Forgot how Pro-drug the fediverse is as well; vapes should be regulated as heavily as cigarettes and other tobacco products. Just because it's less harmful doesn't mean it's not harmful.
The laws around vapes are nonsense and pseudoscience.
Recognising that there are health issues, without fully understanding them yet due to there having not been enough time to form complete and solid conclusions, doesn't make it pseudoscience. It means we should be cautious and continue to study, and certainly not widely adopt their use in the mean time assuming everything will be fine. Especially as it directly interacts with such a sensitive part of our inner bodies, and especially as the largest group taking up their use are teenagers.
Flat prohibitions aren't saving any lives or ending any health crisis. Meanwhile cigarettes are widely available with a dozen flavors.
I disagree, to blanket suggest prohibitions don't save lives is not based in fact. Even the misguided alcohol prohibition over in the USA saved lives, reducing the number of deaths that would have otherwise been caused by intoxication (dangerous driving being an obvious example, domestic abuse, etc).
And take this example from literally only yesterday, where a child almost died due to electronic cigarettes and the complications therein (often when people discuss the danger of X and Y, they assume a completely healthy person to begin with, and ignore that a large percentage of the population has at least one illness or environmental factor that it can complicate).
Also, yes cigarettes are available, but their use in public is heavily restricted, and they aren't attractive to young people any more thanks to decades of hard work in education. Electronic cigarettes however are targeted directly at teenagers in a very predatory way, suggested to be safe and clean, and thus we have these new issues.
In the end, I suspect electronic cigarettes are less dangerous than breathing in smoke from tobacco, which is insanely dangerous, but that will not make them safe, either, and the cumulative effects of electronic cigarette use over decades simply isn't fully known yet.
We're working on it, and where our health is concerned, especially that of our impressionable youth, an abundance of caution is always the best course of action.
Vaping should be limited to 18+ consumers just like "standard" nicotine products. But we shouldn't pretend, like the WHO and other organizations do, that Vaping hasn't been used by many (myself included) to effectively quit nicotine. Personally I kicked a 2 pack a day habit because of vaping and today I use no nicotine products (including vaping) because of it.
I quit smoking cigarettes using a "box mod" in 2016 and gradually tapered down from a very high nicotine blend to 0 nicotine using 100% vegetable glycerin and peppermint flavoring and then I finally literally lost my vape and just never bothered to replace it...
So anyways, I started smoking over 30 years ago and I don't vape or smoke anymore.
What's too heavy about how cigarettes are regulated in your country? I'm in Canada and when I smoked cigarettes I never felt like I was obstructed in making my own choices.
Many mundane things are less harmful than cigarettes and shouldn't be regulated as heavily
Why not? We regulate the shit out of food and medicine and those are the exact opposite of harmful when everything goes as planned.
Nicotine on its own is ballpark as addictive as caffeine, vapes lack the MAOIs contained in cigarettes which on their own are much more addictive (atypical antidepressants, hardly surprising) but in synergy with nicotine even more.
as evidenced by all the kids buying vapes.
They also bought fidget spinners. Also I've never seen a kid with a vape.
Nicotine by itself is less physically addicting than caffeine, and no more harmful. It's the 9000 other chemicals in cigarette smoke that increase the addictive properties and cause cancer.
A large part of the reason smoking is so addictive is because it integrates into every part of your life. This is why vaping is by far the most successful method of quitting smoking.
Also, in the US it's illegal to sell nicotine of any form to anyone under 21. But kids will always do the things we tell them not to do exactly because we tell them not to do them. I'd 100% prefer a kid vape than smoke.
Nicotine is absolutely addictive wtf are you talking about. I smoked cigarettes for 6 years and then used a vape to quit cigarettes, it took about 3 months to wean myself off cigarettes and get used to vaping full time. My original plan was to use a vape to get off nicotine completely by gradually lowering my nicotine from 24MG to 0MG of nicotine in my vape juice but that didn't work.
Now here I am 8 years later, vaping my 3MG juice daily and just as additiced to the vape as I was to cigarettes. I have literally the exact same habits with my vape as I did with cigarettes, as soon as I finish eating I pull out my vape, I wake up and have coffee, I pull out my vape, I have some drinks I have a vape. Nicotine is nicotine regardless of how you get it. I've literally tried to quit by going to 0MG juice or going cold turkey 6 times over those 8 years and I just can't do it. It's to fucking hard. I've given up on trying to quit because life sucks and I have no good reason to quit anymore, getting lung cancer is basically my retirement plan at this point. (no clue what the actual health effects are regarding vapes, I'm just being hyperbolic)
Don't get me wrong, vaping is definitely a MUCH better alternative than smoking cigarettes but don't try and downplay just how addictive nicotine is. Nobody should touch nicotine vapes unless you're using it to quit cigarettes.
I 100% agree that kids will get a hold of vapes or smokes regardless of whether it's legal or not to sell it to underagers, but that doesn't mean it's a good thing. Vaping is definitely preferable to smoking, but not getting addicted to nicotine is WAY better than either of those options.
You're talking out of your arse pal. Nicotine is the addictive substance in cigarettes and vape fluid. Furthermore, it is still toxic, but vaping is simply less harmful than smoking - not harmless.
From my own experience of quitting smoking, I can tell that you're spreading lies.
I was on IQOS before I quit entirely and let me tell you, the addiction was real, I couldn't think straight, I was extremely dizzy all the time and generally unusable for pretty much anything.
I had to take some meds to actually help me with the physical withdrawal symptoms, otherwise I would be of no use for 3-5 days (or so I've read) which I couldn't really afford at that time.
If I could just push a button and make all non medical use tobacco become impossible to grow, I would push that button a million times just to be sure. I hope everyone working for Philip Morris gets lung cancer.
That should just be an accepted cost to enter the industry.
Frankly, we need fewer prohibitions on substances, not more. I drink responsibly and like it. We also know you can't ban alcohol without a black market, so why even feign that it could be done?
We need better enforcement to prevent people acting like idiots when they drink. I don't have ideas to offer on how, as I haven't pondered it at length, but that's the best path in my mind.
It's entirely possible to enjoy alcohol responsibly and the vast majority of people do. Shall we can cars because some people can't stop getting in them while inebriated and crashing them?
99.999% of smokers are doing substantial damage to themselves and others.
I interviewed with them once, and they swore up and down that they were cleaning up and divesting of all the harmful stuff, and wanted me to trust they were all about health and a smoke-free future.
Thankfully they were so staggeringly full of bullshit during the interviews that I quickly realized it'd be an absolutely horrifically toxic (groan, yes, sorry) place to work irrespective of my other doubts, and I ended up telling them I didn't want to continue the process and that I was so unhappy with the assorted bullshit during the process that I didn't want to ever be approached by them again.
That's the very long way of saying I'm not the slightest bit surprised it turns out they are in fact still massive asshats, and I'm very happy I caught on early enough.
In a message sent by the PMI’s senior vice-president of external affairs last month and seen by the Guardian, staff were told to find “any connection, any lead, whether political or technical” before a meeting of delegates from 182 countries.
The email sent on 22 September by Grégoire Verdeaux, the senior vice-president of external affairs at PMI, said: “The agenda and meeting documents have been made public for the main part.
Unfortunately they reconfirmed every concern we had that this conference may remain as the biggest missed opportunity ever in tobacco control’s history … WHO’s agenda is nothing short of a systematic, methodical, prohibitionist attack on smoke-free products.”
Without “reasonable, constructive outcomes” , Verdeaux wrote, the “WHO will have irreversibly compromised the historic opportunity for public health presented by the recognition that smoke-free products, appropriately regulated, can accelerate the decline of smoking rates faster than tobacco control combined”.
Tobacco companies are not invited to the event and Verdeaux said despite this he would be in Panama “to publicly denounce the absurdity of being excluded from it while PMI today” was “undoubtedly the most helpful private partner WHO could have in the fight against smoking”.
Asked about the leaked email, Verdeaux said in a statement: “What I say publicly and what I say to our employees is exactly the same: I am proud to make the case to governments and media that innovation drives down smoking rates faster and for that reason should be supported and regulated.
The original article contains 880 words, the summary contains 246 words. Saved 72%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Given the damage they have done to society is there a good reason the fines aren't all your companies money and all of your executives money we seize and destroy and products farms and machinery that can't be sold for non-tobacco use?
Vaping seems to be healthier than cigarette smoking from what I've read, and it makes sense. Burnt particulate matter is hell on your lungs.
But it should be used for smokers to break addiction. And recreational use needs to be heavily regulated until we can do long term studies that show it's relatively safe.
I'll explain as someone with professional chemistry experience. Vaping vaporizes water to deliver the nicotine -- or just to deliver flavored vapor without the nicotine. This process gives me two major concerns:
It isn't pure water vapor, there's additives and oils even for juices with no nicotine. We don't know what breathing in the vaporized flavor additives does. And, we don't know if the process is generating enough heat to cause chemical reactions and degradation of the non water components. It's completely possible that carcinogenic or toxic compounds could come from this. This warrants a lot more study, and fortunately, it should be quite doable. Spectroscopy could tell us a lot.
Remember how Flint had a lot of lead in their water? Heavy metals in water come from surface atoms on the metal leaching into the water. You can treat the water to either discourage this or cause it to precipitate out. Heat increases the frequency of leaching -- so vaporizing water with the coils is going to lead to heavy metal particles in the vapor. This is where we really don't have information. We can likely determine the quantity and type of metal atoms, but we can't determine what it's going to do to the lungs. A big safety concern with tiny particles is breathing them in, because nanoparticles and the like will also ravage your lungs when inhaled. Doesn't even matter what the solid particle is.
The latter concern is where we need long term research. We need to know if the heavy metal particles in the vapor are causing damage in the same way that nanoparticles do. And we need to know what prolonged exposure to those metal particles does. After 40 years of vaping, would enough metal have deposited in airways to cause health issues? It's very possible.
Is that to say stop right this second? No, but just be aware of the risks and don't go overboard. Heavy drinking is probably still worse for you than this, and smoking is definitely worse.
There seem to be a few people who have unfortunately believed the anti-vaping propaganda.
If you think that vapes are more harmful than smoking in any way, this is for you. I've been following the actual science on this for almost 15 years and have peer reviewed the studies.
Every single study in the US that produced negative results either had methodologies designed to only produce negative results, or the negative results were orders of magnitude lower than OSHA levels, or even lower than atmospheric levels.
The only things the anti-vaping campaigns can rely on is bad science and purposefully misrepresenting study results. Well, that and the "think of the children" bullshit.
There's also a belief that nicotine is highly addictive and very harmful. This is incorrect. Nicotine on its own is actually less physically addictive than caffeine (shorter withdrawal period), and actually has heath benefits.
Now, to the "think of the children" bullshit. For one, children can't legally purchase nicotine in most countries. If you want to say the flavors attract children, then we need to ban any sort of flavored alcohol. Also, children can buy as many energy drinks as they want, which are actually harmful to them.
The real reason that vaping is being demonized is because the state governments are losing tobacco tax revenue faster than they planned, and they've already budgeted the money they expected to get. But, instead of imposing a reasonable tax to fill the gap, they tried to make a 30ml bottle of eliquid (normally ~$10-20) cost upwards of $100.
Don't bother asking for sources, because I won't Google for you. I am educated on the topic, and this isn't a formal debate.
Don't strawman the argument to "vapes are worse than smoking" - vaping is actually dramatically less harmful than smoking. If you have a nicotine addiction it's quite beneficial to switch to vaping.
BUT both of them are quite harmful to you and vapes were popularized with candy-like flavors that attracted young adults in droves... and continuously use deceptive marketing to play down health effects. Tobacco is a product you shouldn't use every day in any form, full stop.
That's disingenuous. Vaping is 95% less harmful than smoking. To say that the level of harm is anywhere close is a straight up lie.
It's also not a tobacco product. You wouldn't call green tea a coffee product because coffee has caffeine in it. There are absolutely companies extracting nicotine from other sources or synthesizing it.
There’s also a belief that nicotine is highly addictive and very harmful. This is incorrect. Nicotine on its own is actually less physically addictive than caffeine (shorter withdrawal period), and actually has heath benefits.
Bullshit. Quitting caffeine (multiple caffeinated drinks a day) was far, far easier than quitting cigarettes (a pack and a half a day).
I am not the previous poster, but the argument that I've heard on that front is that smoking was already trending rapidly downwards in use and would have made itself obsolete within a couple generations.
Vaping on the other hand established itself as a "safer" alternative to smoking and became trendy with more younger people who wouldn't have smoked in the first place.
This is incorrect and an easy to debunk claim.. the tar in cigarettes is extremely harmful and vaping removes that element. However, vaping is still bad for you and it is still just as addictive.
It's different from cigarettes. You don't get all the tar and stuff, but many people get even more nicotine, which is bad for your heart and addictive. I would say it's likely better, but it's different.
(There's also non-nicotine vape products which often aren't regulated so can cause all kinds of issues.)