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In the context of the alternative which was “nobody really smokes or vapes” it’s not really a good outcome. Sure, smoking rates cratered. It was great. But now

by dangus 5mo ago

In the context of the alternative which was “nobody really smokes or vapes” it’s not really a good outcome. Sure, smoking rates cratered. It was great. But now vaping rates have gone up and it just didn’t have to happen that way at all. Go back a few years and less people vaped with similarly low smoking rates. Vaping didn’t replace smoking, its net new usage.

IAmBroom 5mo ago
Citation needed.
JuniperMesos 5mo ago
I'm not sure this is actually bad. Nicotine, when divorced from the tar of burning cigarettes, has a number of desirable affects on alertness and appetite (as well as less desirable effects like increasing blood pressure) - it's not clear to me that avoiding nicotine as a stimulant is always desirable. As well, vaping is so much less obnoxious to the people around you than traditional smoking (either tobacco or marijuana). I'm in favor of a lot of the social and legal pressure that has been put on smoking tobacco in public (and I think it should apply to weed as well despite being pro-legalization). But most of the actual issues go away if it's vaping and of smoking (and all of them go away if you're getting your tobacco via a pouch).
- hnlmorg 5mo ago
  I honestly still find vaping obnoxious and I’m clearly not alone here because most places that ban smoking also ban vaping too. And weird for someone to talk about vaping like it’s a good thing when we already know there are adverse health implications from vaping. What we don’t know is just how serious that is. But why take the risk in the first place?
  - JuniperMesos 5mo ago
    What adverse health implications from vaping are there?
    - dangus 5mo ago
      Still being studied, but the idea that it’s safe seems to be a very odd default. https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/e-cigarettes/health-effects.html https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/e-cigarettes/health-effects.html Why would your default assumption be that putting foreign (and poorly regulated) substances into your lungs is more likely than not safe? This is especially true since it’s a drug that doesn’t even have much claim to fame for positive recreational or medicinal benefits.
      - JuniperMesos 5mo ago
        The vast majority of that CDC information page is about the health effects of nicotine itself. There's a relative lack of specific information about the health risks of the vapor. "Cancer-causing chemicals" is vague (I live in California, I see prop 65 signs all over the place, I ignore them like every good Californian). "Heavy metals" is also vague - is the amount of tin that I might inhale via vaping actually a problem? Is it significantly more than if I lived in an area with a tin mine or something? I'm not claiming that vaping is safe in some absolute sense, it wouldn't be surprising if there are some meaningful health risks. I personally do not vape myself because the times I've tried it, I've found getting the vapor into my lungs to be very uncomfortable. But it does seem like it's a strict health improvement over tobacco smoke, given that the CDC can't articulate a specific harm to the lungs caused by vaping.
        dangus 5mo ago
        Did you scroll down at all? I’m counting at least 5 risks that are not nicotine.
      - jpadkins 5mo ago
        vapor has been used for medicine delivery for a long time, especially for patients who can't swallow pills. Also gov regulation is not the only form of regulation. Fear of getting sued by your customers into bankruptcy is an effective regulation on putting harmful substances into your vape.
- dangus 5mo ago
  I’m not sure how you could possibly argue that nicotine has mainly desirable effects. Merely being highly addictive on its own is a pretty badly overriding negative effect. Here’s a paper that talks about the negative impacts on a wide variety of organs: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4363846/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4363846/
kortilla 5mo ago
No, the context was getting a handle on smoking, not some alternative goalpost. As lung cancer rates plummet from lack of second hand smoke nobody should ever lament that even if people are doing something else not great. Classic “perfect is the enemy of good”.
- hnlmorg 5mo ago
  That’s a little like celebrating the reduction of heroin usage while ignoring that fentanyl addition has sky rocketed. While I do agree that vaping is better than smoking. The real crux of the problem is the addition that needs treating. Celebrating the rise of vaping feels a little like celebrating an own goal. You’ve put all that time and effort into reducing the effects of smoking and yet you haven’t actually solved the underlying problem at all. This isn’t “perfect is the enemy of good”, this is ensuring that tax money is spent on the right problem and not something more financially comfortable for companies producing these addictive substances.
  - fragmede 5mo ago
    But without the inordinately deleterious effects of smoking, why is it a bad thing? Nicotine is a powerful nootropic and enhances cognitive function. If there was a healthy way to get it into the body, it would be celebrated as a good thing. The comparison to look at is caffeine and coffee. Is a coffee addict someone we look down on, and hope they would quit? I'm not arguing that vaping is healthy, just that, culturally, we should examine how much the argument against vaping is because of the history of smoking and the culture surrounding it, rather than an objective consideration of the benefits and consequences of the activity. (Ftr, imo disposable vapes are absolutely the worst.)
    - hnlmorg 5mo ago
      I don’t really think it’s fair to compare vaping to drinking coffee. But there are plenty of people who have given up coffee for health reasons. And it’s much easier to cut down on drinking coffee than vaping (from a dependency standpoint) Alcohol and alcoholism is probably a better comparison here. But the thing that worries me the most about vaping is: 1. The frequency in which people vape. It’s almost never just a couple of puffs a day to help with concentration. It’s usually just as heavy as when people smoked. And it’s much easier to lose track of how much you vape compared with drinking coffee (I had a friend who, for months, didn’t even realise he was vaping the equivalent of 40 packs of cigarettes a day because he just bought the same solution each time without thinking about it’s concentration) 2. The fact that you’re pulling hot gas into your lungs. Yeah it’s significantly better than smoking but we don’t really know the long term effect this might cause. And by long term, I mean people who vape heavily for years. We could all be walking ourselves into another health crisis in 20 or 40 years but “it’s ok because it isn’t as bad as smoking”. I hear stories all the time about people trying to hack their diet, or brain, or whatever biological. And it so often ends up going wrong. From people adding caffeine to their protein drinks and accidentally ODing, to other people having serious side effects for “herbal remedies”. It’s all just nuts when we’ve already known for millennia what a healthy diet and exercise looks like. And this is my complaint about vaping. When it’s used to help people from quitting smoking then I’m all for them vaping. But when it’s used as just another recreational drug but sold as a “healthy alternative”, well that’s when I’m going to take issue.

by dangus 5mo ago

IAmBroom 5mo ago

Citation needed.

JuniperMesos 5mo ago

I'm not sure this is actually bad. Nicotine, when divorced from the tar of burning cigarettes, has a number of desirable affects on alertness and appetite (as well as less desirable effects like increasing blood pressure) - it's not clear to me that avoiding nicotine as a stimulant is always desirable. As well, vaping is so much less obnoxious to the people around you than traditional smoking (either tobacco or marijuana). I'm in favor of a lot of the social and legal pressure that has been put on smoking tobacco in public (and I think it should apply to weed as well despite being pro-legalization). But most of the actual issues go away if it's vaping and of smoking (and all of them go away if you're getting your tobacco via a pouch).

hnlmorg 5mo ago
I honestly still find vaping obnoxious and I’m clearly not alone here because most places that ban smoking also ban vaping too. And weird for someone to talk about vaping like it’s a good thing when we already know there are adverse health implications from vaping. What we don’t know is just how serious that is. But why take the risk in the first place?
- JuniperMesos 5mo ago
  What adverse health implications from vaping are there?
  - dangus 5mo ago
    Still being studied, but the idea that it’s safe seems to be a very odd default. https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/e-cigarettes/health-effects.html https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/e-cigarettes/health-effects.html Why would your default assumption be that putting foreign (and poorly regulated) substances into your lungs is more likely than not safe? This is especially true since it’s a drug that doesn’t even have much claim to fame for positive recreational or medicinal benefits.
    - JuniperMesos 5mo ago
      The vast majority of that CDC information page is about the health effects of nicotine itself. There's a relative lack of specific information about the health risks of the vapor. "Cancer-causing chemicals" is vague (I live in California, I see prop 65 signs all over the place, I ignore them like every good Californian). "Heavy metals" is also vague - is the amount of tin that I might inhale via vaping actually a problem? Is it significantly more than if I lived in an area with a tin mine or something? I'm not claiming that vaping is safe in some absolute sense, it wouldn't be surprising if there are some meaningful health risks. I personally do not vape myself because the times I've tried it, I've found getting the vapor into my lungs to be very uncomfortable. But it does seem like it's a strict health improvement over tobacco smoke, given that the CDC can't articulate a specific harm to the lungs caused by vaping.
      - dangus 5mo ago
        Did you scroll down at all? I’m counting at least 5 risks that are not nicotine.
    - jpadkins 5mo ago
      vapor has been used for medicine delivery for a long time, especially for patients who can't swallow pills. Also gov regulation is not the only form of regulation. Fear of getting sued by your customers into bankruptcy is an effective regulation on putting harmful substances into your vape.
dangus 5mo ago
I’m not sure how you could possibly argue that nicotine has mainly desirable effects. Merely being highly addictive on its own is a pretty badly overriding negative effect. Here’s a paper that talks about the negative impacts on a wide variety of organs: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4363846/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4363846/

kortilla 5mo ago

No, the context was getting a handle on smoking, not some alternative goalpost. As lung cancer rates plummet from lack of second hand smoke nobody should ever lament that even if people are doing something else not great. Classic “perfect is the enemy of good”.

hnlmorg 5mo ago
That’s a little like celebrating the reduction of heroin usage while ignoring that fentanyl addition has sky rocketed. While I do agree that vaping is better than smoking. The real crux of the problem is the addition that needs treating. Celebrating the rise of vaping feels a little like celebrating an own goal. You’ve put all that time and effort into reducing the effects of smoking and yet you haven’t actually solved the underlying problem at all. This isn’t “perfect is the enemy of good”, this is ensuring that tax money is spent on the right problem and not something more financially comfortable for companies producing these addictive substances.
- fragmede 5mo ago
  But without the inordinately deleterious effects of smoking, why is it a bad thing? Nicotine is a powerful nootropic and enhances cognitive function. If there was a healthy way to get it into the body, it would be celebrated as a good thing. The comparison to look at is caffeine and coffee. Is a coffee addict someone we look down on, and hope they would quit? I'm not arguing that vaping is healthy, just that, culturally, we should examine how much the argument against vaping is because of the history of smoking and the culture surrounding it, rather than an objective consideration of the benefits and consequences of the activity. (Ftr, imo disposable vapes are absolutely the worst.)
  - hnlmorg 5mo ago
    I don’t really think it’s fair to compare vaping to drinking coffee. But there are plenty of people who have given up coffee for health reasons. And it’s much easier to cut down on drinking coffee than vaping (from a dependency standpoint) Alcohol and alcoholism is probably a better comparison here. But the thing that worries me the most about vaping is: 1. The frequency in which people vape. It’s almost never just a couple of puffs a day to help with concentration. It’s usually just as heavy as when people smoked. And it’s much easier to lose track of how much you vape compared with drinking coffee (I had a friend who, for months, didn’t even realise he was vaping the equivalent of 40 packs of cigarettes a day because he just bought the same solution each time without thinking about it’s concentration) 2. The fact that you’re pulling hot gas into your lungs. Yeah it’s significantly better than smoking but we don’t really know the long term effect this might cause. And by long term, I mean people who vape heavily for years. We could all be walking ourselves into another health crisis in 20 or 40 years but “it’s ok because it isn’t as bad as smoking”. I hear stories all the time about people trying to hack their diet, or brain, or whatever biological. And it so often ends up going wrong. From people adding caffeine to their protein drinks and accidentally ODing, to other people having serious side effects for “herbal remedies”. It’s all just nuts when we’ve already known for millennia what a healthy diet and exercise looks like. And this is my complaint about vaping. When it’s used to help people from quitting smoking then I’m all for them vaping. But when it’s used as just another recreational drug but sold as a “healthy alternative”, well that’s when I’m going to take issue.