Well, I personally immediately stopped cigarettes with vaping. I know it’s not harmless and that I’m still addicted to nicotine but I feel a lot better and I’m pretty confident I’ve lowered some long term risks.
Smoking will do that. Vaping - who knows?
Conga-rats!
Because curing addiction is so damn hard I’m all for harm reduction. I’m not entirely convinced vaping is that much safer, but I’ll admit I haven’t put much study into it, either. It does seem to reduce (although not entirely eliminate) the second hand effects on non-users and that is definitely a win.
Quite a few of us are for harms reduction. Some of us are particularly concerned with net harms reduction.
There is the potential of the harms reduction you listed above on the one side.
And there is a potential increased harms of the wide easy availability of current product lines resulting in a huge number of NEW nicotine addicts in a generation that had been decreasing that dramatically with some still to determined but real health risks both from the products directly and from increased risk of smoking products as well.
The goal is a max-min question. Where do we draw the lines given what data we have, and which direction lays more burden of proof?
To completely ignore either the potential of benefits (over other methods) or the potential of harms is not ideal. IMHO.
I’ve been busy, but I need to address this.
My belief is that you are very ignorant as to my position, as based on the rest of your post.
I was saying that it is not the flavors that draw kids in, but rather the actual drug itself. I was “corrected” and told that it was actually peer pressure, and I acknowledged that peer pressure is a part of it, but that that did not detract from my point that it is not the flavors that is the primary cause of teen vaping.
The first time I took a hit off a cig was actually to relax. I saw how people would take a drag and that they would visibly relax, and I wanted that, as I was not relaxed as a kid. Quite a bit you just said there, and you had to shoe in the part about flavor.
The first time I drank though, that was actually to “get fucked up”, same with weed.
Obesity is a worse problem than smoking. It kills nearly as many, and while both of them have decades of lag between change in behavior and a noticeable change in morbidity, obesity is on its way up and smoking is on its way down. In not too many years, obesity will overtake tobacco as a killer, and it will keep going. Do you suggest we ban flavored food?
People like their alcohol, if the only form of it was Malort, then sure, alcohol consumption would go down, but not be as much as you seem to be thinking. I’d be surprised if consumption went down by more than 5%.
You’ve never met a college student, have you?
By my way of thinking is not that people dive head first into anything that they express any interest in. The only way this question makes any sense is if you uncontrollably binge on any substance that you find interesting. Do you?
And I don’t know what you mean exactly by “not too many” are dropping acid right now. How many do you consider to be too many? When I was in high school*, I knew quite a few, and having nieces and nephews in high school, I am aware that it is still pretty prevalent. Not a huge percent, but certainly present, and in the minds of many school parents, it is “too many.”
By the fact that I never said that they’ll try whatever something someone has that they haven’t tried before. :rolleyes:
Nicotine is highly addictive and pleasurable and desirable. That is why people consume it. That is why people set leaves on fire and inhale nastiness into their lungs that they know will probably kill them. That’s why their houses and clothes smells like shit. Those are the trade offs that they (and I ) are willing to make in order to have our drug of choice.
If you ban flavors, then we’ll go to unflavored or back to cigarettes, but that’s stupid, it would be like trying to curb underage drinking by banning all forms of alcohol other than Malort. If you ban vaping, or make it hard or unpleasant to get, then we’ll probably just go back to smoking.
Now, you want to ban flavors in prepackaged Juuls and the like, I see no problem with that. You even want to ban pre mixed nicotine juice with flavor, I can accept that, even though I do not see the utility of it.
You want to out and out ban flavors, and you are going to find people using food flavoring as a flavoring agent, and making themselves sick. You are going to find people dropping the vape in favor of going back to smoking. There will be absolutely no positive that comes from it, but quite a few negatives.
*and just so that you don’t think that my high school is some sort of backwater or shit hole, I will mention that I went to high school with the daughter of a very prominent (though now retired) Republican US congressman.
That doesn’t invalidate his point.
Actually, overall, smoking increases stress, just that brief period when you get that drug fix you relax.
Second hand smoke kills 50000 Americans a year, mostly kids and the elderly- yep parent killing their kids and Nana in the spare room.
Very, very few deaths from second hand cheeseburgers. 
Yep, and it is harder to quit than heroin. Which is why i support vaping, even tho i dont like it. I dont think I now have any friends at all who smoke, those who did have quit tobacco and switched to vaping.
I have read some not quite tinfoil hat theories that Big Tobacco is helping push this attack on vaping- vaping has been too damn effective for smokers who want to quit. I believe it.
Oh please - news of vaping-associated lung injury and the push for effective regulations on vaping products are terrible news for Big Tobacco, because (as already pointed out), big tobacco enterprises have invested heavily in vaping.
Altria (parent company of Philip Morris) owns 35% of Juul, the big player in the vaping market. An R.J. Reynolds subsidiary owns the #2 vaping company, Vuse. I can envision a lot of chuckling in tobacco company boardrooms* at the prospect of keeping nicotine addicts on board (and recruiting a bunch of new ones) through company investments in vaping.
*at least, until the recent push for regulation and the news of serious vaping-associated lung injuries and deaths.
Bravo. That’ll show us! :dubious:
I was disgusted the other day to see a local vape shop prominently advertising in their window the availability of CBD products, including stuff intended to be vaped. Now there’s a responsible business that won’t let widespread outbreaks of lung disease and death (largely involving cannabinoid products) affect its bottom line.
The CDC issues a preliminary report on the outbreak which currently stands at over 800 cases in 46 states including 12 deaths. Nothing new in the report, really, but it’s filled with statistics and charts if you like that sort of thing.
The investigation of the illness outbreak is focusing on blackmarket additives.
And here is a Leafly article from the cannabis community
Does that matter to hyper anxious 13 year old me?
We don’t smoke in enclosed public places anymore, I think that number is going to start coming down rather rapidly rather soon.
If we want to pass laws that disallow smoking around minors or non-consenting adults, I have no problem with that.
Quite a few and growing from first hand though.
Smokers tended to have children who smoked. Obese people tend to have children that are obese.
Most of my friends have turned to vaping. There’s a few hold-outs, but we keep trying new blends and flavors on them to see if we can get the to switch.
Well, unless they ban flavors, of course.
I’m sure there are many entrenched interests on both sides of the issue. I’ll leave the tin foil on the roll for now though.
The problem that you may be having with this debate is that you for some odd reason think it’s about you. :dubious:
I wouldn’t switch back to cigarettes to “show you”, I don’t care about you. I would switch back because that would be the form of nicotine delivery that you haven’t banned. The only way that you figure into it is in you working towards restricting my actions.
Is it the CBD oil part that bothers you? I have mixed feelings about CBD, but it’s pretty mainstream now. It is sold everywhere, even at pharmacies.
If stuff is intended to be vaped, and is safe to be vaped, then I don’t see why you care. If it is not safe to be vaped, then it should be, that is the role of regulation in this scenario.
If people are using improper products to vape CBD or even THC, and getting themselves sick or dead for it, then how would it be an irresponsible business that is offering the proper products to vape these substances with? Sounds to me that they are stepping up and filling a public safety need that is not being filled by the regulators that you want to come in to crush the industry with.
I mean, there are probably a number of things that will cause immediate and serious illness if run through a vape, and it is better that people get products that are made for such things than come up with “bright” ideas on their own. I can see someone just putting CBD or hemp oil in a vape and thinking that that is a great idea. I can see drug dealers making THC oils that are not high quality or even made of the right stuff. Banning this stuff will not stop people and black market entities from creating and doing it, it will just make sure that there are no controls or regulations over the products.
Altho that is true, their main product is still death sticks, and they will do anything to get people addicted to them.
Publics spaces, but it’s the smoking in the home that kills the kids and elderly.
Smokers murder 50000 non-smokers a year, most members of their own family.
And my point is that 50000 is not a static number, but a number that will likely be going down. It used to be that if you worked in an office, you worked next to a a smoker, and you could get second hand smoke from that. If you were in an airplane, or a bus, or even a hospital, you were subject to second hand smoke.
Parents are also more cognizant of the dangers of second hand smoke, and shamed by friends neighbors and everyone else about it. All the smoking and/or vaping parents that I know do not smoke or vape in the house. My point is that the laws and the practices have changed, and you will see a result of that, you just won’t see it for a while, as it is a while between exposure to smoke and health effects from it. Most people dying now from second hand smoke were exposed in the 80’s or early 90’s at the latest. Blaming the current generation for that is not only more than a bit unfair, it is entirely unproductive.
I also pointed out that I would be supportive of laws that would forbid smoking around minors and non-consenting adults. I do think that second hand “vape” is also going to be far less harmful than that out of a cigarette.
So, I’m not sure why you feel the need to keep repeating this statistic as if it actually means anything relevant to the topic at hand, which is currently whether or not flavoring for nicotine juice should be banned.
Pffft. I’m sure you were equally outraged when you saw a grocery store selling Iceberg lettuce during the last Romaine scare. You are rather shamelessly using this black market adulterated cartridge problem to smear the whole concept of vaping.
A long time ago I was a pack a day cigarette smoker. Or sometimes two. I did kick it.
Then, I fell off the wagon and started smoking cigars. I inhaled them.
It’s sort of a cute story. I was in Mexico, at a liquor store. The proprietor was very nice and helped find what we where looking for. I insisted on him keeping the change (a few pesos) and he insisted on throwing a few cigars into the bag. What’s a few cigars gonna hurt? Heck, I’m on vacation! Got hooked again, big time.
Vaping got me off of those, and I am cutting back on the amount of nicotine in them.
No, not at all. What’s truly odd is that anyone who was hooked on cigarettes and then switched to being hooked on nicotine vaping would defiantly announce that they’d likely switch back to cigarettes if denied flavored nicotine vapes.
Apparently that’s supposed to make the rest of society throw up its hands in horror and say “Oh NO! Please don’t do that! Look, here are some lovely watermelon and bubblegum-flavored nicotine vapes!! Come back, please!!!” :dubious:
It doesn’t make a whopping difference to me if nicotine addicts seek to self-destruct faster out of pique.* I just don’t want to see the vaping industry and its Big Tobacco affiliates create a whole new generation of nicotine addicts by using flavors and deceptive advertising to entice them.
Given that we don’t know yet exactly what constituents of vaping medium are causing serious acute lung illness (not to mention the specter of slow-developing irreversible chronic lung disorders), it strikes me as hugely irresponsible at this time to be encouraging the sale of CBD vape products.
*although as previously noted, smoking has been very very good to me as a pathologist (diagnosing various smoking-related cancers has probably represented a minimum of 10% of my income over the years). I mildly regret not having trained for a subspecialty in pulmonary pathology, as I anticipate that vaping will help make that a booming field in the future.
Bullshit. You thought it was irresponsible to sell that before this outbreak and you know perfectly well that the cause of this outbreak can’t be the traditional vape ingredients.
Are you now a mindreader? I’ve never said any such thing.
Except that some victims of serious lung disease reported vaping only nicotine, and there’s been no scientific vindication of “traditional vape ingredients”.*
*to the contrary, there’s evidence of harm. For instance: