My main concern with the way things are going is that it looks an awful lot like attacks on vaping are for the purpose of driving smokers back to cigarettes. I know of no one that things vaping is harmless. It is certainly much, much less harmful than cigarettes and is infinitely preferable to cigarettes.
I quit smoking, with the help of vaping. I was a pack-a-day Newport smoker that started on a ludicrously high 36mg nicotine level. I was down to 3mg within a year and quit entirely a year later.
This is a very common story for former smokers that switched to vaping. There is a theory in the vaping community, or maybe its an urban myth, that the lack of MAO inhibitors is what allows people who vape to essentially lose their addiction. What I can tell you is that stopping vaping after two years was painless, very much unlike attempting to cold turkey cigarettes.
What's the supporting evidence for your concern that "attacks on vaping are for the purpose of driving smokers back to cigarettes"
Philip Morris (now known as Altria) put $13bn into Juul to do the exact opposite. The margins on vaping are higher, the current perception of vaping is that it's better than smoking, and it's way easier to get kids addicted to vaping than cigarettes.
I see too much evidence to the contrary... that big tobacco is now big vaping (which is really big nicotine).
We dont know just how bad vaping really is, it's hard to say its better than smoking, and its impossible to say its not bad for you at all.
>"attacks on vaping are for the purpose of driving smokers back to cigarettes"
I don't think it is intentionally on purpose, but it sure does seem this way sometimes.
A specific example that comes to mind: city of San Francisco banning sale of e-cigs completely, while keeping regular cigarettes just as legal as before [0].
Good point. I don't see any of the politicians addressing why the didn't also ban cigarettes.
My guess is that banning cigarettes would go too far. It's unrealistic to expect cigarette smokers to quit over night and start using patches and lozenges.
It's a little more realistic to expect that people who vape to do so.
Vaping is really hard to tax unlike cigarettes. State and local governments are addicted to cigarette tax revenue, but that has been evaporating quickly, so outlawing vaping and not cigarettes is really profitable to them, even if causing more harm overall.
Mixing propylene glycol, glycerine, nicotine, and flavors can be easily done at home. Pretty hard to limit the distribution of any of the parts the way tobacco distribution is limited.
Well, maybe you could, the way we tax ethanol. The problem with that is the duty-free sales (including ordering a year-supply of it online from China), and the moonshine (synthesized nicotine).
"We dont know just how bad vaping really is, it's hard to say its better than smoking, and its impossible to say its not bad for you at all."
This is absolutely true. Inhaling propylene glycol and glycerine daily for thirty years might cause you to grow three heads or have babies with 27 fingers. But the results of every reputable report I've seen until now has indicated that vaping is much, much better than smoking cigarettes.
Juul's creators increased the nicotine because they felt other vapes on the market couldn't compare to the sensations delivered by regular cigarettes.
The nicotine salts in Juul pods are a type of nicotine that supposedly feels more like a cigarette when inhaled, as opposed to other vapes that use freebase nicotine.
Philip Morris strategy to create confusion is obviously working. Don't buy from big tobacco if your goal is to quit smoking.
Personally, I couldn't stand the freebase nicotine juice. A hit off some 10mg juice made me feel like I'd just taken a fat haul on a cigar. My mouth started watering, I started twitching a bit and felt like was going to puke, then immediately i started craving a smoke. The nicotine salts don't feel that way, even with the 36mg. It actually takes the cravings away without really giving me that nicotine rush.
In a month I cut down my smoking by over half and I smoke less and less as time goes on. I find the flavours bother me though and is the main reason i haven't quit entirely. I actually enjoy the taste of cigarettes, I haven't found any ejuice I actually like the taste of it all reminds me of candy, even the ones that are supposed to taste like tobacco.
I don't smoke the juul vapes, they're not the only company that makes nicotine salt juice. Nicotine salts are made by adding an acid to freebase nicotine, which is still made originally via extracting nicotine from tobacco and processing it with ammonia. If you smoke nicotine, you're inevitably supporting large tobacco producers, there's not really much way around that.
Then there's the matter of, freebasing an alkaloid makes it more bioavailable to your brain, you may be smoking lower concentrations, but your body's absorbing more nicotine per puff.
Kind of like the difference between snorting coke or smoking crack. Cocaine hydrochloride is cocaine in salt form, crack is the freebase form. Both are addictive nasty drugs, but with crack, you need less to get high, the high lasts longer and in the long term tends to really fuck people up from what I've seen.
Also, the first time I ever heard of freebase nicotine, was when I was reading about how it was added into cigarettes to increase the addictiveness and rush you get.
That cake flavoured one still sounds unappealing. I'd really prefer some kind of savoury or smokey flavour. I've never really enjoyed sweet things.
I have seen the effects of crack also from nearby but the effects usually lasts from 5–10 minutes. Snorting quality cocaine last an hour.
I'm not a chemist so you good be spot on in the information you provide. I'm just sharing my positive experience with freebase and hope more people can quit smoking.
Taste is such a personal thing, I don't like sweets either and this flavor was delivered by accident because the store made a mistake.
>Freebasing is a more efficient method of self-administering alkaloids via the smoking route. For example, cocaine hydrochloride decomposes at the high temperatures necessary for smoking. Free base cocaine, in which the cocaine alkaloid is "freed" from the hydrochloride salt, has a melting point of 98 ℃ and is volatile at temperatures above 90 ℃, therefore providing an active drug for smoking. After inhalation the alkaloid is absorbed into the blood stream and rapidly transported throughout the body. However, since blood is buffered with carbonate at physiological pH (near 7.4), free-base amines will be rapidly converted back into their acid form. In fact, 94.19% of cocaine will exist as the acid form under equilibrium at pH=7.4, calculated using the Henderson-Hasselbalch equation assuming a pKa of 8.61[1].
What did you hit it out of? 10 is really high man, I am not surprised. I remember my friend got a sub-ohm tank when they first started getting popular, and put 26 nic in there. We nearly died it felt like. If you were vaping off a sub-ohm tank at 10 nic, that's a massive dosage of nic in one hit. I vape 6 and it's often too high for people who vape.
If you were vaping off one of those little pens, then 10 makes a bit more sense, and maybe even a bit low. But, those never really hit right for me. I cough when I hit a Juul though, so idk.
It's not hard to say it's better than smoking. Every study done to date comparing the two days it's not nearly as harmful as smoking.
Smoking is one of the most harmful things you can possibly do to your body. Many people underestimate how much of a low bar being better than smoking is.
That seems like a foolish argument. The time horizon in which we discovered smoking was bad for you was decades, and over a massive population of users.
E-Cigarettes are only now becoming mainstream, and have only been in use for the better half of a decade.
We wont truly know the effects until we have a large sample size over a long period of time.
Ultimately, saying it's conclusively better for you than smoking is short sighted. We thought smoking was good for you in the 1920s...
You seem to think that science do not have the ability to predict the effects from causes, it is possible to say if vaping is safer than normal cigarettes now itself, rather than have to wait for 50 years to make that declaration. Theoreticaly ecigs are much much safer, due to the lack of combustion and presence of carcinogenic smoke components.
Vaping has been mainstream for what, a little over 5 years? And it’s exploded in just the past couple years. Any research coming out saying it’s not dangerous is simply premature. Most young people who start smoking don’t really notice majorly harmful effects within their first couple years either. At this point, most studies can only demonstrate the short term effects. It’ll take a while to determine long term harm.
> I know of no one that things vaping is harmless.
To me this is up there with "I know of no one on HN who actually dislikes Javascript."
You're contradicting a mantra that is so ubiquitous that it's
a bit hard to take you seriously.
People I know IRL and on Reddit (without even venturing into circlejerks like r/juul and r/vaping) think vaping is so harmless that health effects aren't even the tiniest part of the discourse while they puff on their vape pretty much every waking hour. Compare that to almost every cigarette smoker who is at least in a state of "yeah, I should quit someday." I'd be hard pressed to find someone who vapes saying that, and when it comes up it's usually just for financial reasons.
Not to say you aren't having the experience that you said you have, but rather to point out that you may be surrounded by a rather unique group.
> Not to say you aren't having the experience that you said you have, but rather to point out that you may be surrounded by a rather unique group.
Maybe its a fast evolving community and things have changed. I haven't touched vapes since 2016, so my involvement in the online community is zero these days. When I quit, Juul wasn't even a thing and mech mods were the norm. Everyone that talked about vaping was in the context of harm reduction, not harm elimination.
Those I do know IRL that still vape just aren't even trying to give it up, but they also weren't willing to give up cigarettes until vapes came along and took away the smells. Maybe it is also a factor of my social circles being 30+ and upper middle class now and smoking/vaping/drunkenness in general being frowned upon.
My concern is that any pushback on attacks on vaping just allows more room for more people to continue saying / believing that it's "ok, not 100% harmless, but almost completely" - enough so for the rise in nicotin intake among younger people (as referenced by other commenters) and enough for people to spontaneously start to vape in places where smoking is strictly prohibited, acting like it shouldn't bother anyone,("it's not like it's cigarette smoke") - even offices (happened in mine), public transportation etc...That boils my blood to no end.
I quit smoking in a similar way now 3 years ago. A cigaret is almost engineered to spike a nicotine shot. By only vaping my nicotine cravings decreased over time without effort. I recommend smokers to immediately start with an expensive vapor that works. Beating a nicotine addiction is not possible with a $20 solution that requires duck tape hacks after a week. I took away from Alan Carr's book it is not possible to just smoke one cigarette ever again.
I’m in the same case as you. I switched to vaping 2 years ago (August 14th). Started out at 9mg of nicotine, and now at 1mg. Switch to 0.5mg is planned for early September.
Every time I lower my dosage, I notice I vape 2-3 times more than usual, and after a week, I stabilise again (at around 15-20ml per day). I exclusively vape on an RDA.
Over the weekend, I was invited to go to a shisha bar. After 3-4 tokes, I was high as a kite. Hadn’t experienced such a nicotine high in a very long time.
I can’t wait to finally be off nicotine completely. I’m already noticing that I often forget my vape when leaving the house, and when I notice, I don’t really sweat it. It’s a slow process, but for me, it works.
And yes, I know that it’s possible that I might grow a 3rd arm 20 years from now. But I’m playing the odds: cigarettes will kill me dead for certain. Vaping, maybe not.
Don't worry about the negative effects of vaping. And your experience without backup and not sweating it is a clear sign of progress. I remember a time I couldn't go to sleep if I didn't have any cigarettes left for the next day. After the third vapor broke I decided not to buy a new one. Good luck!
My quit signal seems to be getting the flu or similar. I've heard from others as well. After a few days of being miserable and not wanting to smoke because of the flu you come out the other end not needing it.
I quit chewing tobacco this way. Picked up vaping a while later for no apparent reason. Will probably quit this the same way.
> "My main concern with the way things are going is that it looks an awful lot like attacks on vaping are for the purpose of driving smokers back to cigarettes"
I've heard this from enough vapers that I'm starting to suspect that vaping causes paranoia. Big tobacco is happy as a clam that so many people are vaping. Cigarettes were on the decline before vaping came along and gave nicotine addictions to a new generation.
> The CDC conducts an annual survey of tobacco use by middle and high school students, asking if they’ve used a tobacco product in the last 30 days. The most recent poll, released in February, found middle school use increased from 5.6% in 2017 to 7.2% in 2018; among high school students, it surged from 19.6% in 2017 to 27.1% last year.
> Almost all of the increase comes from e-cigarettes. Among middle school students, use rose from 3.3% in 2017 to 4.9% last year. Use nearly doubled among high schoolers, from 11.7% in 2017 to 20.8% in 2018.
> In other words, the number of high school smokers dropped by 1.2 million, while those using e-cigarettes rose by almost 3.5 million. That more than wipes out progress in reducing smoking during the last seven years.
> For decades, the percentage of high school and middle school students who smoked cigarettes had been declining fairly steadily. For the past three years, it has flattened, according to new numbers released Monday.
> Adults who smoke cigarettes may have an easier time cutting back or quitting altogether if they start vaping, but a new French study also suggests that vaping may make ex-smokers more likely to relapse.
“It’s not clear yet what’s going on and it’s best to not jump to any conclusions,” said David Levy, a Georgetown University researcher.
In the UK, teenage smoking is at record lows - just 16% of secondary school children have ever smoked tobacco, down from 19% in 2016. We have not seen a significant rise in youth e-cigarette use. This may have something to do with the 2014 Tobacco Products Directive, which introduced substantial new regulation on both cigarettes and e-cigarettes including restrictions on advertising.
Hasn’t that always been the case though? Peer pressure is going to be directed somewhere, maybe cigarettes, maybe marijuana, maybe heroin, ... are kids really expected to be better these days than when we were kids?
Kids are better today than we were as kids. They drink less, they smoke less, they take drugs less often, they have fewer unplanned pregnancies, etc etc.
At the moment we don't think vaping turns non-smokers into smokers. But it's complicated, especially if there are companies that are marketing vaping to young non-smokers.
I personally think vaping is a useful public health measure, but I recognise the very many years of terrible behaviour from tobacco companies and it feels like light-touch regulation doesn't work.
Well balancing non-smokers becoming vapers relative to smokers becoming vapers definitely depends on the relative risks. But if vaping is increasing the number of smokers (which is definitely not true among adults, and probably not true among teens) you're right that wouldn't depend on relative risks.
> There is a theory in the vaping community, or maybe its an urban myth, that the lack of MAO inhibitors is what allows people who vape to essentially lose their addiction.
Definitely a myth, I never smoked but vaped for 2 years. I quit a few months ago because I was vaping so much I noticed some pretty bad side effects, the increase in blood pressure was real. Nicotine is highly addictive, I still feel like I want to do it and it takes willpower not to go back to it.
I think it's probably true that Vaping is less addicting than Smoking.
But I also think, that the act of Vaping/Smoking/Inhaling/Ritual also has something to do with it.
I quit smoking, with the help of vaping. I was a pack-a-day Newport smoker that started on a ludicrously high 36mg nicotine level. I was down to 3mg within a year and quit entirely a year later.
This is a very common story for former smokers that switched to vaping. There is a theory in the vaping community, or maybe its an urban myth, that the lack of MAO inhibitors is what allows people who vape to essentially lose their addiction. What I can tell you is that stopping vaping after two years was painless, very much unlike attempting to cold turkey cigarettes.