People like to go to both extremes wrt. vaping - "but it creates new addicts" vs. "but it's effective tool for breaking addiction", forgetting about the biggest benefit vaping brings: letting smokers who don't want to quit to keep smoking, without risking lung cancer.
I'm definitely against marketing vaping to non-smokers. But I'm fine with converting existing smokers to vaping without any talk about quitting, because smoking e-cigarettes is strictly better than smoking analog ones.
How can a society allow marketing vaping as a healthier way to smoke without allowing marketing that makes non-smokers think vaping is a healthy way to smoke?
(Especially considering that the marketers are eager to market to non-smokers.)
It's all about power.
There are so many things it would be useful to quantify and compare:
Does anybody know the difference between the percentage of non-nicotine users who begin smoking cigarettes and the percentage who begin vaping? It sounds like the percentage for vaping is higher, but how much higher? Is it as much higher as the risk of dangerous health complications smoking has over vaping?
Never mind the question of why nicotine addiction is so dangerous it must be prevented on a federal level, but alcohol addictions aren't? How much more dangerous is nicotine than alcohol?
Important distinction: I didn't say anything about banning sales, just marketing, which we've already done for both smoking and alcohol.
> How much more dangerous is nicotine than alcohol?
According to the CDC, "cigarette smoking is the leading cause of preventable death in the United States...causes more than 480,000 deaths each year in the United States" while "excessive alcohol use is responsible for more than 95,000 deaths in the United States each year, "
https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/heal...
https://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/features/excessive-alcohol-death...
Edit: as for vaping specifically, the risks are not yet fully known, but some health authorities argue "a growing body of evidence shows that smoking e-cigarettes, or vaping, may be even more dangerous than smoking cigarettes".
https://www.nm.org/healthbeat/healthy-tips/emotional-health/...
If you divorce nicotine from its problematic delivery systems, nicotine itself is a pretty good drug (albeit very addictive). It's potentially protective against diseases like Parkinson's and Alzheimer's, it's associated with weight loss, and it improves short term memory and attention.
It's also great in combination with caffeine, and it speeds up caffeine metabolism.
Juul is a product of one of those big tobacco companies.
These are conversations that belong in a physicians office. Advertising is a scam on both sides and destroys instead of creates value for humanity. Historians will look back upon advertising the way many look back upon slavery.
What's the lastname of this Society guy?
It's kind of hypocritical to wrap your personal wishes and desired in the veil of common good, care for others, etc.
Legislature would be its lastname, I suppose. As in [nation] legislature, [state] legislature, etc.
I do.
> but it doesn't do anything to get you off your nicotine addiction, which people usually mean by "smoking cessation product"...
OK but what does this have to do with expressing ourselves accurately?
If impossible meat makes vegans start eating burgers, you can't just argue "well, it's still better than meat".
> I'm definitely against marketing vaping to non-smokers.
But this is the whole point, they do attract non-smokers. They should explicitly detract them instead.
This is magical thinking. Do we apply this requirement to healthier alternatives in any other market?
For example: I really like McDonalds fries, but I mostly don't eat them because they're unhealthy. However anecdotally some "heavy users" eat them 3 to 5 times a week.
Imagine if McDonalds introduced "Beyond Fries" tomorrow, equivalent in every salient way, but less unhealthy (say, baked potato-level healthy). Would anyone apply the standard above, calling for it to be _only_ a "fry cessation product" for heavy users, and expecting it to explicitly repel the abstaining-for-health-reasons users like me?
I can't see how it's even possible to achieve both goals at once. A healthier alternative to _anything_ is going to draw some former abstainers-for-health-reasons into the market. And smoking has a _lot_ of abstainers-for-health-reasons.
By all means let's call vaping a smoking cessation product, but I'm not sure it's reasonable to assume that we can have our cake and eat it too here.
Edit: sense
Attitudes around smoking in general are grounded deeply in magical thinking. People have been raised on anti-smoking rhetoric so deep, with such little cultural push back toward sanity, that it's tough for most people to think let alone discuss the subject with any objectivity.
But by that logic, smoking could be called a weight loss product.
Other people have a more complex definition, which precludes cigarettes from being considered a health product, despite their appetite-suppressing properties.
And it was! The difference is that smoking isn't really healthier than obesity, so it's not a very good way to lose weight overall.
No it’s not. Meat isn’t addictive. People don’t “quit” meat and develop a habit of impossible burgers. People don’t wake up every morning feeling shitty about enjoying meat.
I fully support vegan and vegetarian lifestyles. To compare tobacco to meat is foolish.
I started smoking when I was 18 (2004), picked up some of the first vapes in 2009 (they were horrible), and finally stopped smoking in 2012. But I don’t want to stop vaping. I don’t like the modern mainstream ecigs like juul (I mix my own liquid and build my own coils on a dual 18650 battery device), but I’m just glad that vaping exists, because, if all my fruitless attempts at quitting were any indication, otherwise I’d still be smoking a pack a day.
