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I wonder how good it is for public health if Juul is able to grow this market. Do the health benefits from cigarette smokers switching to e-cigarettes offset th
by gringoDan 8y ago
I wonder how good it is for public health if Juul is able to grow this market. Do the health benefits from cigarette smokers switching to e-cigarettes offset the young people who never would have dreamt of smoking cigarettes heavily, but regularly use Juul?
I had no idea how pervasive Juul was for college students until my sister told me that multiple people were "Juul-ing" in all of her classes. Highly recommend this New Yorker article to understand the cultural phenomenon: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/05/14/the-promise-of-vaping-and-the-rise-of-juul https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/05/14/the-promise-of...
- wtvanhest 8y agoAbsolutely not good for public health long-term. Their recruiter reached out to me last December and it was a hard no for me based on what I understood about the industry. People use them for starting to smoke just as much as stopping and they are also heavily used for non-nicotine products as well. I don't hold any moral judgements on the brand, or customers, but I was not going to spend my effort helping that become a bigger company.
- fizwhiz 8y agoThe virtue signaling was unnecessary, tbh.
- ada1981 8y agoUsing the phrase “virtue signaling” seems to be a sort of “virtue signal”. Does it make you uncomfortable that someone would make a decision from a place of values and ethics? Or that they’d discuss it?
- sbinthree 8y agoCigarettes are "generally accepted non-virtuous behavior". Virtue signaling might mean doing something that anyone expects to be baseline "good person" behavior, but inappropriately advertising this fact. People tend to prefer to see virtue and identify it, much like people can safely refer to others as a genius but referring to themselves in that light suggests a lack of genius. Heaping praise on others for their virtuous actions is fine, where as attracting that praise in a form like this maybe not.
- ada1981 8y agoGenerally I find policing the expression of others to be a function of some disowned or repressed part of the policer.
- toomuchtodo 8y agoKudos for the ethics.
- awakeasleep 8y agoTobacco kills 7 MILLION PEOPLE A YEAR You confused your personal morality, which seems more based on "would this rule benefit everyone applied universally" with the question you were asked, which is of the "does this provide the greatest good to the greatest amount of people" variety. It's _possible_ that in the end, ecigs are not a net positive for humanity. But that is a belief without firm proof. They could be twice as addictive, but if they kill only 1/3 of us that cigs did, they'll be a net benefit. And 1/3 the lethality of cigarettes seems to be a drastic overestimation of their harm from the evidence we have right now.
- wtvanhest 8y agoI made my own assumptions and came to the conclusion that this was net negative not net positive. I guess we will find out in 30 years.
- awakeasleep 8y agoWell I am interested in what other features you considered in your analysis (not to disputed them, just curious about what elements spoke to you).
- flyingcircus3 8y agoYou, in fact, conflated the original question with a essentialized, worst case scenario that shoehorns a multivariate determination into a binary proposition. There are, after all, other methods of smoking secession beyond nicotene alternatives. In fact, there are some methods of quitting an addictive substance that work by actually stopping the ingestion of the addictive substance in the first place. Nicotene alternatives are akin to advertisers recommending you to take a break from Facebook when it's too overwhelming, instead of just deleting your account entirely, like a person with self control and agency might do when products and services continually make you regret ever starting to use them in the first place.
- seanmcdirmid 8y agoYou misunderstand what is really bad about cigarettes. It isn’t the nicotine, but the tar (the burning of it). Heck, nicotine gum has long been used as a safe smoking cessation aide. Not to mention it is present in many new works vegetables. Getting rid of the burning tar is a HUGE win for smokers, healthwise.
- Nursie 8y agoe-cigs have been proclaimed as between 95 and 99% less harmful than smoking, by some health charities. If these figures are well grounded in evidence then... probably yes.
- slg 8y agoOxycontin is likely a safer drug than heroin. That doesn't mean we should be working on growing the Oxycontin market on the assumption that every new user is someone who might have otherwise used heroin.
- varjag 8y agoMethadone is safer than heroin and is widely used in substitution therapy. Either way, the bulk of health damage from smoking was from the complimentary products of burning. You ain't getting lung cancer from nicotine.
- slg 8y agoI am not aware of any doctors that would recommend using methadone permanently and and it is only legally available to be prescribed for ongoing substitution therapy by federally certified abuse recovery centers. So my analogy still stands. No one should be actively campaigning to grow the methadone market the way that people are for e-cigarettes.
- magissima 8y agoHigh schools too, it's amazing how many kids use juul. I think a lot of them aren't even aware it's nicotine.
- GW150914 8y agoThey know, they don’t care. It was hard enough to convince people, especially kids, that smoking was bad for you and that was with something that made you hack up yellow slugs, and stank. I would guess that convincing people that vaping nicotine is harmful decades before the harm is readily apparent, in ways that are not well studied will be essentially impossible. Juul is just the perfect intersection of portable, concealable, and apparently consequence-free. Kids will use it, and I don’t see a way around it. Good luck to the poor little bastards.
- wycs 8y agoThere is startlingly little evidence that pure doses of nicotine are harmful without smoke.
- _Schizotypy 8y agohttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4553893/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4553893/
- Jonovono 8y agoEveryone in here is caught up in the physical harm of smoking. Celebrating moving from cigarettes to eCigs. I'll admit that's important. But for me, most of the harm cigarettes have (and also eCigs) is not how bad is it on your physical health.
- hazz99 8y agoLegitimate question - if most of the harm of eCigs is not on your physical health, what is it?
- TimTheTinker 8y agoThat’s a great article, and rather eye-opening. Juul may help cigarette smokers get away from tobacco, but wow — stories about teens and young adults taking Juul hits every 10-15 minutes are something else. That’s just plain addiction, taking them far beyond the threshold of diminishing returns, even for caffeine-like self-medication. There’s definitely a lot of money in creating addictions... this can’t be a long-term, net good to society the way it’s heading now.
- stefan_ 8y agoKids taking Juul hits every 10-15 minutes are not driving and are not drinking alcohol, so there is your public health benefit already, mostly in the former. If you're gonna be opposed to some fidget spinner infatuation on "think about the kids" public health concerns, start at what actually kills kids.
- Splines 8y agoIf you're going to pick something to say "Kids doing X don't drink a drive", vaping would probably be pretty low on that list.
- TimTheTinker 8y ago> start at what actually kills kids Sounds like you’re categorically ignoring whatever negative things don’t directly kill people... well-being encompasses a lot more than not dying.
- EpicEng 8y agoAnd when I was in school half the kids smoked cigarrettes. I have no idea what the numbers are, but you have to consider that fewer kids are using tobacco, which is a good thing.
- trentlott 8y agoWell, it depends. As far as I remember, the vehicle is propylene glycol. It isn't biologically inert, and I'm not sure how much work has been done to study buildup within the lungs or combustion products. Combine that with dodgy sourcing allowing metal contamination. It seems more or less the definition of trading the devil you know for one you don't.
- tigershark 8y agoI never heard of this Jool-thingy before, but when I was smoking I switched to e-cig for a while and after a couple of month I had to stop altogether because one night I managed to smoke the equivalent of 2 packs of cigs in something like 4/5 hours. After that night I didn’t smoke for 8/9 months I think because the effect that it had on me was so awful. After some huge stress at work I started again and after a couple of years I finally stopped for good, I hope. Now it’s 3 years that I don’t touch a cig or an e-cig, and I really hope that the new generation doesn’t fall on the new and glamorous nicotine trap, although I’m not really optimistic...
- singingfish 8y agoI'm not sure how you'd manage to "smoke the equivalent of 2 packs of cigs in something like 4/5 hours". Firstly you're not inhaling any combustion products, so that's not equivalent to start with. Secondly the absorbance of nicotine from ecig vapour is much lower than when nicotine is inhaled in the form of smoke such equivalence is not really measurable.
- homero 8y agoI was a heavy smoker, 2 packs a day, Juul was the only thing that helped me quit. Nothing else worked.
- 83457 8y agoAll I know is that I vastly prefer hanging around people that vape vs smoke. I am middle aged and wasn't that familiar with it but started running events with older teens and young adults with vaping being somewhat common (small fraction overall). For some events a dozen people go outside to smoke and then come back stinking the entire place up. Vapers on the other hand just take some puffs in the room and no one even notices or go out and come back smelling normal. Of course the highly scented or large clouds are annoying but not what most vapers I know do. Not sure how "juuling" figures in here but wanted to share my experience. Growing up annoyed with a mom who smoked and generally hating it, vaping has been a bit of a relief as compared to cigarette smokers.