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There's a logical fallacy here somewhere. I'm sure stage smoke isn't also a viable insecticide. Growing up around people in the tobacco industry I know nicoti

There's a logical fallacy here somewhere. I'm sure stage smoke isn't also a viable insecticide. Growing up around people in the tobacco industry I know nicotine is lethal and easily absorbed through the skin, and not something you want to be around if you don't have to -- and especially not if someone has breathing problems. The long term consumption data will take a while to build up about all the health effects. It's not a good idea to be a guinea pig for that.

TeMPOraL 11y ago
The logical fallacy is on the side of anti-e-cig arguments here. It's moving the goalpost from talking about smoke to talking about nicotine. And yes, you're probably better off not ingesting nicotine than ingesting it, but if you do ingest nicotine, you're significantly better off getting it from an e-cigarette than from a standard one. Also, dose matters; I don't recall studies showing that pure nicotine is harmful in the amounts usually consumed (addiction being created by its interaction with other substances in tobacco smoke).
- mpdehaan2 11y ago
  Did the goalposts not move first with the implied argument that "we ingest this all the time, ergo these things are safe?". They aren't containing just those chemicals. I'm saying I don't want to breathe any of it I don't have to second hand, and the argument that I breathe liquid smoke at concerts or Christmas festivals is beside the point. Forget addiction in users who decide to smoke it, nictotine a neurotoxin and exhaling it to people who don't want it in public places is inconsiderate.
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    > I'm saying I don't want to breathe any of it I don't have to second hand, and the argument that I breathe liquid smoke at concerts or Christmas festivals is beside the point. It's not, it's about magnitude of danger and pointing out it's not a kind of danger that's worth worrying about. This is the rational approach; contrast with media fear-mongering that likes to point out "a connection" between X and some illness, without mentioning how insignificant the connection is. Or, in this case, without noticing that you ingest the exact same thing in similar amounts from different sources, and those sources somehow aren't considered bad for you. > Forget addiction in users who decide to smoke it, nictotine a neurotoxin So is water, when overdosed. > and exhaling it to people who don't want it in public places is inconsiderate. I totally agree with that! But let's call a spade a spade - it's inconsiderate, not dangerous.
    - Retric 11y ago
      You have zero rights to harm my health. So, it's not that bad is simply not a defense. If you want nicotine ware a patch, chew gum etc. If you want some other crap in your lungs, do it somewhere that does not impact me.
      - TeMPOraL 11y ago
        Are you telling the same thing to every driver that drives past you? To every person that breathes near you? Or to God himself, for creating the Sun that spews way more UV than you need for healthy existence? There are countless things that are "not that bad" and yet shown to be linked to various diseases. We don't care about them because that's the very definition of danger being not in any way significant.
        Retric 11y ago
        If someone is driving a SUV down the sidewalk I would probably call the police. The EPA is legally empowered to deal with air pollution, sure we carve out exceptions for the common good, but the default is not dump whatever you want into the air.
        TeMPOraL 11y ago
        Yes, but for better or worse[0], smoking is considered common good. Here we're talking about replacing smoking, which is clearly very harmful, by e-cigarettes, which are maybe somewhat but insignificantly harmful. The cost-benefit analysis of that alone[1] should convince everyone to cheerfully advocate for them. In the course of this discussion thread, we've jumped from the danger of e-cig vapor (which is nil) to the danger of pure nicotine (which is also nil) and now we're talking about pollution. Can't we just agree that those are three separate issues (two of which are non-issues, and third isn't really discussed by people right now)? So far everything is showing that e-cigs are a neglible hazard to smokers and their surroundings. We should be happy we've found a good alternative for the decades-old problem, instead of trying to destroy it by overblowing its negative effects by orders of magnitude. [0] - Googling just now, I found that there are reasons for considering cigarette smoke an air pollution - http://epi.yale.edu/the-metric/considering-smoking-air-pollution-problem-environmental-health http://epi.yale.edu/the-metric/considering-smoking-air-pollu... [1] - I haven't seen any analysis about potential of e-cigarette smoke becoming a significant pollutant; it most likely won't be in terms of particulate matter, but maybe the smoke itself is bad for atmosphere. I don't know. But even if, that's a discussion about environmental impact (and a one that no one is having right now), not about direct health effects.
  - MCRed 11y ago
    It's not beside the point-- when I vape, there is no nicotine, it is literally a human smoke machine. Your anti-nicotine crusade is attacking people who aren't using nicotine, without making the distinction.
    - mpdehaan2 11y ago
      There is no crusade. However, most people who are vaping into public airspace are in fact using nicotine with a very high degree of correlation -- this is not something many people do just to taste 0-nicotine air flavors. This started off by saying "vaping is probably safe, because similar things are used for special effects at concerts". In this case, there is at least one factor not included in those concerts - the drug most people are obtaining through vaping. They say "this is safe", while ingesting a particularly evil toxin that is lethal in very small quantities (like a drop or two will make you violently sick). Yes, there are other toxins, but ... again, this is perfectly avoidable and nobody has any business making others who do not choose to be exposed to it. People should have the right to not come in contact with that.
      - tripzilch 11y ago
        > a drop or two will make you violently sick can we please stick to the facts? a drop of nicotine will kill you. it's easily more than the above stated lethal dose of 6mg. and before you think that proves your point, it actually just proves that you can't properly keep orders of magnitude apart. if you consider "a drop or two" as "very small quantities" then I have some news for you: there's essential nutrients your body needs to survive, that would be lethal if you ingested "a drop or two". how much mg nicotine is there in a whiff of second-hand e-cig smoke? how much whiffs are there in "a drop or two" of nicotine?
surement 11y ago
It's pretty bold to bring up the word fallacy and to go on saying that because nicotine is used as a pesticide, it's bad for humans at the levels found in cigarettes or e-liquids. Anything is lethal at a high enough dose; no one is advocating rubbing pure nicotine on your hands. Also, I'm very interested in knowing what nicotine (outside of cigarette smoking) has to do with breathing problems.
- Retric 11y ago
  "Smoking excessive amounts of tobacco has also led to poisoning; a case was reported where two brothers smoked 17 and 18 pipes of tobacco in succession and were both fatally poisoned." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicotine_poisoning#cite_note-Lavoie-1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicotine_poisoning#cite_note-L...
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    One case. In 1920. Please read the rest of that article, including the paragraph you quote from, to see why you generally can't get nicotine poisoning from even hardcore smoking. Also, this doesn't answer GP's question about nicotine causing breathing problems - besides the pedantic observation that your lungs will shut down with the rest of your body when you get lethally poisoned.
- mpdehaan2 11y ago
  > then go on saying that it's bad for humans at the levels found in cigarettes or e-liquids Is it bad to jump to conclusions that it's safe and everybody else should be happy inhaling your exhaust believing so? What someone does in their own homes is fine, though this thread was discussing vaping-exhaust being fine in public, and I don't believe people have that right. Smoking was predominent in restaurants and public areas a while back and we thought it would be impossible to go away, and now that it has, it's been absolutely fantastic. This is basically just a "safer", not "safe" method that still affects people in a given area. I'd rather people just use patches or something else rather than vaping down the street, in malls, or sidewalks. This would be completely fine - mind you - that it is likely to have very negative health consequences to those people.

TeMPOraL 11y ago

The logical fallacy is on the side of anti-e-cig arguments here. It's moving the goalpost from talking about smoke to talking about nicotine. And yes, you're probably better off not ingesting nicotine than ingesting it, but if you do ingest nicotine, you're significantly better off getting it from an e-cigarette than from a standard one. Also, dose matters; I don't recall studies showing that pure nicotine is harmful in the amounts usually consumed (addiction being created by its interaction with other substances in tobacco smoke).

mpdehaan2 11y ago
Did the goalposts not move first with the implied argument that "we ingest this all the time, ergo these things are safe?". They aren't containing just those chemicals. I'm saying I don't want to breathe any of it I don't have to second hand, and the argument that I breathe liquid smoke at concerts or Christmas festivals is beside the point. Forget addiction in users who decide to smoke it, nictotine a neurotoxin and exhaling it to people who don't want it in public places is inconsiderate.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  > I'm saying I don't want to breathe any of it I don't have to second hand, and the argument that I breathe liquid smoke at concerts or Christmas festivals is beside the point. It's not, it's about magnitude of danger and pointing out it's not a kind of danger that's worth worrying about. This is the rational approach; contrast with media fear-mongering that likes to point out "a connection" between X and some illness, without mentioning how insignificant the connection is. Or, in this case, without noticing that you ingest the exact same thing in similar amounts from different sources, and those sources somehow aren't considered bad for you. > Forget addiction in users who decide to smoke it, nictotine a neurotoxin So is water, when overdosed. > and exhaling it to people who don't want it in public places is inconsiderate. I totally agree with that! But let's call a spade a spade - it's inconsiderate, not dangerous.
  - Retric 11y ago
    You have zero rights to harm my health. So, it's not that bad is simply not a defense. If you want nicotine ware a patch, chew gum etc. If you want some other crap in your lungs, do it somewhere that does not impact me.
    - TeMPOraL 11y ago
      Are you telling the same thing to every driver that drives past you? To every person that breathes near you? Or to God himself, for creating the Sun that spews way more UV than you need for healthy existence? There are countless things that are "not that bad" and yet shown to be linked to various diseases. We don't care about them because that's the very definition of danger being not in any way significant.
      - Retric 11y ago
        If someone is driving a SUV down the sidewalk I would probably call the police. The EPA is legally empowered to deal with air pollution, sure we carve out exceptions for the common good, but the default is not dump whatever you want into the air.
        TeMPOraL 11y ago
        Yes, but for better or worse[0], smoking is considered common good. Here we're talking about replacing smoking, which is clearly very harmful, by e-cigarettes, which are maybe somewhat but insignificantly harmful. The cost-benefit analysis of that alone[1] should convince everyone to cheerfully advocate for them. In the course of this discussion thread, we've jumped from the danger of e-cig vapor (which is nil) to the danger of pure nicotine (which is also nil) and now we're talking about pollution. Can't we just agree that those are three separate issues (two of which are non-issues, and third isn't really discussed by people right now)? So far everything is showing that e-cigs are a neglible hazard to smokers and their surroundings. We should be happy we've found a good alternative for the decades-old problem, instead of trying to destroy it by overblowing its negative effects by orders of magnitude. [0] - Googling just now, I found that there are reasons for considering cigarette smoke an air pollution - http://epi.yale.edu/the-metric/considering-smoking-air-pollution-problem-environmental-health http://epi.yale.edu/the-metric/considering-smoking-air-pollu... [1] - I haven't seen any analysis about potential of e-cigarette smoke becoming a significant pollutant; it most likely won't be in terms of particulate matter, but maybe the smoke itself is bad for atmosphere. I don't know. But even if, that's a discussion about environmental impact (and a one that no one is having right now), not about direct health effects.
- MCRed 11y ago
  It's not beside the point-- when I vape, there is no nicotine, it is literally a human smoke machine. Your anti-nicotine crusade is attacking people who aren't using nicotine, without making the distinction.
  - mpdehaan2 11y ago
    There is no crusade. However, most people who are vaping into public airspace are in fact using nicotine with a very high degree of correlation -- this is not something many people do just to taste 0-nicotine air flavors. This started off by saying "vaping is probably safe, because similar things are used for special effects at concerts". In this case, there is at least one factor not included in those concerts - the drug most people are obtaining through vaping. They say "this is safe", while ingesting a particularly evil toxin that is lethal in very small quantities (like a drop or two will make you violently sick). Yes, there are other toxins, but ... again, this is perfectly avoidable and nobody has any business making others who do not choose to be exposed to it. People should have the right to not come in contact with that.
    - tripzilch 11y ago
      > a drop or two will make you violently sick can we please stick to the facts? a drop of nicotine will kill you. it's easily more than the above stated lethal dose of 6mg. and before you think that proves your point, it actually just proves that you can't properly keep orders of magnitude apart. if you consider "a drop or two" as "very small quantities" then I have some news for you: there's essential nutrients your body needs to survive, that would be lethal if you ingested "a drop or two". how much mg nicotine is there in a whiff of second-hand e-cig smoke? how much whiffs are there in "a drop or two" of nicotine?

surement 11y ago

It's pretty bold to bring up the word fallacy and to go on saying that because nicotine is used as a pesticide, it's bad for humans at the levels found in cigarettes or e-liquids. Anything is lethal at a high enough dose; no one is advocating rubbing pure nicotine on your hands. Also, I'm very interested in knowing what nicotine (outside of cigarette smoking) has to do with breathing problems.

Retric 11y ago
"Smoking excessive amounts of tobacco has also led to poisoning; a case was reported where two brothers smoked 17 and 18 pipes of tobacco in succession and were both fatally poisoned." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicotine_poisoning#cite_note-Lavoie-1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicotine_poisoning#cite_note-L...
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  One case. In 1920. Please read the rest of that article, including the paragraph you quote from, to see why you generally can't get nicotine poisoning from even hardcore smoking. Also, this doesn't answer GP's question about nicotine causing breathing problems - besides the pedantic observation that your lungs will shut down with the rest of your body when you get lethally poisoned.
mpdehaan2 11y ago
> then go on saying that it's bad for humans at the levels found in cigarettes or e-liquids Is it bad to jump to conclusions that it's safe and everybody else should be happy inhaling your exhaust believing so? What someone does in their own homes is fine, though this thread was discussing vaping-exhaust being fine in public, and I don't believe people have that right. Smoking was predominent in restaurants and public areas a while back and we thought it would be impossible to go away, and now that it has, it's been absolutely fantastic. This is basically just a "safer", not "safe" method that still affects people in a given area. I'd rather people just use patches or something else rather than vaping down the street, in malls, or sidewalks. This would be completely fine - mind you - that it is likely to have very negative health consequences to those people.