Forgot how Pro-drug the fediverse is as well; vapes should be regulated as heavily as cigarettes and other tobacco products. Just because it’s less harmful doesn’t mean it’s not harmful.
The laws around vapes are nonsense and pseudoscience. That’s what really pisses people off.
Flat prohibitions aren’t saving any lives or ending any health crisis. Meanwhile cigarettes are widely available with a dozen flavors.
The laws around vapes are nonsense and pseudoscience.
Recognising that there are health issues, without fully understanding them yet due to there having not been enough time to form complete and solid conclusions, doesn’t make it pseudoscience. It means we should be cautious and continue to study, and certainly not widely adopt their use in the mean time assuming everything will be fine. Especially as it directly interacts with such a sensitive part of our inner bodies, and especially as the largest group taking up their use are teenagers.
Flat prohibitions aren’t saving any lives or ending any health crisis. Meanwhile cigarettes are widely available with a dozen flavors.
I disagree, to blanket suggest prohibitions don’t save lives is not based in fact. Even the misguided alcohol prohibition over in the USA saved lives, reducing the number of deaths that would have otherwise been caused by intoxication (dangerous driving being an obvious example, domestic abuse, etc).
And take this example from literally only yesterday, where a child almost died due to electronic cigarettes and the complications therein (often when people discuss the danger of X and Y, they assume a completely healthy person to begin with, and ignore that a large percentage of the population has at least one illness or environmental factor that it can complicate).
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-67081855
Also, yes cigarettes are available, but their use in public is heavily restricted, and they aren’t attractive to young people any more thanks to decades of hard work in education. Electronic cigarettes however are targeted directly at teenagers in a very predatory way, suggested to be safe and clean, and thus we have these new issues.
In the end, I suspect electronic cigarettes are less dangerous than breathing in smoke from tobacco, which is insanely dangerous, but that will not make them safe, either, and the cumulative effects of electronic cigarette use over decades simply isn’t fully known yet.
We’re working on it, and where our health is concerned, especially that of our impressionable youth, an abundance of caution is always the best course of action.
I was under the impression that prohibition of alcohol did not reduce any harm, because people flocked to speakeasys, and the quality of the homemade alcohol was not good. A good chunk of the alcohol beverages people drank during prohibition would give them poisoning of some kind.
People didn’t stop drinking, they just started drinking homemade alcohol made with industrial alcohol. The US government also made sure that the only kind of alcohol people could aquire to make drinks was not good for human consumption.
Your comment is the first time I’ve ever heard anybody say anything good about prohibition. Maybe it saved a few people, like you said, but overall alcohol related deaths probably stayed around the same, or even went up thanks to all the poisoning. It’s hard to tell, because the US didn’t keep track of these numbers at the time.
Yawn. Prohibition is not about protecting youths, its about protecting income. Your conclusions regarding the supposed benefits of prohibition are largely opinion, a generally refuted by historians. Flat bans produce unregulated markets, which lead to excess death and injury.
Well they are bad for you so it’s not exactly pseudo science, and the problem is that kids are using them.
Vapes come in candy flavour which is ridiculous, not because it exists, but because is sold to children.
At the very least I think we should say that you have to be at least what 18 to buy them. I don’t think that’s too bad.
How exactly are they bad for you? Where’s the studies? You gotta be 21 to buy them, at least in the US. I quit smoking and use vapes exclusively and I can tell a huge difference in how I feel and breathe
Vaping should be limited to 18+ consumers just like “standard” nicotine products. But we shouldn’t pretend, like the WHO and other organizations do, that Vaping hasn’t been used by many (myself included) to effectively quit nicotine. Personally I kicked a 2 pack a day habit because of vaping and today I use no nicotine products (including vaping) because of it.
Agreed.
More restrictions is uncalled for.
I quit smoking cigarettes using a “box mod” in 2016 and gradually tapered down from a very high nicotine blend to 0 nicotine using 100% vegetable glycerin and peppermint flavoring and then I finally literally lost my vape and just never bothered to replace it…
So anyways, I started smoking over 30 years ago and I don’t vape or smoke anymore.
We need stricter regulations on the production of disposables or ingredients. Like, using diacetyl which is known to cause popcorn lung. Or the whole vitamin E oil causing lung disease in black market vapes…
Maybe something similar to the regulations around alcohol. We know alcohol is bad, but the long term effects are much different than going blind from methanol.
Smoking or vaping isn’t good long term, but it shouldn’t be able to kill your lungs after a few uses.
Shouldn’t that be an argument to regulate it less, not “as heavily”?
Many mundane things are less harmful than cigarettes and shouldn’t be regulated as heavily.
Edit: typo
What’s too heavy about how cigarettes are regulated in your country? I’m in Canada and when I smoked cigarettes I never felt like I was obstructed in making my own choices.
Many mundane things are less harmful than cigarettes and shouldn’t be regulated as heavily
Why not? We regulate the shit out of food and medicine and those are the exact opposite of harmful when everything goes as planned.
vapes should be regulated as heavily as cigarettes
My comment referred to this quote. It’s a comparison between how heavy two things are regulated. Neither needs to be heavily regulated for this comparison to work.
What’s too heavy about how cigarettes are regulated in your country? I’m in Canada and when I smoked cigarettes I never felt like I was obstructed in making my own choices.
I’m fine with how cigarretes are regulated in Germany. Could be still heavier. I’m not fine with regulating vapes as heavy. Especially taxes.
It’s ridiculous when vaping becomes more expensive than smoking. This creates incentive to quit vaping and smoke. Should be reversed.
Many mundane things are less harmful than cigarettes and shouldn’t be regulated as heavily
Why not? We regulate the shit out of food and medicine and those are the exact opposite of harmful when everything goes as planned.
That’s two different kinds of regulation. You’re referring to regulations to make things safer. These are great.
I was talking about regulations to make things less accessible. These are great if the things are dangerous.
It makes sense to make things less accessible which are more dangerous.
I thought vaping was fine because I didn’t know it had nicotine in it.
Super fucking addictive, it should absolutely be regulated because currently in most places it isn’t, as evidenced by all the kids buying vapes.
it should absolutely be regulated because currently in most places it isn’t, as evidenced by all the kids buying vapes.
They’re regulated the same as cigarettes. Kids find ways to get cigarettes, alcohol, and drugs, too, despite how regulated they are.
It’s more to do with the fact that they’re intentionally marketed towards kids in a way cigarettes and alcohol aren’t so much anymore.
People say that but I’ve never seen a vape ad for kids.
In what way are they marketed towards kids?
Bright colors doesn’t count.
Super fucking addictive,
Nicotine on its own is ballpark as addictive as caffeine, vapes lack the MAOIs contained in cigarettes which on their own are much more addictive (atypical antidepressants, hardly surprising) but in synergy with nicotine even more.
as evidenced by all the kids buying vapes.
They also bought fidget spinners. Also I’ve never seen a kid with a vape.
Nicotine by itself is less physically addicting than caffeine, and no more harmful. It’s the 9000 other chemicals in cigarette smoke that increase the addictive properties and cause cancer.
A large part of the reason smoking is so addictive is because it integrates into every part of your life. This is why vaping is by far the most successful method of quitting smoking.
Also, in the US it’s illegal to sell nicotine of any form to anyone under 21. But kids will always do the things we tell them not to do exactly because we tell them not to do them. I’d 100% prefer a kid vape than smoke.
Nicotine is absolutely addictive wtf are you talking about. I smoked cigarettes for 6 years and then used a vape to quit cigarettes, it took about 3 months to wean myself off cigarettes and get used to vaping full time. My original plan was to use a vape to get off nicotine completely by gradually lowering my nicotine from 24MG to 0MG of nicotine in my vape juice but that didn’t work.
Now here I am 8 years later, vaping my 3MG juice daily and just as additiced to the vape as I was to cigarettes. I have literally the exact same habits with my vape as I did with cigarettes, as soon as I finish eating I pull out my vape, I wake up and have coffee, I pull out my vape, I have some drinks I have a vape. Nicotine is nicotine regardless of how you get it. I’ve literally tried to quit by going to 0MG juice or going cold turkey 6 times over those 8 years and I just can’t do it. It’s to fucking hard. I’ve given up on trying to quit because life sucks and I have no good reason to quit anymore, getting lung cancer is basically my retirement plan at this point. (no clue what the actual health effects are regarding vapes, I’m just being hyperbolic)
Don’t get me wrong, vaping is definitely a MUCH better alternative than smoking cigarettes but don’t try and downplay just how addictive nicotine is. Nobody should touch nicotine vapes unless you’re using it to quit cigarettes.
I 100% agree that kids will get a hold of vapes or smokes regardless of whether it’s legal or not to sell it to underagers, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good thing. Vaping is definitely preferable to smoking, but not getting addicted to nicotine is WAY better than either of those options.
Don’t downplay how addictive nicotine is.
Former smoker here. Instead of trying to use zero nicotine juice. Take advantage of the fact that you can control how many drags you take per session. For me I hit a cig about 10 times. So when I vaped I was sure to only hit it 10 times. Then I lowered the hits from 10 to about 3 and from there I was able to cold turkey.
I don’t think they’re intentionally downplaying how addictive nicotine is, I think you’re underestimating how addictive caffeine is. Caffeine is ridiculously addictive, it just doesn’t seem that way because its use is normalized. Try skipping caffeine for a full week and see how that goes for you. In my experience, going without caffeine is way more painful than going without nicotine. Going without nicotine makes me kinda groggy and irritable. Going without caffeine gives me headaches, makes me achey and feel mildly ill, and I don’t drink a lot of caffeine to begin with (I typically drink a single soda throughout the day, rarely coffee or energy drinks).
. I have literally the exact same habits with my vape as I did with cigarettes
And there you go, you’re not addicted to nicotine. You’re addicted to your habit. It’s why I can’t stop biting my nails, they don’t have any drugs in them at all, yet I’ve been doing it all my life and have tried to stop multiple times.
Habits easy to form and super hard to break.
From my own experience of quitting smoking, I can tell that you’re spreading lies.
I was on IQOS before I quit entirely and let me tell you, the addiction was real, I couldn’t think straight, I was extremely dizzy all the time and generally unusable for pretty much anything.
I had to take some meds to actually help me with the physical withdrawal symptoms, otherwise I would be of no use for 3-5 days (or so I’ve read) which I couldn’t really afford at that time.
IQOS is not a vape it’s a “heat not burn” product. Completely different category of product and very much not only nicotine when it comes to neurologically active substances, but the whole cigarette spectrum of stuff.
IQOS is still not nicotine on its own, and if the symptoms you described were while you were using the IQOS, it sounds like a nicotine overdose.
You where trying to break a physical habit. Nicotine is not a super addictive drug. It’s why pipe and cigar smokers aren’t addicted to smoking. Most of us quit in the winter months with no issues because we’ve not created a habit of smoking 5 cigars a day. It’s the same reason vaping has such a good track record of getting people to stop smoking and then quitting vaping, were the drugs the pharma companies sell that are NRT like patches and pills have like a %10 success rate and people relapse to the sticks constantly, even though they’re getting the same or more amount of nicotine from the patch or drug than from cigs.
Fuuuuck Philip Morris. Tax them heavily and use the proceeds to pay their customers’ medical expenses
If I could just push a button and make all non medical use tobacco become impossible to grow, I would push that button a million times just to be sure. I hope everyone working for Philip Morris gets lung cancer.
That should just be an accepted cost to enter the industry.
Frankly, we need fewer prohibitions on substances, not more. I drink responsibly and like it. We also know you can’t ban alcohol without a black market, so why even feign that it could be done?
We need better enforcement to prevent people acting like idiots when they drink. I don’t have ideas to offer on how, as I haven’t pondered it at length, but that’s the best path in my mind.
Thank you for having some common sense. If we know anything about history, prohibitions on substances just lead to worse outcomes with black market activity and criminal enterprises.
Tobacco is a weird one, because most people I know that smoke, don’t really enjoy it, they are just literally addicted. Still, I don’t think banning nicotine would be a great move.
I think the taxes are pretty effective. I smoked for a few years in my younger days, and I quit when the prices started to go way up, thanks to taxes.
I interviewed with them once, and they swore up and down that they were cleaning up and divesting of all the harmful stuff, and wanted me to trust they were all about health and a smoke-free future.
Thankfully they were so staggeringly full of bullshit during the interviews that I quickly realized it’d be an absolutely horrifically toxic (groan, yes, sorry) place to work irrespective of my other doubts, and I ended up telling them I didn’t want to continue the process and that I was so unhappy with the assorted bullshit during the process that I didn’t want to ever be approached by them again.
That’s the very long way of saying I’m not the slightest bit surprised it turns out they are in fact still massive asshats, and I’m very happy I caught on early enough.
