67 points
Removed by mod
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68 points

Some people seem to think that if we just correct all of our unhealthy habits we will live forever. My life has been better with some unhealthiness in it, and times that I’ve stopped has proven that. It’s your body and your time, so you should be able to use it like you want to.

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54 points

“Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming "Wow! What a Ride!”

Hunter Thompson

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24 points

A man who reached sixty-seven, wealthy and loved, and put a gun in his mouth while at the kitchen table.

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4 points

I would rather live a shorter life where I enjoy myself than a longer one where I restrict myself.

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9 points

In countries with universal healthcare, there is an argument that government should take a more active role in dissuading the use of substances that cause social harm and harm to the body and result in long term expenditure for public health. The detail is in how far government should go, e.g. educational initiatives, regulation, or prohibition, etc.

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-33 points

Countries with Universal Healthcare are always the worst places to get any treatment done, the US still to date is the best country for medical treatment of any kind

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17 points

If you’re a billionaire maybe.

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2 points

I’m all for safe substance use if wanted, but vapes are dangerous. I smoked cigarettes, then changed over to vaping and now use snus. Nicotine is a huge problem with it’s addictiveness.

Vapes in the current state they are sold, are like candy to young people and the shops treat it that way. Vaping makes it easy to consume nicotine, and once your body is addicted it craves more and more. The amount of nicotine in these vapes is obscene. And you can do it everywhere with them. You don’t smell it like cigarettes. You can get vapes in any taste you desire. I consumed way more nicotine when I was vaping than with cigarettes.

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13 points

I use cannabis to sleep (legally) and consume on moderation, just enough to do the job. While on an extended trip just now, I purchased a cartridge and battery for convenience and to try it out (I normally vape cannabis flower). It was shocking to me how quickly and frequently I would use it if I wasn’t really being strict with myself. The ease of use made it trivial, the amount of product at a high concentration made it something I didn’t have to think about, and it tasted and smelled like blueberry. I’ll ask back to my normal methods but it gave me something to think about. There is still quite a bit left in the cartridge. To your point, it was very affordable, convenient, and psychologically speaking “addictive”.

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4 points

Yeah the convenience and the flavor are the main problems for me. If the prepackaged vapes would come in non candy flavors, a lot of potential new consumers wouldn’t touch vapes. They should be an alternative for smokers and not a new revenue stream for tobacco conglomerates based on a new generation who know smoking in general is bad.

If THC vapes are properly vetted and the buyer is informed about possible health impacts I’m totally ok with that.

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1 point

Shouldn’t conflate THC distillate vaping with nicotine vaping. They are very different things

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maybe grow up 👆 and control yourself

you sound exactly like an alcoholic blaming the bottle and not THEMSELVES

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11 points

Saying that vapes are dangerous is misinformation at best. Vaping got you off smoking cigarettes (congrats btw), which are far more dangerous. Yes, you may have consumed more nicotine, but you didn’t consume any of the other thousands of toxic or even carcinogenic chemicals present in cigarette smoke.

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0 points

I meant dangerous as in that it attracts people who would have never started smoking. While cigarettes are more dangerous, vaping also has it’s drawbacks. The base fluid may be safe to consume, but the flavorings are the problem in my eyes. They appeal to a younger audience and the ingredients are most often not known (Corresponding study if you want to dive deeper: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK507184/#_sec_000093_ )

Additionally nicotine in itself is not something I would want anyone to be addicted to.

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-3 points

Seriously, the other day on the bus I was enjoying my favorite snack, skunk glands infused with fox urine, and people had the audacity to tell me I can’t put these things in my own body. Dictators.

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0 points
Removed by mod
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-6 points

Being a liability to the state by taking drugs known to cause harm is also hilariously unjustified by that same metric. Sure let people decide with things like weed, shrooms whatever mellow shit they want but shit like heroin, vapes causing lung damage and putting pressure on already stressed out health infrastructures across the word needs to be governed.

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12 points

I can’t believe you really just put heroin & vapes causing lung damage together. Insane. I have relatives addicted to both and it’s genuinely aggravating to see someone say something so disconnected.

I’d take a family of vape addicts over a single heroin addict a million times over.

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10 points
Removed by mod
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0 points

So people are nothing more than a statistic to you? What an insanely warped mentality that only a slave owner could love

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😂 😂 😂 😂 😂 😂 heroin vapes this dude lives in a basement 12 floors underground

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-8 points

It’s the drugs going into air that other people have to breathe, or behavior while under the influence that endangers other people that’s the problem.

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18 points

The danger of passing a cigarette on the street pales in comparison to urban pollution, poorly regulated restaurants, and even household cleaners for the number of toxins you expose yourself to. Worrying about second hand smoke outside makes as much sense as worrying about malaria from a mosquito while you’re trapped in a cage with lions.

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-6 points
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Not when you’re allergic. And even when you’re not, I’ve only met one smoker who realizes how awful they smell and tries to mitigate it.

You do realize this is a hugely fallacious argument, right?

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7 points

All that dangerous behavior like snacking relentlessly and laughing at dumb jokes, what horror! Also edibles have no secondhand smoke to inhale.

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-13 points

More like car accidents, second hand lung damage in children of smokers, and overdosing.

I’m not talking about just marijuana, but you definitely come across as insecure about it.

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0 points

And when the government can effectively prevent massive amounts of benzene from going into the air, they are more than welcome to work on the trace amounts of nicotine.

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7 points
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It’s not a zero sum. You can be against both.

That argument sounds like someone whining about car accidents while setting themselves on fire… one does not make the other okay.

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4 points

We should only make beating others illegal once we successfully prevented all murder

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-2 points

You’d be right, but those trace amount of nicotine are often going straight into our faces for the crime of being downwind of someone smoking/vaping without a care in the world.

Health effects aside, I’d appreciate not having to breath in or smell other people’s second-hand smoke/vape.

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47 points

I don’t quite understand how the science is clear if “there is still no data on the long-term effects of e-cigarettes”.

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18 points

We dont have long term data because e-cigarettes haven’t been used for a long time. They got popular ten years back?

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16 points

Also, as a vaper who switch from cigs because I was desperate for an alternative, I’m also curious about the different strata of products that exist on the market. For example, I visit a juice shop that mixes their products on site with pure materials, and I get to customize what exactly appears within my harmful juices. I build and maintain my parts as well. How does this approach compare to ‘over the connivence store counter’ kits like Juul?

It wouldn’t surprise me if those products contain preservatives, or byproducts of a corporation skirting regulatory lines, that could be hazardous for consumer health. Though, that is purely my speculation — yet I wonder if my choice method of getting my sweet, sweet nicotine will get lumped in with everything else.

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14 points

So the science isn’t clear yet. It’s still emerging

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-12 points
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Deleted by creator
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5 points

You would think 10 years would be enough time to see a groups increased risk to associated illnesses. If I made a study group and made them smoke daily for 10 years there would definitely be poorer health. The science is pretty clear, but the WHO doesn’t want to admit that vapes are net neutral, whereas tobacco is bad, so obviously that would make vapes “healthy” in comparison.

Nicotine in the body acts much like caffeine, it increases your blood pressure, giving the effect of a “calmer” feeling, and headaches when in withdrawal. No one is lobbying against coffee/caffeinated drinks, even though it’s understood that too much caffeine can cause health risks. That’s really where we’re at. Alternative methods like nicotine gum or patches have existed for a long time and while there can be dependencies formed on these, no one would dare say nicotine gum is as dangerous as smoking cigarettes. The associated cancer risks from tobacco come from the carcinogens that are created when burning tobacco, not from the nicotine itself

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5 points

Anything other than air going in to your lungs is bad. Vaping puts stuff that isn’t air into your lungs. The science is clear on that.

Just how much damage it’s doing isn’t really clear because they’re only becoming really popular now, but it is doing damage.

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0 points

Cool. The science is in, when are we banning coffee?

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-1 points
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I’m be fine with them banning coffee so that’s not the “gotcha!” you think it is. Alcohol too btw. Alcohol especially should be banned tbh.

Coffee isn’t inhaling stuff into your lungs that isn’t air though. I’m assuming you’re saying “caffein = bad”? People aren’t filling their lungs with caffeine from coffee.

Again - science is settled here. If it’s not oxygen it’s bad if it goes into your lungs.

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40 points

“It beats smoking” is a low fucking bar.

The science is that putting shit in your lungs is not great. There’s no upside for non-smokers. It’s a lark. The only truly positive side is that it’s objectively better than inhaling smoke, and that only matters if it’s a tobacco alternative - and contains nicotine. Which let this low-impact delivery mechanism create new addicts.

Two decades in either direction and the calculus would be trivial. 1990, the way people smoked back then? We’d solve the epidemic overnight. Trade it for vaping in a heartbeat. 2030, the way statistics were headed? Pointless and inexcusable. A brief fad that would linger in countries with hookah culture.

Instead, the worst-case scenario happened immediately. The same murderous liars made money hooking a new generation with a fairly unsafe and hideously addictive chemical. Like they’d previously done by adding filters, and then menthol, and then cloves.

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33 points

Smoking kills 8 million people worldwide every year. I think it’s worth pushing the alternatives.

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22 points

Maybe I read it wrong but what I got from it is this:

Vaping is good as an alternative to non-smokers. The problem is that it’s being pushed to non-smokers. It’s not as bad as smoking, but the best is neither.

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nah he just hates others who choose to do thinga they dont like

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13 points

The problem isn’t pushing it as an alternative to already active smokers, that’s what it was initially touted as…

The problem is it became the new smoking fad. People who never smoked are taking this up, and are now the new generation of hungry addicts to keep the tobacco corps alive and well.

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15 points

An adult should be able to do whatever the fuck they want, as long as it doesn’t impact other people. Vaping doesn’t emit any carcinogens or toxic substances, and 10 times less nicotine than smoking does. At the end of the day, vaping does far less harm than smoking, and it’s easier to reduce the amount of nicotine consumed with vaping. Nicotine also has health benefits, such as slowing down the onset of Parkinson’s.

If teenagers are vaping then that’s an enforcement issue, but at the same time I would be less worried if I found a vape in my kid’s bedroom than a packet of cigarettes. Teenagers will experiement with substances. Nicotne vapes are way down the list of ones I would be worried about.

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1 point

Then don’t smoke or vape. No one is forcing you to. Please do not be a pearl clutcher and make decisions for everyone else around you. You’re not God and even GOD gave people the choice to believe in him.

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11 points

Yeah, that’s a lot of words when they could’ve just said “I don’t understand risk, harm reduction, any statistics relavent to the topic, or science.”

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1 point

How bluntly does someone have to say ‘this is good compared to smoking, but caused harm for non-smokers’ before y’all stop projecting whatever shallow kneejerk absolute suits your fancy?

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6 points

Vaping was how I quit smoking tobacco and then quit vaping too. I started vaping to quit tobacco using premixed liquids for about 2 years, then switched to mixing my own so I took control of my nicotine intake. Over the course of about 8 months I kept cutting the nicotine in half. I would have a bit of a headache for a couple days then I would get better. After vaping at 0% for about 2 weeks, I noticed I was not picking up the vape as often and I could just leave it on the other side of the room and not care. About another month and I was entirely done. Previously about 1/2 pack a day smoker for 25+ years, now free of everything for about 6 years now.

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-2 points

“It beats smoking” is a low fucking bar… that I already mentioned.

What conversation do you think you’re having?

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5 points
*

I haven’t smoked a cigarette in six years. Most of the time I use nicotine lozenges during the day, and my vape is for when I’m drinking or I need to fall on my crutch. It’s familiar to my known vice, and stopped me from the more dangerous method of handling my addiction.

Grand stand all you will about how it was ‘solved’ over night, but I got hooked on the bitch in the 2000’s due to family history and culture. People still smoke all around me, and it was only a matter of time before I tried it and got hooked. And I’ve made peace with that. That’s before we even touch a more terrifying addiction that exists all over my country within opiate-families despite them having a stronger controlled classification. While the chemical exists in the environment potential addicts will happen across it and subsist.

‘It beats smoking’ is a pretty important bar for me, as an addict, because it reduces harm to myself

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-1 points

‘Vaping is negative except compared to smoking.’

‘Oh yeah well what about compared to smoking?!’

… ibid.

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2 points
*

I don’t think anyone is arguing vaping is a good thing, and nor was I. It would be rather foolish to do so.

I was only giving my perspective at how it has been better for me and many others in my life.

🤷‍♀️

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2 points

You really wanna police what other people put in their body? How exactly does it affect you?

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17 points
*

People should be properly informed about what they put in their bodies.

Edit: Just realised I posted in an American politics instance. Ignore the foreigner.

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6 points
Removed by mod
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-11 points

Sure, I can agree with that. Maybe we should start with the food industry first. Did you know there’s an acceptable amount of sawdust to put in some types of food as filler? It really is horrific. Vaping at least is something people realize is probably not great for you in the long run… but people who falls for the shitty quality of food standards don’t know what they are putting in their body either.

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2 points

second and third-hand smoke and vaping aerosols contain harmful, toxic and cancer-causing chemicals that can be breathed in.

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-4 points
*

Then don’t stand near them?

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1 point

Addiction has societal impact. Reality exists outside the individual.

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-2 points
*

Not all addiction is negative

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0 points

Are you advocating for cigarettes ban? Because if not, how you can advocate for vile ban? If you advocate for neither, then what do you mean by “it beats smocking “ is a low fucking bar”?

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2 points

Cigarettes are sufficiently regulated that the industry was going to die. No outright ban was necessary.

That is no longer the case, directly thanks to this shit. Like if Philip Morris started selling nicotine patches as a brand new drug.

“The science is clear” only means, vaping beats smoking. A fact absolutely no-one questions. But vaping is worse than not vaping. The lesser-evil argument only works when there’s no third option. Like “neither.”

Serving the same purpose as smoking, while being less dangerous, is great… compared to smoking.

But the purpose of smoking fucking blows.

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0 points
*

But vaping is worse than not vaping.

But this fact also absolutely no-one questions.

And are you saying that somehow coping is regulated less??

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dude its tobacco not black tar heroin get of your high horse i would blow smoke straightkbin your face at a party

except you havent been to a party in how long?

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3 points

Ape in a zoo beats his chest until the visitors walk away. That’ll show 'em.

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2 points

Wow, you’re really fucking cool.

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33 points

If we ban vaping, we should ban cigarettes, cigars, chew, alcohol, and weed as well.

All have a negative effect on your health.

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10 points

Strongly agree. We’ve already learned that prohibition doesn’t work and that people will always find other ways to get their fix.

If flavored vapes are “marketed to children”, what about flavored THC edibles and fruity/candy flavored alcohol? What about energy drinks and highly caffeinated sodas? What about high calorie ultra-palatable foods with absurd quantities of high fructose corn syrup? How is nicotine so different from any of the other drugs that society has decided are socially acceptable?

Humanity has had a relationship with mind altering substances since the dawn of time. It’s ingrained in our cultures, and may even be partially responsible for how human intelligence has adapted to where it is today. Nobody is going to overwrite thousands of years of history by banning vapes. People will just find some other way to access nicotine and other substances, probably by switching back to smoking or chewing. A brief ten-year interval of pushback against smoking in select countries didn’t mean that people no longer wanted nicotine, it just meant that people wanted a less objectionable way of consuming it than burning leaves in paper.

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5 points

Yeah, that is basically my view on it. Vaping isn’t healthy, but it seems to be healthier than the alternatives. If you aren’t willing to ban all nicotine products, just tax it and treat it like other nicotine products.

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5 points

The problem is that this is multiple times more addictive than earlier nicotine products. The previous generation in the US almost stopped smoking entirely then this reversed all progress.

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8 points
*

Bigger and faster hits alongside fruity flavours and and easy to hide/disipate vapour. Everyone knew if you smoked in the boys room, it is a lot easier to vape in the boys room.

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its not mate you dont smoke

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2 points

Guess we should ban sugar too.

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1 point

Don’t forget banning excess eating, red meat, sugar, and staying up too late. Let us work together to create our utopia of perfect, boring humans who are peak physical specimen, exactly the way we want them to be.

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-1 points

Who cares it’s my health not yours. Life is pretty shit. Everything cost to much, forced into servitude by a system I have very little control over. Why would I want more life?

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30 points

All advertising for all tobacco products should be banned, including of course the product placement bullshit.

Other than that, and age restrictions, people should have the right to consume it. They should not have the right to force other people to consume it, as in secondhand smoke.

Same with other addictive and/or harmful products.

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1 point

All advertising for all tobacco products should be banned, including of course the product placement bullshit.

Same with other addictive and/or harmful products.

Is advertising for addictive and/or harmful products really that much worse than advertising for products in general? Think about it.

(You might be predisposed to read the above as a defense of advertising, but it’s quite the opposite.)

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6 points

I agree that advertising is in itself part of the overall cultural problem of the system. However that doesn’t mean the specific forms or contents of advertisements aren’t more problematic than others.

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4 points

I think so. Every time is see someone smoke on TV I instantly want one. I imagine it’s very similar for people with gambling addiction.

Really you shouldn’t be allowed to sell anything that is physically addictive. The consumer isn’t choosing to buy it, they are compelled to.

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4 points

How about candy advertisements? Soda? Coffee? Anything with sugar in it?

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2 points

I think grue is trying to make you think just one step further:

ALL advertising is bad. It’s something we just started accepting as being nearly everwhere in society, but it’s ALL bad. It uses an immoral, bastardization of psychology and sociology to force messages on a populace designed to make them buy and consume more shit they don’t need.

They pollute our streets, our buildings, our sky’s. They flood our airwaves, our internet, even new technology like phones and TV’s will have them hard baked in. Ads showing people with happy, full, contented lives that you could have too if only you bought this shiny product!

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