Unfortunately we aren’t getting a handle on it because those friendly tobacco companies instead just pushed people to vaping instead.
Unfortunately we aren’t getting a handle on it because those friendly tobacco companies instead just pushed people to vaping instead.
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?
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
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.
Nicotine has both positive and negative effects but the impact on hypertension can cause pretty serious adverse health problems for some heavy users.
absolutely not true
they erode your gums
and the accelerated rate of nicotine absorbtion probably has side effects we do not yet understand
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.
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.
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.