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Why aren’t we stopping kids from getting them? Changing the flavor sounds needlessly draconian, as adults like apple and bubblegum, too. You can flood your sy

Why aren’t we stopping kids from getting them? Changing the flavor sounds needlessly draconian, as adults like apple and bubblegum, too. You can flood your system with caffeine using over the counter caffeine pills, or ultra-high caffeine drinks. You can flood your system with alcohol with everclear or unconventional ingestion methods. Neither of these behaviors are as common as this article is trying to push about nicotine, probably mostly due to education and possibly due to the relative addictive nature of caffeine and alcohol. This whole article, though, talks about teens, presumably underage ones, vaping. Isn’t that already illegal? Shouldn’t we get better at that part before we add more things?

exabrial 7y ago
> Isn’t that already illegal? Shouldn’t we get better at that part before we add more things? Pretty much the answer to every law that's passed. Why not just enforce the laws that we have?
- dsfyu404ed 7y ago
  >Why not just enforce the laws that we have? Because that's harder than patting yourself on the back for making it double illegal. You need to allocate funding, convince enforcement to care, etc, etc. Doing a good job enforcing a law requires buy in on basically every level. Making a law is a cakewalk by comparison.
snuxoll 7y ago
But the flavors encourage vulnerable teens to pick up the habit! As if teens didn’t just get packs of cigarettes before, they just had to be more discrete about them. Kid next door smoked in his back yard and threw the butts over the fence into mine, that was just last year. The whole thing is a joke, stores need to do a better job checking ID cards instead of the government creating draconian restrictions. The corner stores I frequent will sell me alcohol without carding me because they “all know who I am”, but the local smoke shop will card me EVERY SINGLE TIME even though they’ve seen me a dozen times (I personally appreciate this).
- tempguy9999 7y ago
  Agreed. If the smoke smelt of vomit...
- conductr 7y ago
  Won't make a lick of difference. Someone always has an older brother or friend. Where there’s a will, there’s a way. What they should do is just apply some friction. Like when you had to start getting OTC meds like Sudafed from the pharmacist. I don’t know if that’s federal or my state. But if you buy too much Sudafed you get on the meth cooker list.
- dbuder 7y ago
  Some stores really don't check IDs, you just have to do it when there are no upright citizens in the store.
augstein 7y ago
Great comment. I‘m a bit afraid that alarmists and the likes will manage to restrict the sale and use of electronic cigarettes and nicotine-liquids for adults, as they already managed to do in a number of countries. Products like the Juul are orders of magnitude less harmful than real smoking and I think adults should absolutely have the choice to use them. And yeah, many of them apparently like flavors such as Mango and Bubblegum instead of using liquids that claim to taste like tobacco.
- Balgair 7y ago
  > Products like the Juul are orders of magnitude less harmful than real smoking Source?
  - Scoundreller 7y ago
    Mostly the absence of the carcinogens from combustion. I don’t think there’s clear evidence that the contents of ecigs are safer (too new), but we know how terrible tobacco combustion is. We also know that nicotine itself isn’t particularly harmful.
    - Balgair 7y ago
      > We also know that nicotine itself isn’t particularly harmful. Source?
      - tempguy9999 7y ago
        Elsewhere in this thread, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20536162 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20536162
      - seanmcdirmid 7y ago
        https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-nicotine-all-bad/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-nicotine-all-b...
        7y ago
dgacmu 7y ago
Because people are awfully good at getting around laws preventing the purchase of things, particularly when those things are legally purchasable by adults -- c.f., cigarettes, alcohol. It's not crazy to think that a multi-pronged approach would be more effective: Try to reduce sales both sales _and appeal_ to underage people. We do this with alcohol, for example, particularly high-alcohol malt liquor [1]. We ban or restrict advertising when it's likely to reach children. [2] [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5391327/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5391327/ [2] https://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2013/who_ban_tobacco/en/ https://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2013/who_ban_t...
- t-writescode 7y ago
  How is this different from flavored alcohol in appeal, though? You could buy bubble gum or chocolate or any other sort of flavor for alcohol, and primarily hard alcohol, at that! Or harder, at least (30 proof+)
  - joezydeco 7y ago
    It's a lot harder to consume alcohol in public as an underaged kid. A lot of it happens in private, after hours or on weekends. A lot of the vaping done by underaged kids is happening in public - some of it during school hours right inside the building. As a parent of teenaged kids I hear a lot about their peers vaping right in the middle of a classroom.
    - t-writescode 7y ago
      Then maybe make vaping, nicotine or not, illegal for children. Now you don’t have to specify and they can’t be advertised to, at all, even for the purely flavored vapor.
    - jyrkesh 7y ago
      Kids in my high school used to drink birthday cake vodka out of a water bottle in the middle of class too...
    - 7y ago
Balgair 7y ago
> Shouldn’t we get better at that part before we add more things? Addictions are very pernicious things. Other methonds to combat addictive substances have similarly failed and succeded in varying ways. Look at the Opiod crisis, despite the pills being highly controlled and only given out via the supervision of multiple highly educated doctors, it became an epidemic of additction in parts of the US. The opiods overcame the laws and many people's best intentions. Nicotine is a different addiction, for sure, but the Opiod crisis provides a good case study. To combat these things, using multiple overlapping methods is a good idea. Laws, yes. Enforcement, yes. Restrictions on advertising, yes. Taking flavors out, yes. taking candy out of the packaging, yes. All of it together, yes. It is likely to take a multi pronged approach. Per the article, it does seem that these vape pens are a different animal from traditional cigarettes. It seems that there are significant health risks that are really hurting real people in the real world. It seems that these people are victims of their addictions and victims of the people in the companies that push and sell these things. More data is needed, of course, and I am not a prosecutor in a court of law. But, it seems like these companies are trying to hurt children for money.
- mieseratte 7y ago
  > Look at the Opiod crisis, despite the pills being highly controlled and only given out via the supervision of multiple highly educated doctors They may be highly controlled now, but they weren't for decades which is how we have gotten to this point.
  - DanBC 7y ago
    The opioid crisis in the US started from doctors prescribing opioids, often in hospital settings. Those meds were licenced and controlled. Has oxycontin ever been available without a prescription?
darkpuma 7y ago
> "Changing the flavor sounds needlessly draconian, as adults like apple and bubblegum, too." I heard this same sort of thing back when Obama banned flavored cigarettes. I wasn't very sympathetic to it back then and I'm still not. But with the passage of several years I think we should be able to evaluate the impact of banning flavored cigarettes. Have any adults been unduly impacted by this restriction? I can't imagine how anybody would be, but there is no reason to speculate since it's been several years. Is there any demonstrable harm caused by the banning of fruity flavor cigarettes?
- sigstoat 7y ago
  > Is there any demonstrable harm caused by the banning of fruity flavor cigarettes? loss of freedom. you should have to demonstrate some value to the ban.
  - darkpuma 7y ago
    I don't care about freedom of the tobacco industry, nor the freedom of teenagers to smoke, nor the freedom of adults to smoke flavored cigarettes. I take it you can't identify any other 'harm.'
    - t-writescode 7y ago
      Thoughts on adults enjoying marijuana? How about pot-brownies? Alcohol? Flavored liquors? If something is legal for adults and illegal for children, then why is it okay to restrict the methods of enjoyment of that item in ways that do not impact other people (e.g. driving while drunk impacts other people). Your whole argument seems to be built around protecting children, so let’s protect them by disallowing advertisement of the product, especially explicit or advertisement that can be reasonably expected to be viewed by minors, and by carding people that buy the products. Let’s make all vaping, nicotine, thc or otherwise illegal for minors. Please don’t come after my apple vodka. I like those flavors, too.
    - navigatesol 7y ago
      >I don't care about freedom of the tobacco industry, nor the freedom of teenagers to smoke, nor the freedom of adults to smoke flavored cigarettes. Ah, so you only care about your freedoms.
awinder 7y ago
To be clear, I’m pretty sure that was a voluntary move on juul’s part, you can still buy those flavors of pods on their websites. Supposedly they are coming back to stores when juul can confidently deploy the age verification system they want.

exabrial 7y ago

> Isn’t that already illegal? Shouldn’t we get better at that part before we add more things? Pretty much the answer to every law that's passed. Why not just enforce the laws that we have?

dsfyu404ed 7y ago
>Why not just enforce the laws that we have? Because that's harder than patting yourself on the back for making it double illegal. You need to allocate funding, convince enforcement to care, etc, etc. Doing a good job enforcing a law requires buy in on basically every level. Making a law is a cakewalk by comparison.

snuxoll 7y ago

But the flavors encourage vulnerable teens to pick up the habit! As if teens didn’t just get packs of cigarettes before, they just had to be more discrete about them. Kid next door smoked in his back yard and threw the butts over the fence into mine, that was just last year. The whole thing is a joke, stores need to do a better job checking ID cards instead of the government creating draconian restrictions. The corner stores I frequent will sell me alcohol without carding me because they “all know who I am”, but the local smoke shop will card me EVERY SINGLE TIME even though they’ve seen me a dozen times (I personally appreciate this).

tempguy9999 7y ago
Agreed. If the smoke smelt of vomit...
conductr 7y ago
Won't make a lick of difference. Someone always has an older brother or friend. Where there’s a will, there’s a way. What they should do is just apply some friction. Like when you had to start getting OTC meds like Sudafed from the pharmacist. I don’t know if that’s federal or my state. But if you buy too much Sudafed you get on the meth cooker list.
dbuder 7y ago
Some stores really don't check IDs, you just have to do it when there are no upright citizens in the store.

augstein 7y ago

Great comment. I‘m a bit afraid that alarmists and the likes will manage to restrict the sale and use of electronic cigarettes and nicotine-liquids for adults, as they already managed to do in a number of countries. Products like the Juul are orders of magnitude less harmful than real smoking and I think adults should absolutely have the choice to use them. And yeah, many of them apparently like flavors such as Mango and Bubblegum instead of using liquids that claim to taste like tobacco.

Balgair 7y ago
> Products like the Juul are orders of magnitude less harmful than real smoking Source?
- Scoundreller 7y ago
  Mostly the absence of the carcinogens from combustion. I don’t think there’s clear evidence that the contents of ecigs are safer (too new), but we know how terrible tobacco combustion is. We also know that nicotine itself isn’t particularly harmful.
  - Balgair 7y ago
    > We also know that nicotine itself isn’t particularly harmful. Source?
    - tempguy9999 7y ago
      Elsewhere in this thread, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20536162 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20536162
    - seanmcdirmid 7y ago
      https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-nicotine-all-bad/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-nicotine-all-b...
      - 7y ago

dgacmu 7y ago

Because people are awfully good at getting around laws preventing the purchase of things, particularly when those things are legally purchasable by adults -- c.f., cigarettes, alcohol. It's not crazy to think that a multi-pronged approach would be more effective: Try to reduce sales both sales _and appeal_ to underage people. We do this with alcohol, for example, particularly high-alcohol malt liquor [1]. We ban or restrict advertising when it's likely to reach children. [2] [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5391327/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5391327/ [2] https://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2013/who_ban_tobacco/en/ https://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2013/who_ban_t...

t-writescode 7y ago
How is this different from flavored alcohol in appeal, though? You could buy bubble gum or chocolate or any other sort of flavor for alcohol, and primarily hard alcohol, at that! Or harder, at least (30 proof+)
- joezydeco 7y ago
  It's a lot harder to consume alcohol in public as an underaged kid. A lot of it happens in private, after hours or on weekends. A lot of the vaping done by underaged kids is happening in public - some of it during school hours right inside the building. As a parent of teenaged kids I hear a lot about their peers vaping right in the middle of a classroom.
  - t-writescode 7y ago
    Then maybe make vaping, nicotine or not, illegal for children. Now you don’t have to specify and they can’t be advertised to, at all, even for the purely flavored vapor.
  - jyrkesh 7y ago
    Kids in my high school used to drink birthday cake vodka out of a water bottle in the middle of class too...
  - 7y ago

Balgair 7y ago

> Shouldn’t we get better at that part before we add more things? Addictions are very pernicious things. Other methonds to combat addictive substances have similarly failed and succeded in varying ways. Look at the Opiod crisis, despite the pills being highly controlled and only given out via the supervision of multiple highly educated doctors, it became an epidemic of additction in parts of the US. The opiods overcame the laws and many people's best intentions. Nicotine is a different addiction, for sure, but the Opiod crisis provides a good case study. To combat these things, using multiple overlapping methods is a good idea. Laws, yes. Enforcement, yes. Restrictions on advertising, yes. Taking flavors out, yes. taking candy out of the packaging, yes. All of it together, yes. It is likely to take a multi pronged approach. Per the article, it does seem that these vape pens are a different animal from traditional cigarettes. It seems that there are significant health risks that are really hurting real people in the real world. It seems that these people are victims of their addictions and victims of the people in the companies that push and sell these things. More data is needed, of course, and I am not a prosecutor in a court of law. But, it seems like these companies are trying to hurt children for money.

mieseratte 7y ago
> Look at the Opiod crisis, despite the pills being highly controlled and only given out via the supervision of multiple highly educated doctors They may be highly controlled now, but they weren't for decades which is how we have gotten to this point.
- DanBC 7y ago
  The opioid crisis in the US started from doctors prescribing opioids, often in hospital settings. Those meds were licenced and controlled. Has oxycontin ever been available without a prescription?

darkpuma 7y ago

> "Changing the flavor sounds needlessly draconian, as adults like apple and bubblegum, too." I heard this same sort of thing back when Obama banned flavored cigarettes. I wasn't very sympathetic to it back then and I'm still not. But with the passage of several years I think we should be able to evaluate the impact of banning flavored cigarettes. Have any adults been unduly impacted by this restriction? I can't imagine how anybody would be, but there is no reason to speculate since it's been several years. Is there any demonstrable harm caused by the banning of fruity flavor cigarettes?

sigstoat 7y ago
> Is there any demonstrable harm caused by the banning of fruity flavor cigarettes? loss of freedom. you should have to demonstrate some value to the ban.
- darkpuma 7y ago
  I don't care about freedom of the tobacco industry, nor the freedom of teenagers to smoke, nor the freedom of adults to smoke flavored cigarettes. I take it you can't identify any other 'harm.'
  - t-writescode 7y ago
    Thoughts on adults enjoying marijuana? How about pot-brownies? Alcohol? Flavored liquors? If something is legal for adults and illegal for children, then why is it okay to restrict the methods of enjoyment of that item in ways that do not impact other people (e.g. driving while drunk impacts other people). Your whole argument seems to be built around protecting children, so let’s protect them by disallowing advertisement of the product, especially explicit or advertisement that can be reasonably expected to be viewed by minors, and by carding people that buy the products. Let’s make all vaping, nicotine, thc or otherwise illegal for minors. Please don’t come after my apple vodka. I like those flavors, too.
  - navigatesol 7y ago
    >I don't care about freedom of the tobacco industry, nor the freedom of teenagers to smoke, nor the freedom of adults to smoke flavored cigarettes. Ah, so you only care about your freedoms.

awinder 7y ago

To be clear, I’m pretty sure that was a voluntary move on juul’s part, you can still buy those flavors of pods on their websites. Supposedly they are coming back to stores when juul can confidently deploy the age verification system they want.