8 ms·

It really is amazing. We were thiiiiiiis close to having a generation that wasn't addicted to nicotine for the first time in hundreds of years (like, since trad

It really is amazing. We were thiiiiiiis close to having a generation that wasn't addicted to nicotine for the first time in hundreds of years (like, since trade between North America and Europe really became a thing) and these guys pulled this thumb drive that tastes like cotton candy out of nowhere and every young person is just jonesing. And the regulatory/public opinion environment isn't what it was in the 80s and 90s when we decided to take on cigarettes. Imagine a company being told today that they now have to stop advertising on billboards, can't advertise to kids, and have to pay a fifth of a trillion dollars over 25 years for the harms they caused to Medicaid. Can't, can you?

ndsipa_pomu 3y ago
> Imagine a company being told today that they now have to stop advertising on billboards, can't advertise to kids, and have to pay a fifth of a trillion dollars over 25 years for the harms they caused to Medicaid. Can't, can you? I'd welcome those kinds of regulations to be applied to oil and car companies. Arguably they've caused a lot more harm.
- jgalt212 3y ago
  except now everyone who isn't on Ozempic, is obese.
sevagh 3y ago
[flagged]
dudisubekti 3y ago
But what’s so bad about nicotine? Is it any worse than caffeine? I’m genuinely curious, because isn’t tar and carbon monoxide the dangerous byproduct of smoking, not the nicotine?
- bayindirh 3y ago
  Nicotine addiction is chronic and very hard to break. You can reset caffeine tolerance and dependence in 10 days.
  - madog 3y ago
    Actually with vaping it becomes pretty easy to quit. You just taper down the nicotine slowly until you're on nothing and eventually you just kind of stop because you don't feel the need to do it anymore.
    - bayindirh 3y ago
      What about body's response? Is it easy to curb? I was drinking 2 liters of coffee per day while finishing my Ph.D.. Next week I wasn't drinking, and after that I occasionally drank half a cup per day. This was seven years ago, and I still drink half a cup, because I like the taste of coffee. I have at least a dozen vaping friends who said they started to stop smoking. Now at least half of them have heavily souped up, customized e-cigs. Two of them are making their own liquids with nicotine, rest are using bog-standard vapes. None of them stopped smoking or nicotine intake, which was the goal of all of them.
      - zachturn 3y ago
        This is such an edge case on quitting a caffeine addiction. 2 liters is an INSANE amount of coffee to be drinking daily. Kudos to you but let's not pretend this is the average experience of people breaking even much milder levels of caffeine consumption.
        bayindirh 3y ago
        I did my research before letting coffee loose on my body. The coffee acts by blocking tiredness/sleep receptors on the brain, so brain builds more of them to work normally. This is how coffee dependence and tolerance builds. When you stop coffee, brain detects that the number of receptors is too high and starts to break them down. This is why you get the headaches. That "one week" period is not an edge case, it's the science of it. If it was proved to be harder on that research, I'd never let my body to reach 2L/day levels.
- lobsterthief 3y ago
  Yes, nicotine is much worse than caffeine for your heart.
- uniqueuid 3y ago
  There are many studies on the effect of nicotine. I would look for several meta-analyses or umbrella (meta-meta) analyses. Ideally reporting all-cause mortality. Here is one like that: ~500k individuals, vaping has an odds ratio of 1.33 (95% CI = 1.14–1.56) for heart attacks compared to non-smoker/non-vapers. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0167527322013158 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01675... [edit] To compare that to caffeine, this study does not see a significant risk increase for coffee drinkers. So it seems that vaping is objectively more harmful: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5940396/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5940396/ [edit2] And an umbrella review, because I like them a lot: This shows that negative effects of high coffee intake mostly disappear when controlling for smoking. Note this paper has a correction, which I think is a great sign of credibility. https://www.bmj.com/content/359/bmj.j5024 https://www.bmj.com/content/359/bmj.j5024
  - jorvi 3y ago
    You are conflating the harms of the delivery mechanism with the harms of the substance. Nicotine gum is relatively harmless for example. Or perhaps imbibe on a Nicotini[0]? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicotini https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicotini
    - uniqueuid 3y ago
      You're right that these studies measure the product, not the substance. But TFA is about vaping, and I am referring to that. [edit] Seems that nicotine is not really harmless, even in gum or patches: double the risk of heart palpitations and chest pains, 1.67 the risk of nausea and vomiting, 1.5 times the risk of gastrointestinal complaints, and 1.4 times the risk of insomnia. Of course, if you measure anything this closely with >100k participants in RCTs, it's bound to have a significant effect. But these odds ratios are not exactly small. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/1617-9625-8-8 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/1617-9625-8-8
      - kjkjadksj 3y ago
        Are those numbers comparable to caffeine?
- alphazard 3y ago
  Really nothing; you're correct to think of it in the same category as caffeine. Both addictive, yet safe. But vaporizers have more than nicotine. There's other chemicals needed to produce vaporizer fluid, and it's far too soon to tell if they are safe. Even though most of them have been in the food supply, they haven't been inhaled at scale. We already found one that wasn't safe (Vitamin E Acetate), because it was causing very obvious problems. What about the non-obvious problems? A more direct comparison to caffeine is a nicotine (not tobacco) pouch.
  - user_7832 3y ago
    Aren’t nicotine’s vasoconstriction worse than coffee’s (at regular consumption levels)?
- gwbas1c 3y ago
  Nicotine is one of the most addictive substances known to man. Quitting cigarettes is about as hard as quitting heroin. In contrast, quitting coffee is much, much easier. On a more personal note, when "The King's Speech" was in theaters I kept watching people smoke cigarettes on screen, and went out and bought some Drum. (Loose tobacco that comes with rolling papers.) Within a few days I started getting a voice in my head that told me it was "a good idea to go have a cigarette on the porch once I get out of bed," or "it's a good idea to have a cigarette when you get home." It was really creepy, I've never had a substance put ideas in my head 24+ hours after it was out of my system.
  - VyseofArcadia 3y ago
    I've thankfully never had to quit cigarettes or heroin, but in my experience quitting coffee is awful. 3-5 days of migraine-level headaches and nausea. And the whole time you're thinking, "all this could go away with just one little cup of coffee, which all the studies say has health benefits even. Just one little cup"
    - bayindirh 3y ago
      > 3-5 days of migraine-level headaches and nausea... A single sip of coffee, or a cup of good black tea generally alleviates these symptoms. I had to drink a sip of coffee on day 4 while quitting coffee, and all my headache was gone.
    - 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
      Why quit coffee if it has health benefits?
      - VyseofArcadia 3y ago
        Great question! A couple of reasons. The simplest is that I dislike being dependent on any substance. A more nuanced reason is that I want to be able to use caffeine as a tool. A cup of coffee is the largest dose of caffeine that I am comfortable taking at any one time. If I already have caffeine tolerance at the level of a daily coffee habit, caffeine has lost much of its utility to me. However, if my tolerance is lower than that, I can really feel it when I do occasionally have use for a cup of coffee (e.g. the day before code freeze.) Currently my caffeine intake is a cup of tea[0]. This is at the level where I don't hate myself if I miss it[1], and I can still use coffee as a tool on occasion. Also, you can pry my tea out of my cold dead hands. [0] Note that how much caffeine a cup of tea has is much more nuanced than "black vs green". Cultivar, terroir, steep time are much more important to caffeine levels than how the tea is processed. In fact if anything, green tea cultivars have been shown to have, on average, very slightly more caffeine than black[2]. [1] I feel it, but it's not 3-5 days of migraines [2] Y. Zuo et al, Simultaneous determination of catechins, caffeine and gallic acids in green, Oolong, black and pu-erh teas using HPLC with a photodiode array detector, Talanta 57 (2002) 307–316
- interludead 3y ago
  Nicotine is a highly addictive stimulant
rayiner 3y ago
We socialized people to realize smoking is dirty, then went ahead and legalized marijuana so now kids who would never have smoked cigarettes are filling their lungs with tar: https://www.cnn.com/2023/08/14/health/marijuana-smoke-wellness/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2023/08/14/health/marijuana-smoke-wellne.... At least cigarettes made people skinny and hot.
- eej71 3y ago
  I've often wondered if our complete demonization of all smoking was a bit of a disservice to the sporadic smoke that likely helped with managing one's weight which has its own health benefits.
  - lenerdenator 3y ago
    The problem came from the fact that sporadic smoking didn't serve the profits of tobacco companies in the way they would have liked. The shoving of high-fructose corn syrup and other calorie-rich ingredients into everything sold in the US to increase consumption (again, for profits) has a much greater impact on weight management, though.
    - itsoktocry 3y ago
      >The shoving of high-fructose corn syrup and other calorie-rich ingredients into everything sold in the US to increase consumption (again, for profits) Do you have any evidence of this conspiracy? Perhaps it's just food producers adding an abundant, cheap sweetener to their crap because that's what the market demands? Read the ingredients and buy or don't buy. People need to have a bit of personal accountability in these things.
      - redserk 3y ago
        Where are you finding many options in products without HFCS or additives? Even the much-higher-end supermarkets near me don't have meaningful alternatives for a lot of products where I am, and I'm in a HCOL area.
alephnerd 3y ago
Opium War 2.0 - we have too much inertia to stop the "good times", and while everyone had the right to ruin their bodies, they're doing it out of complete ignorance. The Western relationship to addictive substances is insane, and I hate to admit this, but to a certain extent Wang Huning's thesis about America is right.
- sevagh 3y ago
  Which non-Western utopias have avoided addictive substances? List them.
  - alephnerd 3y ago
    No one can avoid addictive substances, but at least countries like Singapore try to criminalize or heavily restrict their access via sin taxes AND prosecution of dealers. The kind of model Canada and California follows could be helpful as well, if only prosecution and the stick was also used in conjunction with cracking down on black markets for drugs the same way provinces and CA do on moonshine.
- mcphage 3y ago
  > to a certain extent Wang Huning's thesis about America is right What is that?
  - alephnerd 3y ago
    Hyper-individualism leading to a nihilistic worldview. Individuals absolutely should have autonomy to choose what they wish to do, but not if it has an impact on the rest of society. Fundamentally, some amount of regulation (either via social norms or via actual laws) is needed, yet we as individuals will continue to fight each other while ignoring the core fact that we are all on the same team. I strongly disagree with Wang and Xi, but on this part I am in agreement - individualism has gone too far in America (both economically and socially), and we need to return to our communitarian roots.
    - 3y ago
fidotron 3y ago
You say it like that it is desirable. Unfortunately people perform better when they have nicotine, so the effect for society as a whole is non negligible if a huge mass of people get a slight performance bounce. Smoking is annoying, disgusting, unhealthy etc. but we are way too quick to dismiss the possibility that nicotine itself may have been a civilization booster.
- uniqueuid 3y ago
  That's a very interesting, but completely ad-hoc theory. The problem with these is that there are almost always equally plausible theories, and it's really hard to figure out which is correct. Especially given the huge amount of effort that has gone into research on tobacco and nicotine (I guess millions of hours, if not more), I would definitely NOT say we are too quick to dismiss the possibility. I'm sure you can find an interesting econometric paper presenting this argument, but then it would be more credible.
  - fidotron 3y ago
    This has come up before here but unfortunately I'm right: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicotine#Performance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicotine#Performance
    - uniqueuid 3y ago
      Thanks, I take the ad-hoc theory back!
- bilekas 3y ago
  > Unfortunately people perform better when they have nicotine. This is the first time I've ever heard someone bring this argument. Ignoring the health risks involved with nicotine, the 'performance boost' is negligible. It's less than caffeine. > but we are way too quick to dismiss the possibility that nicotine itself may have been a civilization booster. There are nicotine gums and patches available, and a very good reason you don't see people who don't smoke using them, because the idea of using nicotine as a performance enhancer is crazy. A silly question, but why not just distribute cocaine or Adderall without prescription if you're concerned about performance? Where do you draw the line ?
Grimeton 3y ago
20 years from now the cigarette will have a comeback as "totally natural", " 100% bio", "no batteries needed"...
- giraffe_lady 3y ago
  This is already beginning I think. Right now usually with some irony but that's how these things start sometimes.
jprete 3y ago
We did something similar with prescription opioids and medical amphetamine relatives are extremely regulated. It's really just alcohol, tobacco, and now marijuana that get this treatment.
ThrowawayTestr 3y ago
I hate that my smoking cessation aid is being ruined because gas station attendants can't be bothered to check IDs.
jcranmer 3y ago
> Imagine a company being told today that they now have to stop advertising on billboards, can't advertise to kids, and have to pay a fifth of a trillion dollars over 25 years for the harms they caused to Medicaid. Can't, can you? That's what's happening to Juul right now. Juul e-cigarettes came out in 2015; 2018 had the first consent decree to not advertise anywhere kids might see the advertisements; by 2021, we had the first attempt to ban Juul from selling products in the US, period (something which never happened with cigarettes!). The current crop of lawsuits isn't at $200 billion, though, only a few billion. But for a product segment that existed for less than a decade, that's a pretty steep penalty.
- retrac 3y ago
  We had a minor scandal here in Canada. The same company behind Vuse vapes (Imperial Tobacco of Canada) got approval for an oral product that falls in the same category as nicotine gum, legally. Not heavily controlled. The regulators had apparently never considered that someone might try to market nicotine gum to children who do not use any nicotine products. It was approved as normal, just another off-brand nicotine replacement. To quote the Health Minister, "We were duped." Within a few months in most provinces, orders in council had been drafted to ban the advertising, and prohibit flavours except mint, and there may now be amendments to the laws federally to go further. The slow bureaucratic march to patch the loophole began as soon as it was recognized, basically. Still, the brazenness is stunning. It's the same mentality behind the marketing of the vapes. https://globalnews.ca/news/10142796/health-minister-nicotine-pouches-tobacco/ https://globalnews.ca/news/10142796/health-minister-nicotine... https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/nicotine-pouches-regulations-warnings-zonnic-1.7150279 https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/nicotine-pouches-regulation...
  - ryandrake 3y ago
    I always laugh when governments express surprise when companies exploit loopholes in the law. Here we have an amoral entity whose only purpose and incentive is to find ways to make money, and you're surprised that they hire a bunch of staff to figure out all the loopholes and how to make money against the spirit of the law but while sticking exactly to the letter of the law? You weren't "duped." You wrote a law without red-teaming it thinking like a corporation.
dyauspitr 3y ago
I don’t see the problem with being addicted to pure nicotine. It’s completely safe, causes next to no health issues, is not carcinogenic, actually has health benefits for acuity and long term memory. Addiction in itself is not a bad thing.
- oyashirochama 3y ago
  Nicotine DOES cause health issues, most of them are extreme versions of caffeine, and due to the severity should be controlled a little similar to alcohol.
  - dyauspitr 3y ago
    What are they. I’ve done a lot of research and the most I could find is a slightly increased cardiovascular risk. It has been a few years since I looked into it so maybe there is new research I’m missing. Maybe you’re referring to a nicotine overdose which is a separate discussion.
- 39896880 3y ago
  I think you mean “dependency” and not “addiction.” Addiction is by definition a bad thing: “Addiction is a neuropsychological disorder characterized by a persistent and intense urge to use a drug or engage in a behaviour that produces natural reward, despite substantial harm and other negative consequences.” You’re right about nicotine though. It’s the delivery that’s the problem, in addition to the addictive properties which make the harm of the delivery less salient. Emphasis mine. From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Addiction?wprov=sfti1# https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Addiction?wprov=sfti1#
  - dyauspitr 3y ago
    That’s my point. A nicotine addiction does not satisfy the “despite substantial harm and other negative consequences” corollary. Using a high quality vape pen and unflavored vegetable glycerine as the base, the delivery issue is somewhat resolved.
  - 3y ago
interludead 3y ago
Vaping has made it so that now there's no need to hide the smell from parents

ndsipa_pomu 3y ago

> Imagine a company being told today that they now have to stop advertising on billboards, can't advertise to kids, and have to pay a fifth of a trillion dollars over 25 years for the harms they caused to Medicaid. Can't, can you? I'd welcome those kinds of regulations to be applied to oil and car companies. Arguably they've caused a lot more harm.

jgalt212 3y ago
except now everyone who isn't on Ozempic, is obese.

sevagh 3y ago

[flagged]

dudisubekti 3y ago

But what’s so bad about nicotine? Is it any worse than caffeine? I’m genuinely curious, because isn’t tar and carbon monoxide the dangerous byproduct of smoking, not the nicotine?

bayindirh 3y ago
Nicotine addiction is chronic and very hard to break. You can reset caffeine tolerance and dependence in 10 days.
- madog 3y ago
  Actually with vaping it becomes pretty easy to quit. You just taper down the nicotine slowly until you're on nothing and eventually you just kind of stop because you don't feel the need to do it anymore.
  - bayindirh 3y ago
    What about body's response? Is it easy to curb? I was drinking 2 liters of coffee per day while finishing my Ph.D.. Next week I wasn't drinking, and after that I occasionally drank half a cup per day. This was seven years ago, and I still drink half a cup, because I like the taste of coffee. I have at least a dozen vaping friends who said they started to stop smoking. Now at least half of them have heavily souped up, customized e-cigs. Two of them are making their own liquids with nicotine, rest are using bog-standard vapes. None of them stopped smoking or nicotine intake, which was the goal of all of them.
    - zachturn 3y ago
      This is such an edge case on quitting a caffeine addiction. 2 liters is an INSANE amount of coffee to be drinking daily. Kudos to you but let's not pretend this is the average experience of people breaking even much milder levels of caffeine consumption.
      - bayindirh 3y ago
        I did my research before letting coffee loose on my body. The coffee acts by blocking tiredness/sleep receptors on the brain, so brain builds more of them to work normally. This is how coffee dependence and tolerance builds. When you stop coffee, brain detects that the number of receptors is too high and starts to break them down. This is why you get the headaches. That "one week" period is not an edge case, it's the science of it. If it was proved to be harder on that research, I'd never let my body to reach 2L/day levels.
lobsterthief 3y ago
Yes, nicotine is much worse than caffeine for your heart.
uniqueuid 3y ago
There are many studies on the effect of nicotine. I would look for several meta-analyses or umbrella (meta-meta) analyses. Ideally reporting all-cause mortality. Here is one like that: ~500k individuals, vaping has an odds ratio of 1.33 (95% CI = 1.14–1.56) for heart attacks compared to non-smoker/non-vapers. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0167527322013158 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01675... [edit] To compare that to caffeine, this study does not see a significant risk increase for coffee drinkers. So it seems that vaping is objectively more harmful: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5940396/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5940396/ [edit2] And an umbrella review, because I like them a lot: This shows that negative effects of high coffee intake mostly disappear when controlling for smoking. Note this paper has a correction, which I think is a great sign of credibility. https://www.bmj.com/content/359/bmj.j5024 https://www.bmj.com/content/359/bmj.j5024
- jorvi 3y ago
  You are conflating the harms of the delivery mechanism with the harms of the substance. Nicotine gum is relatively harmless for example. Or perhaps imbibe on a Nicotini[0]? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicotini https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicotini
  - uniqueuid 3y ago
    You're right that these studies measure the product, not the substance. But TFA is about vaping, and I am referring to that. [edit] Seems that nicotine is not really harmless, even in gum or patches: double the risk of heart palpitations and chest pains, 1.67 the risk of nausea and vomiting, 1.5 times the risk of gastrointestinal complaints, and 1.4 times the risk of insomnia. Of course, if you measure anything this closely with >100k participants in RCTs, it's bound to have a significant effect. But these odds ratios are not exactly small. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/1617-9625-8-8 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/1617-9625-8-8
    - kjkjadksj 3y ago
      Are those numbers comparable to caffeine?
alphazard 3y ago
Really nothing; you're correct to think of it in the same category as caffeine. Both addictive, yet safe. But vaporizers have more than nicotine. There's other chemicals needed to produce vaporizer fluid, and it's far too soon to tell if they are safe. Even though most of them have been in the food supply, they haven't been inhaled at scale. We already found one that wasn't safe (Vitamin E Acetate), because it was causing very obvious problems. What about the non-obvious problems? A more direct comparison to caffeine is a nicotine (not tobacco) pouch.
- user_7832 3y ago
  Aren’t nicotine’s vasoconstriction worse than coffee’s (at regular consumption levels)?
gwbas1c 3y ago
Nicotine is one of the most addictive substances known to man. Quitting cigarettes is about as hard as quitting heroin. In contrast, quitting coffee is much, much easier. On a more personal note, when "The King's Speech" was in theaters I kept watching people smoke cigarettes on screen, and went out and bought some Drum. (Loose tobacco that comes with rolling papers.) Within a few days I started getting a voice in my head that told me it was "a good idea to go have a cigarette on the porch once I get out of bed," or "it's a good idea to have a cigarette when you get home." It was really creepy, I've never had a substance put ideas in my head 24+ hours after it was out of my system.
- VyseofArcadia 3y ago
  I've thankfully never had to quit cigarettes or heroin, but in my experience quitting coffee is awful. 3-5 days of migraine-level headaches and nausea. And the whole time you're thinking, "all this could go away with just one little cup of coffee, which all the studies say has health benefits even. Just one little cup"
  - bayindirh 3y ago
    > 3-5 days of migraine-level headaches and nausea... A single sip of coffee, or a cup of good black tea generally alleviates these symptoms. I had to drink a sip of coffee on day 4 while quitting coffee, and all my headache was gone.
  - 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
    Why quit coffee if it has health benefits?
    - VyseofArcadia 3y ago
      Great question! A couple of reasons. The simplest is that I dislike being dependent on any substance. A more nuanced reason is that I want to be able to use caffeine as a tool. A cup of coffee is the largest dose of caffeine that I am comfortable taking at any one time. If I already have caffeine tolerance at the level of a daily coffee habit, caffeine has lost much of its utility to me. However, if my tolerance is lower than that, I can really feel it when I do occasionally have use for a cup of coffee (e.g. the day before code freeze.) Currently my caffeine intake is a cup of tea[0]. This is at the level where I don't hate myself if I miss it[1], and I can still use coffee as a tool on occasion. Also, you can pry my tea out of my cold dead hands. [0] Note that how much caffeine a cup of tea has is much more nuanced than "black vs green". Cultivar, terroir, steep time are much more important to caffeine levels than how the tea is processed. In fact if anything, green tea cultivars have been shown to have, on average, very slightly more caffeine than black[2]. [1] I feel it, but it's not 3-5 days of migraines [2] Y. Zuo et al, Simultaneous determination of catechins, caffeine and gallic acids in green, Oolong, black and pu-erh teas using HPLC with a photodiode array detector, Talanta 57 (2002) 307–316
interludead 3y ago
Nicotine is a highly addictive stimulant

rayiner 3y ago

We socialized people to realize smoking is dirty, then went ahead and legalized marijuana so now kids who would never have smoked cigarettes are filling their lungs with tar: https://www.cnn.com/2023/08/14/health/marijuana-smoke-wellness/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2023/08/14/health/marijuana-smoke-wellne.... At least cigarettes made people skinny and hot.

eej71 3y ago
I've often wondered if our complete demonization of all smoking was a bit of a disservice to the sporadic smoke that likely helped with managing one's weight which has its own health benefits.
- lenerdenator 3y ago
  The problem came from the fact that sporadic smoking didn't serve the profits of tobacco companies in the way they would have liked. The shoving of high-fructose corn syrup and other calorie-rich ingredients into everything sold in the US to increase consumption (again, for profits) has a much greater impact on weight management, though.
  - itsoktocry 3y ago
    >The shoving of high-fructose corn syrup and other calorie-rich ingredients into everything sold in the US to increase consumption (again, for profits) Do you have any evidence of this conspiracy? Perhaps it's just food producers adding an abundant, cheap sweetener to their crap because that's what the market demands? Read the ingredients and buy or don't buy. People need to have a bit of personal accountability in these things.
    - redserk 3y ago
      Where are you finding many options in products without HFCS or additives? Even the much-higher-end supermarkets near me don't have meaningful alternatives for a lot of products where I am, and I'm in a HCOL area.

alephnerd 3y ago

Opium War 2.0 - we have too much inertia to stop the "good times", and while everyone had the right to ruin their bodies, they're doing it out of complete ignorance. The Western relationship to addictive substances is insane, and I hate to admit this, but to a certain extent Wang Huning's thesis about America is right.

sevagh 3y ago
Which non-Western utopias have avoided addictive substances? List them.
- alephnerd 3y ago
  No one can avoid addictive substances, but at least countries like Singapore try to criminalize or heavily restrict their access via sin taxes AND prosecution of dealers. The kind of model Canada and California follows could be helpful as well, if only prosecution and the stick was also used in conjunction with cracking down on black markets for drugs the same way provinces and CA do on moonshine.
mcphage 3y ago
> to a certain extent Wang Huning's thesis about America is right What is that?
- alephnerd 3y ago
  Hyper-individualism leading to a nihilistic worldview. Individuals absolutely should have autonomy to choose what they wish to do, but not if it has an impact on the rest of society. Fundamentally, some amount of regulation (either via social norms or via actual laws) is needed, yet we as individuals will continue to fight each other while ignoring the core fact that we are all on the same team. I strongly disagree with Wang and Xi, but on this part I am in agreement - individualism has gone too far in America (both economically and socially), and we need to return to our communitarian roots.
  - 3y ago

fidotron 3y ago

You say it like that it is desirable. Unfortunately people perform better when they have nicotine, so the effect for society as a whole is non negligible if a huge mass of people get a slight performance bounce. Smoking is annoying, disgusting, unhealthy etc. but we are way too quick to dismiss the possibility that nicotine itself may have been a civilization booster.

uniqueuid 3y ago
That's a very interesting, but completely ad-hoc theory. The problem with these is that there are almost always equally plausible theories, and it's really hard to figure out which is correct. Especially given the huge amount of effort that has gone into research on tobacco and nicotine (I guess millions of hours, if not more), I would definitely NOT say we are too quick to dismiss the possibility. I'm sure you can find an interesting econometric paper presenting this argument, but then it would be more credible.
- fidotron 3y ago
  This has come up before here but unfortunately I'm right: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicotine#Performance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicotine#Performance
  - uniqueuid 3y ago
    Thanks, I take the ad-hoc theory back!
bilekas 3y ago
> Unfortunately people perform better when they have nicotine. This is the first time I've ever heard someone bring this argument. Ignoring the health risks involved with nicotine, the 'performance boost' is negligible. It's less than caffeine. > but we are way too quick to dismiss the possibility that nicotine itself may have been a civilization booster. There are nicotine gums and patches available, and a very good reason you don't see people who don't smoke using them, because the idea of using nicotine as a performance enhancer is crazy. A silly question, but why not just distribute cocaine or Adderall without prescription if you're concerned about performance? Where do you draw the line ?

Grimeton 3y ago

20 years from now the cigarette will have a comeback as "totally natural", " 100% bio", "no batteries needed"...

giraffe_lady 3y ago
This is already beginning I think. Right now usually with some irony but that's how these things start sometimes.

jprete 3y ago

We did something similar with prescription opioids and medical amphetamine relatives are extremely regulated. It's really just alcohol, tobacco, and now marijuana that get this treatment.

ThrowawayTestr 3y ago

I hate that my smoking cessation aid is being ruined because gas station attendants can't be bothered to check IDs.

jcranmer 3y ago

> Imagine a company being told today that they now have to stop advertising on billboards, can't advertise to kids, and have to pay a fifth of a trillion dollars over 25 years for the harms they caused to Medicaid. Can't, can you? That's what's happening to Juul right now. Juul e-cigarettes came out in 2015; 2018 had the first consent decree to not advertise anywhere kids might see the advertisements; by 2021, we had the first attempt to ban Juul from selling products in the US, period (something which never happened with cigarettes!). The current crop of lawsuits isn't at $200 billion, though, only a few billion. But for a product segment that existed for less than a decade, that's a pretty steep penalty.

retrac 3y ago
We had a minor scandal here in Canada. The same company behind Vuse vapes (Imperial Tobacco of Canada) got approval for an oral product that falls in the same category as nicotine gum, legally. Not heavily controlled. The regulators had apparently never considered that someone might try to market nicotine gum to children who do not use any nicotine products. It was approved as normal, just another off-brand nicotine replacement. To quote the Health Minister, "We were duped." Within a few months in most provinces, orders in council had been drafted to ban the advertising, and prohibit flavours except mint, and there may now be amendments to the laws federally to go further. The slow bureaucratic march to patch the loophole began as soon as it was recognized, basically. Still, the brazenness is stunning. It's the same mentality behind the marketing of the vapes. https://globalnews.ca/news/10142796/health-minister-nicotine-pouches-tobacco/ https://globalnews.ca/news/10142796/health-minister-nicotine... https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/nicotine-pouches-regulations-warnings-zonnic-1.7150279 https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/nicotine-pouches-regulation...
- ryandrake 3y ago
  I always laugh when governments express surprise when companies exploit loopholes in the law. Here we have an amoral entity whose only purpose and incentive is to find ways to make money, and you're surprised that they hire a bunch of staff to figure out all the loopholes and how to make money against the spirit of the law but while sticking exactly to the letter of the law? You weren't "duped." You wrote a law without red-teaming it thinking like a corporation.

dyauspitr 3y ago

I don’t see the problem with being addicted to pure nicotine. It’s completely safe, causes next to no health issues, is not carcinogenic, actually has health benefits for acuity and long term memory. Addiction in itself is not a bad thing.

oyashirochama 3y ago
Nicotine DOES cause health issues, most of them are extreme versions of caffeine, and due to the severity should be controlled a little similar to alcohol.
- dyauspitr 3y ago
  What are they. I’ve done a lot of research and the most I could find is a slightly increased cardiovascular risk. It has been a few years since I looked into it so maybe there is new research I’m missing. Maybe you’re referring to a nicotine overdose which is a separate discussion.
39896880 3y ago
I think you mean “dependency” and not “addiction.” Addiction is by definition a bad thing: “Addiction is a neuropsychological disorder characterized by a persistent and intense urge to use a drug or engage in a behaviour that produces natural reward, despite substantial harm and other negative consequences.” You’re right about nicotine though. It’s the delivery that’s the problem, in addition to the addictive properties which make the harm of the delivery less salient. Emphasis mine. From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Addiction?wprov=sfti1# https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Addiction?wprov=sfti1#
- dyauspitr 3y ago
  That’s my point. A nicotine addiction does not satisfy the “despite substantial harm and other negative consequences” corollary. Using a high quality vape pen and unflavored vegetable glycerine as the base, the delivery issue is somewhat resolved.
- 3y ago

interludead 3y ago

Vaping has made it so that now there's no need to hide the smell from parents