As a reformed smoker who moved to vaping, I'm terribly concerned at the current marketing of vaping to teens, and the uptake within that age bracket in my country (NZ).
I switched because my nicotine addiction isn't an easy one to break, and vaping is significantly cheaper (our government increases excise taxes on tobacco annually, so currrently $30 NZD buys me a pack of 20 cigarette that I smoke in a day, or it buys me a bottle of vape juice that lasts 2 weeks).
And I'm a big fan of vaping for the economic and (so far as we know currently) health benefits for smokers.
But what really concerns me, is the number of young people who would never smoke due to the (successful! and good on the Ministry of Health for doing so) demonisation of cigarette smoking, who are instead happily vaping away.
It seems apparent from the marketing that Big Tobacco has realised where their next big market lies - young people who don't want to smoke, but will vape if you tell them it's healthy and cool. At the end of the day, you're still getting people addicted to nicotine for money. Yes, bonus that there's less cancer involved, but it' still a monetised addiction.
My preference would be for vape liquids containing nicotine to be prescription only for recovering smokers. If kids want to blow watermelon vapour out of their lungs, go nuts, just don't do it with a known addictive substance in the mix.
> My preference would be for vape liquids containing nicotine to be prescription only for recovering smokers.
Isn't this going to make the argument for making teens smoke cigarettes so they can get access to vaping with nicotine? And before you say "they're not going to go that far," we can also have a conversation about what underage people will do to get access to alcohol.
Also, I'm especially humored by people wanting to put legal restrictions on things like vaping but wont have that same discussion about alcohol, which imo is much more harmful. Alcohol literally is: Yes, bonus that there's less cancer involved, but it' still a monetized addiction.
> Isn't this going to make the argument for making teens smoke cigarettes so they can get access to vaping with nicotine? And before you say "they're not going to go that far," we can also have a conversation about what underage people will do to get access to alcohol
Alcohol is an entirely different animal to nicotine. Nicotine doesn't, in normal doses, produce a notably altered mental state that's strongly associated in society with "having a good time". Alcohol is significantly more attractive because of all its socialisation associations.
> Nicotine doesn't, in normal doses, produce a notably altered mental state
Right, nicotine doesn't lead to drunk driving. So that makes vaping with nicotine a target for legislation, whereas alcohol is perfectly fine because it leads to a good time?
Nicotine also doesn't lead to things like alcohol poisoning, or liver damage.
Nicotine is increasingly being considered a nootropic/cognitive enhancer, and so is likely to become a drug of abuse as a "study drug" for college students, the way Ritalin is today.
I think the flaw in that flow is that no one cares about nicotine, they just want vaping. As long as vaping without nicotine exists, there's no reason to go after the other version. Unless you're already addicted, and in that case, I'd say let's get them the prescription as well.
Yeah, and I smoked for more than a decade for the great taste and flavor. People vape for nicotine. It’s habit forming, pleasant, either compatible with or actively helpful for normal social and working.
Like caffeine. People say they don’t drink tea or coffee for caffeine but there might be one person who drinks decaf or no caffeine tea or coffee with the regularity of all the addicts who know perfectly well that they drink it most every day and feel crap if they don’t.
If you don't get hooked to start, no habit forming needed. Isn't the point to stop the cycle? You also have to remember that these are teens as young as 9th grade that are doing it for social reasons. Let them play around with some flavored vapor (which seems safe so far, needing more regulation) and walk away without an addition.
One thing I don't understand about caffeine addicts is why they don't just separate out "caffeinated drinks" into their components: "caffeine" and "drinks." You don't have to get your caffeine one sip at a time. Take a caffeine pill in the morning, then drink whatever you like. (And then you won't be staining your teeth or dehydrating your gastrointestinal mucosal lining by constantly exposing it to a diuretic, either!)
Nicotine is a stimulant, so some people enjoy it. Nicotine by itself isn't really too much of a health concern from my understanding, especially when compared to alcohol. So I really don't get why there's such a fuss about banning vaping entirely, or putting it on a prescription-only state.
I am opposed to open slather nicotine vaping because it's literally just selling a product that has the brilliant business aspect of being horribly addictive.
> As long as vaping without nicotine exists, there's no reason to go after the other version.
That's not true. I find nicotine quite useful for hackathons and the like where I don't want to sleep, but also don't want to visit the restroom as often as red bull or other caffeine options would make me.
That's an active choice for a specific use case, mind you one that's not healthy to have regularly. If people want nicotine, let's sell its on its own. There is literally no reason to package it into vaping unless you're coming from smoking or are simply trying to hook your customers.
> Isn't this going to make the argument for making teens smoke cigarettes so they can get access to vaping with nicotine?
Then simply apply the same to cigarettes. Only current people who smoke can buy them, this paves the way to eliminate it altogether. But unfortunately, greed and money speak more than the health of people.
And how would minors be filling prescriptions for nicotine juice? Presumably it wouldn't be prescribed to minors, and doctors doing that would risk serious consequences.
This strikes me as quite the edge case, but we have a variety of alternative forms of metered nicotine delivery that are far less recreational, trendy, and photogenic like nicotine gums and patches that doctors can prescribe to assist parents struggling with addicted children.
> My preference would be for vape liquids containing nicotine to be prescription only for recovering smokers
But what if adults just want to vape? Plenty of things are addictive. Sugar, video games, Facebook... if you want to take away somebody freedom to do something I think you’d need a pretty compelling reason. Otherwise why not just have the government tell you when to go to bed, wake up, go to the gym, what to eat, etc.
Vaping has the potential to be qualitatively more harmful than any of the things you mention. Video games/facebook are just addictive mental feedback loops, added sugars are fairly simple compounds used in excess, cigarettes are fairly simple with not much room for technological optimization. Vaping, or unregulated vaping in the future, can consist of thousands of carefully optimized and artificially engineered chemicals delivered to the human lungs/bloodstream through an optimized hardware device. The addictive properties of such devices can surpass anything we have seen short of directly injecting similar chemicals into the bloodstream.
In simple words, vaping once optimized over a few device generations has the potential to be at least as harmful as hard drugs (heroin/coke/etc), while masquerading as safe and socially acceptable. Therefore, they need to be regulated. An outright ban might not be advisable, but banning certain chemicals or device designs might be preferable.
> vaping once optimized over a few device generations has the potential to be at least as harmful as hard drugs (heroin/coke/etc)
Vaping itself doesn’t have any proven harmful affects. I’m not saying it definitely won’t turn out to have any at all, but nicotine is not carcinogenic, and doesn’t have anywhere near the same potential to harm as the narcotics you mentioned. This is really just speculation.
> An outright ban might not be advisable, but banning certain chemicals or device designs might be preferable.
Sounds good to me. I’ve got no issue with the FDA making sure my food is safe to consume, nor any with this suggestion. It’s a sin tax or other ridiculous restrictions that seem unjustified to me. I expect the truth behind a lot of the regulation talk is really that the government doesn’t want to lose tobacco tax revenue. Which really just makes the whole thing even more tyrannical.
I am not at all concerned about the medical harms of vaping in my post. Facebook also doesn't have any medical harms, but its addictive nature is why it is slowly being more and more regulated. The potential super-addictive nature of vaping (much greater than cigarettes or facebook), I argue, is why it needs to be regulated.
Why would you willingly take a highly addictive substance for shits and giggles? You don't even get properly high on it. I got addicted to tobacco because I was young and an idiot.
But you're right, adults should be free to be idiots if they like. I just feel repelled by large tobacco corporations profiting by pivoting nicotine addiction from tobacco to vaping products.
In my country, British American Tobacco is focusing a large amount of their marketing on selling nicotine vapes to young people. So perhaps treat vape products the same as we treat tobacco products - plain packaging, no marketing allowed.
> But you're right, adults should be free to be idiots if they like.
This is the mentality that ended up getting society down the drain. No, "adults" (many of whom aren't mentally) shouldn't be allowed to be idiots, especially if it puts other people at risk.
You put yourself at risk countless times every single day, in ways that would mostly be unnecessary. Why should you even be allowed to leave your house without permit? Especially if you’re just doing it for something like entertainment, leisure or your own enjoyment.
Your argument has a fallacy. Smoking is not only bad for whoever smokes, but is also bad for anyone near him/her, as well as the environment. There is literally zero benefit from it, let's stop with this "adults can do anything they want" mentality.
Well we’re actually talking about vaping, but I’d still like you to answer my question.
Also, you are constantly putting other people at risk as well. Taking any form of transport, cooking, living in a house that has either electricity or natural gas, playing any form of sport, living in a house made from flammable material. If you want to include emotional or psychological harm, then add the very act of existence to the list. All of that and countless other things you do every day puts other people at risk. So again, why should you have the right to do anything at all that put yourself or anybody else at risk of harm?
It was implied in my answer. Smoking and vaping have nothing but negative outcomes. Driving to get somewhere on the other hand, has both a benefit and a risk. We're also constantly improving safety ratios with things like safer cars, automatic braking systems, and autonomous driving sometime down the line hopefully.
All the examples you listed are practically a necessity for modern life, again, a benefit-risk tradeoff, and there are always improvements in safety being developed. Smoking and vaping aren't a necessity, and zero good comes out of them.
How about requiring companies to produce non-nicotine versions of equal quality? The addictive part is optional, unlike with sugar for example. Video games and Facebook are more of a grey area but removing the addictive elements is more complex to say the least. Let's remove it when we literally know it's one non-essential ingredient.
Where did you get the idea from that you or anybody else should get to make people’s decisions for them?
With smoking, the government decided that the affects were so grievously harmful that they should put serious restrictions in place regulating their sale. You can agree with that or not, but at least there’s some logic to it. Nicotine is not the harmful part of the cigarette, and unless some new information comes to light, vaping isn’t anywhere as harmful as smoking. Where’s your justification for trying to remove people freedom to do it? Because following your line of reasoning to it’s logical conclusion, we’d end up with government mandated lifestyles.
> Where did you get the idea from that you or anybody else should get to make people’s decisions for them?
Where did you get the idea that I made anyone else's decision? I am literally just asking for the option of vaping without nicotine to exist.
My theory is only that many people (especially kids without a history of smoking) would choose vaping without nicotine on their own if they had the option. Juul et al know that would drastically shrink their revenue, so they, the profit seeking company they are, made sure their product had an addictive substance in it, and then marketed it to people not already exposed to the addiction. Requiring them to make an equal product without nicotine is at worst market regulation that basically all consumable products go through and at best a public safety mandate.
Availability is key though. Juul brand pods are simply the default, and for people on here we should know the power of sane defaults. Especially when we are talking underage users who are not really able to take advantage of the full market.
I did some googling and even promising links advertising no nicotine alternatives didn't even seem to have any in stock to order. Also noticed some disturbing trends with hiding the nicotine levels by mixing grams and percentage strengths and referring to it as "nic" which the skeptic in me says this is to divert attention from it being nicotine and people doing research on its addictive properties for those young enough not to know from anti-smoking campaigns.
Edit: Did a bit more digging and found some, but still likely harder to get if under 21.
My god, if this kind of paternalistic shite spreads it won’t be long until we’re back to 30% of the adult population smoking just as a fuck you to puritans.
Smoking has very limited effects on reproductive fitness as it barely effects lifetime fertility, given that almost all of the bad effects generally happen after reproductive age.
Natural selection won’t do anything about smoking for the same reason it doesn’t do anything about cancer or heart disease.
The title (from BuzzFeedNews) leaves out that the slides were plagiarized by Juul, then Juul paid schools to teach them, all while name-dropping The Farm.
I'm trying to tease apart how much of the plagiarism is to be expected when you're an academic, whether Juul was being more manipulative or lazy, and is paying schools to teach this a token gesture, an insult, or inception marketing.
IANAL, but it's complicated because this was(?) produced as part of her employment by Stanford, so arguably Juul took Stanford's work. Stanford is private, it can do what it wants, but what about public universities? Should the public own the IP they fund? IP created by public employees in the US are often released into the public domain. What if a professor from a private school got a government grant? I'm not sure how settled any of this is legally.
Not just "released" - works created by federal officers and employees cannot be copyrighted in the first place. But public universities are run by states/territories/etc., not by the federal government, and there's no such restriction on state governments. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_status_of_works_by_s...
Another interesting case: works done by government contractors are eligible for copyright protection, and the copyright can be transferred to the government, which is, I think, how parts of OpenStack can be copyrighted by NASA. By that argument, professors (or anyone else) with government grants should definitely be able to copyright their work and keep copyright.
There's certainly an increasingly-popular argument that publicly-funded research work should be publicly accessible / open access, but there's no law or even norm about it yet.
For the people here who are thinking teens are doing this for taste, etc.
Ask yourself how much more existential crises kids these days are facing.
Global warming is happening and the adults aren't doing anything.
They're seeing their family get crushed by medical debt and the adults aren't doing anything. Not only that they're actively voting for people who support the current system.
The world is fucked for these people and the adults are blaming stuff like how it tastes instead of the structural issues these kids are going through.
You’ve heard of the bomb, right? From 1950 to the end of the Cold War every thinking person knew there was an excellent chance that’s they and everyone they knew could die along with the rest of civilization.
Before WW2 even the richest society in world history, the US, was by modern standards fairly poor. People died of diseases we just don’t worry about now because we have antibiotics.
This generation is not special. Everyone has to deal with shit.
> This generation is not special. Everyone has to deal with shit.
When the Falklands War started in 1982, and the British warship was sunk, I seriously thought this was the start of WW3. So yeah, the shit was there too.
And deal with shit they do. By vaping. I guess that’s the argument.
Frankly, I think they do it because they’re bored and it’s an easy way to differentiate as part of an in-group, but it’s been long enough since I was a kid that I don’t recall for sure.
Either way, the insistence that kids were smoking/vaping (but curiously not drinking) for the watermelon flavor always seemed dubious. But until some solid research on actual motivations becomes known in a widespread manner, the ‘solutions’ will probably remain political and lobbyist-informed.
> This generation is not special. Everyone has to deal with shit.
Everyone has to deal with shit, but as long as the global population continues growing every subsequent generation is relatively special.
I hope for the day when this trend reverses and our economies are no longer dependent on continuous growth. But until then, I'm afraid every new generation really is dealing with a tougher problem.
Although I'm sure there are some teens that think that, don't you think "my friends are doing it", "it's cool" and "it's fun to blow sick clouds when the teacher isn't looking" a lot more likely than some existential crisis? I mean at least I was a lot more likely to think the former than the latter a couple of years ago when I was a teen
One need look no further than the marketing material corporations like Juul are putting out. Are the ads playing up fears of climate change, or are the ads about making the product look cool?
It's the later, obviously. Anybody who says otherwise is either deluded or trying to delude you.
Maybe the belonging and ‘adult’ involvement in something semi-dangerous distracts them from the existential dread. I don’t know if I’d make that argument, but I do think the reasons involved are nuanced and varied.
Your "appeal to worse problems" doesn't invalidate the taste argument.
I believe "how it tastes" might be a root cause to trying it.
Anecdotally I know many people who, as kids, tried their dad's or friend's cigarette or pipe, said oh-hell-no and lost interest for the rest of their childhood.
It does though, people are looking for the simple solutions to problems. You're trying to erase a symptom of a systematic issue that kids these days literally don't have a future.
Global Warming, Student Loans, Terrible Jobs.... Who on earth wouldn't be seriously depressed just thinking 5-10 years into their future?
I wish we were taking a much more harm-reduction focus like they are in the UK.
From the NHS website...
Leading health organisations including the Royal College of General Practitioners, British Medical Association and Cancer Research UK agree that e-cigarettes are far less harmful than smoking. Based on the currently available evidence, Public Health England and the Royal College of Physicians estimate they are at least 95% less harmful.
Yes, seems the UK is the only sane government on this. The US has gone absolutely hysterical on the subject. Ban is our only tool, and everything is a nail. Think of the fucking children, for GOD's sake! Puritanical roots probably has something to do with it.
When I was a child, Reagan kicked off the drug war into high gear to protect me. Millions incarcerated, even more families ruined. I wish he hadn't. We were hysterical then too.
Any specific reasoning here? My understanding is that virtually all recent vaping injuries were caused by grey-market oil-soluble (e.g. THC) products, not from water-soluble nicotine products.
Do you have data/studies suggesting the claimed extreme danger of vaping commercially available nicotine products (especially considering their obvious use as smoking cessation aids)?
They aggressively market kids, making all their spiel about caring about reducing cancer deaths completely bullshit (as if there was ever any doubt).
Sadly vaping becoming trendy among kids has had the consequence of deleting a lot of the progress made in underage smoking. Because yes, after starting with vaping, kids are way more likely to move on to cigarettes afterwards.
What makes me really mad is that it does not seem like it would have been extremely hard to do not market to kids. That's an extremely low bar and that's already too much for scummy companies like juul.
Yes absolutely, but the degree to which these are addictive is not the same for each, so how much action you take towards them must be on a case by case basis.
I'd be surprised, since it appears that vitamin E in grey market THC pods has been the cause of the health issues, and aside from that vaping is substantially less harmful than cigarettes (but not risk free).
Juuls in particular give you about 3x more nicotine per puff than a cigarette, and they marketed directly to kids via free handouts at concerts. Juul is the thing that isn’t about getting you off cigarettes, it’s getting you on even more nicotine so it’s even harder to stop.
I should also note that they go to fairly great lengths to muddy the exact amount in comparison to a cigarette. Most of the copy on the internet about the amount is a direct quote from Juul (1 pod - 1 pack).
They didn't just plagiarize the slides, they neutered them, and then attempted to pass them off as Stanford endorsed research; all without permission from the author.
I did read the article. All that is just a more unethical strain of plagiarism to me. I however agree with the other comment below that this report could go toward painting a full picture of what kind of company we're dealing with.
It all goes towards painting a more complete picture of the company. Stories like this wouldn't mean much in isolation but it strengthens the greater narrative of Juul being a unethical corporation.
I switched because my nicotine addiction isn't an easy one to break, and vaping is significantly cheaper (our government increases excise taxes on tobacco annually, so currrently $30 NZD buys me a pack of 20 cigarette that I smoke in a day, or it buys me a bottle of vape juice that lasts 2 weeks).
And I'm a big fan of vaping for the economic and (so far as we know currently) health benefits for smokers.
But what really concerns me, is the number of young people who would never smoke due to the (successful! and good on the Ministry of Health for doing so) demonisation of cigarette smoking, who are instead happily vaping away.
It seems apparent from the marketing that Big Tobacco has realised where their next big market lies - young people who don't want to smoke, but will vape if you tell them it's healthy and cool. At the end of the day, you're still getting people addicted to nicotine for money. Yes, bonus that there's less cancer involved, but it' still a monetised addiction.
My preference would be for vape liquids containing nicotine to be prescription only for recovering smokers. If kids want to blow watermelon vapour out of their lungs, go nuts, just don't do it with a known addictive substance in the mix.