4 ms·

I have a very mixed reaction to all the e-cigarette shenanigans. There's part of me that feels like it's a health corollary to the Jevons Paradox, if you make

I have a very mixed reaction to all the e-cigarette shenanigans. There's part of me that feels like it's a health corollary to the Jevons Paradox, if you make nicotine delivery potentially less damaging, it would stand to follow you lower the risk barrier and might end up with more nicotine users than you started with. I'm def not in high school anymore, and maybe for that reason, the messaging I've personally seen from Juul does is entirely different. Literally the only stuff I've seen from Juul in the wild has been, * "If you weren't already smoking, don't use Juul" * "we support any effort to raise the minimum age of purchasing nicotine products to 21 (T21 laws)" I certainly wouldn't be taken aback if this were just one face of a many-faced beast, and with the other hand they were trying to cultivate a new generation of customers. But it's with a sort of bemused annoyance that the common refrain I've heard from activists and public policy folks ends up converging at "Juul should have never existed." The cynic in me thinks it wonderful if all our problems had the decency to never exist. It just seems aggravating of all issues, the wheels of the machine politic turn so freely for flavored e-cigarettes.

dcolkitt 7y ago
I've noticed a major cognitive bias most people have regarding vaping. Basically along the lines of "smoking's very bad for health, therefore vaping (or nicotine consumption) is probably pretty bad too". Here's the facts. Smoking is bad because smoldering organic compounds are very damaging. It doesn't matter what is being burned, all smoke is bad in roughly equal proportion to the volume of smoke being inhaled. It's why sitting by a wood-burning fireplace does as much damage as a pack of cigarettes. (As an aside, we generally don't see the same health problems with cannabis smokers as we do with tobacco smokers. That's primarily because cannabis smokers consume significantly less volume than tobacco smokers. A pack-a-day smoker is smoldering 140 grams of dried organic material. A very heavy cannabis user might go through 7 grams of high-THC weed per week.) So the fact is we don't really know much about the long-term health consequences of vaping. It simply hasn't been widespread for long enough for us to gather any large-scale epidemiological data. It's possible it may be very harmful. It's also possible that it may be basically harmless. But the fact that smoking is unhealthy tells us nothing about vaping. There are no smoldering organic compounds involved in vaping. Therefore if it is unhealthy it would be because of a totally separate mechanism. In general there are very very few human activities that are as unhealthy as smoking. Heavy smoking literally quadruples all cause mortality. There are many many activities that push humans' physiological baseline. High-altitude living, exotic or restricted diets, mega-doses of vitamins, scuba diving, high salt consumption, high-dose hallucinogens, keeping a nocturnal schedule, heavy caffeine consumption, drinking too much or too little water, being a radiation worker, artificial sweeteners, heavy manual labor, tons and tons of synthesized dyes and chemicals. Most of them are basically harmless, and none of them have anywhere near the health impact of smoking. It would quite unexpected if vaping just coincidentally happened to be one of the few human activities that had a smoking-magnitude effect. Is it possible? Sure. Is it likely? Not at all. As for nicotine consumption, the balance of the evidence is that it's very slightly unhealthy at worse, and potentially beneficial for neurological health.[1] [1]https://www.gwern.net/Nicotine https://www.gwern.net/Nicotine

dcolkitt 7y ago

I've noticed a major cognitive bias most people have regarding vaping. Basically along the lines of "smoking's very bad for health, therefore vaping (or nicotine consumption) is probably pretty bad too". Here's the facts. Smoking is bad because smoldering organic compounds are very damaging. It doesn't matter what is being burned, all smoke is bad in roughly equal proportion to the volume of smoke being inhaled. It's why sitting by a wood-burning fireplace does as much damage as a pack of cigarettes. (As an aside, we generally don't see the same health problems with cannabis smokers as we do with tobacco smokers. That's primarily because cannabis smokers consume significantly less volume than tobacco smokers. A pack-a-day smoker is smoldering 140 grams of dried organic material. A very heavy cannabis user might go through 7 grams of high-THC weed per week.) So the fact is we don't really know much about the long-term health consequences of vaping. It simply hasn't been widespread for long enough for us to gather any large-scale epidemiological data. It's possible it may be very harmful. It's also possible that it may be basically harmless. But the fact that smoking is unhealthy tells us nothing about vaping. There are no smoldering organic compounds involved in vaping. Therefore if it is unhealthy it would be because of a totally separate mechanism. In general there are very very few human activities that are as unhealthy as smoking. Heavy smoking literally quadruples all cause mortality. There are many many activities that push humans' physiological baseline. High-altitude living, exotic or restricted diets, mega-doses of vitamins, scuba diving, high salt consumption, high-dose hallucinogens, keeping a nocturnal schedule, heavy caffeine consumption, drinking too much or too little water, being a radiation worker, artificial sweeteners, heavy manual labor, tons and tons of synthesized dyes and chemicals. Most of them are basically harmless, and none of them have anywhere near the health impact of smoking. It would quite unexpected if vaping just coincidentally happened to be one of the few human activities that had a smoking-magnitude effect. Is it possible? Sure. Is it likely? Not at all. As for nicotine consumption, the balance of the evidence is that it's very slightly unhealthy at worse, and potentially beneficial for neurological health.[1] [1]https://www.gwern.net/Nicotine https://www.gwern.net/Nicotine