto fibers are damaging for a long time.

This simply isn't true at all. A pack+ a day habit isn't uncommon. I'll smoke an entire pack in 4 hours if I'm drinking outside by a campfire.

> cigarettes are self-limiting they literally hurt your throat and lungs

Eh ...

I didn't know many smokers who smoke < 1 pack per day. For those < 1 pack per day, it's mostly b/c they just haven't gotten there yet, but that's where they're headed.

Smokers aren't really going to change their smoking rituals either, just b/c their throat is a little sore or they're short of breath. They just switch to lights and/or menthol, or otherwise find a brand that doesn't punch them in the throat like Marlboro Reds do.

Going longer than usual without a smoke, generally means chain smoking 2 or more to catch up

Once addicted, it really takes a lot of hurt to self-limit. That means being literally sick, realistically.

Personally, I found vaping far easier to quit than cigarettes.

>are self-limiting because they literally hurt your throat and lungs

This is absolutely false and anyone who has or does smoke, or knows people that smokes, knows this. People should refrain from commenting on things they have zero idea about.

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