Everyone here is arguing the benefits of prohibition. I’m just interested to know how much money Rishi (and/or his family members/friends/donors) have invested in vaping and nicotine alternatives.
I mean lets not pretend it’s risk free, it raises blood pressure, causes headaches, can trigger arrhythmia in those at risk, etc. As far as drugs go it is probably the least risky, but it’s not like it comes with zero health impacts.
I don’t think anything is risk-free, including the vital molecules that we need to live. But caffeine has way a longer and significant list of health benefits that offset the risks at even moderate doses. So much so that there’s enough evidence to encourage people to drink more as a prophylaxis. That list includes protection from gallstones, cancers, asthma, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, and cardiovascular disease among other thing like a potential aide in weight loss and even a significant performance boost in sports. What’s more, there have been large cohort studies that have found a 3% decreased in risk of developing arrhythmia per daily cup even when controlling for genetics. So the risks shouldn’t be used to discourage or scare people away from a proven benefit when the therapeutic window includes up to 4 cups a day. Would I risk the occasional insomnia, headaches, and temporary increase in blood pressure for all the other positive effects given such a lenient margin? Absolutely.
So, really, the public perception that caffeine is somehow dangerous for being labeled a drug is on par with the belief that other substances are inherently dangerous. I think it spills over from the war on drugs, and the delusion of clean eating that often emerges from the dregs of misinformation on the internet and those who perpetuate those beliefs for monetary gain within the wellness communities, ironically enough.
I’ve known people, myself included, that have had negative health impacts from coffee, so that could be biasing my perspective. My father nearly died from heart complications after coffee, I bleed at the exit 100% of the time I drink coffee. I love coffee, but I can’t drink it. There’s probably something genetic that makes my line intolerant. I know people that end up in a migraine caffeine withdrawal cycle on a regular basis. Obviously these are person specific, so you really just need to know your body and act accordingly.
Hi from the depths of a nicotine addiction and struggling to quit.
Its a worthless chemical that gets more expensive everyday and my brain SCREAMS at me for a fix if I try to go more than even a few hours. At least heroin gets you high.
I suspect your struggle comes mostly from the habits, rather than the chemicals involved? I’ve known a number of cigar addicts that managed to quit, they often said that the hardest part was avoiding it after an activity, like a cigar after a cup of coffe, a cigar after a meal, etc. Being allowed cigar breaks during work also encourages use, since it’s a “free pause”
You don’t have any fucking idea what your talking about. I stopped smoking cigarettes 2 months ago and switched to tobacco free pouches. I have been tapering down from 6 mg to 4 to now 2. And here’s a good tip, especially when talking about addiction. You don’t get a say in anyone else’s experience amd diminishing another persons struggle makes you look like a real jackass, especially considering you have no experience of your own. I can tell because if you did you wouldn’t be spouting this bullshit
That’s really not the case. Nicotine is highly physically addictive. “Habits” are involved in the way the mind links itself to the addictive substances and the effect of consuming them. My wife quit smoking 15 years ago, and walking in the woods still gives her near-uncontrollable urges to light a cigarette. Because she and I camped a couple time the first year of our relationship and she smoked a cigarette on a hiking trail. That’s not habit-related. Having a cigarette was a more formative and powerful influencing memory to her than basically anything else in her life.
Being allowed cigar breaks during work also encourages use, since it’s a “free pause”
That’s just anti-smoker bullshit. Honestly, if you work at a job where you need to smoke to get a break, you should be finding another job anyway. Let’s just stick to hating the drug instead of the smokers.
I mean I’m no expert but I do have some knowledge on the subject.
The difference is how you injest it. Our stomachs are much more resilient than our lungs. Your stomach is, for all intents and purposes, a sac of acid that dissolves mostly anything you put in it, your lungs on the other hand literally only do 1 thing all day and it’s breathe air. There are different qualities of air of course, and microparticles in it that could cause harm, but on the whole it’s more or less all the same.
Its like dumping garbage into a sink vs. a paper bag. The sink will get disgusting, and you may end up with a clogged drain, messed up pipes, or worse. But at the end of the day if you just clean the mess and don’t do it too often it will probably be fine. The paper bag on the other hand is gonna get Soggy, gross, and start falling apart in your hands. You can dry it out but it will never quite be the same…
There are different qualities of air of course, and microparticles in it that could cause harm, but on the whole it’s more or less all the same.
Absolutely, and that’s the problem. The same argument you just posed could also be used against intentionally smelling flowers, or sticking your nose over a pot of boiling broth to smell that chicken deliciousness.
We don’t know that vaped nicotine is more harmful than most things we breathe. In fact, I’d say there are non-drug things people do that we already know to be worse than vaping. Ever go camping? The smoke from that fire is worse than vaping, worse than almost any substance you might want to smoke.
So the question is how bad vaping (the action, not the drug) is. Is it as bad as sniffing a rose, as bad as lighting a scented candle? As bad as incense? As bad as a campfire? If, as many suspect, it’s near the beginning of that scale, then the only critique we can rightly have is towards the substance vaped. If it’s near the end of the scale, we kinda need some research to support that claim.
Its like dumping garbage into a sink vs. a paper bag
As of yet, the medical and scientific community have not found solid evidence that it’s “like…garbage” at all if you don’t like it on fire.
Which is where things get complicated. Because it MIGHT be terrible for you. Or it might not be bad at all.
Nicotine is one of the safest stimulants we know, up there with caffeine in terms of safety. There’s little meaningful reason to ban nicotine. You’re more likely to harm yourself with any number of other things we readily allow.
The addiction potential of nicotine alone is also far lower than people assume, because smoking is highly addictive both due to the rituals and the other substances involved. I tried to get used to nicotine via patches years back to use as a safe stimulant, and not only did I not get addicted, I couldn’t get used to it (and I was not willing to get myself used to smoking, given the harm that involves). That’s not to say you can’t develop addictions to patches or vapes etc. too, but much more easily when it’s as a substitution for smoking than “from scratch”.
Restrictions on delivery methods that are harmful or not well enough understood, and combining nicotine with other substances that make the addiction and harm potential greater, sure.
Nicotine is one of the safest stimulants we know, up there with caffeine in terms of safety. There’s little meaningful reason to ban nicotine.
this is from a 2015 article i found on the NIH library:
Nicotine poses several health hazards. There is an increased risk of cardiovascular, respiratory, gastrointestinal disorders. There is decreased immune response and it also poses ill impacts on the reproductive health. It affects the cell proliferation, oxidative stress, apoptosis, DNA mutation by various mechanisms which leads to cancer. It also affects the tumor proliferation and metastasis and causes resistance to chemo and radio therapeutic agents. The use of nicotine needs regulation. The sale of nicotine should be under supervision of trained medical personnel.
in case you think i might be cherry picking, here’s something from johns hopkins, and here’s a source from
the cdc.
here’s something recent from harvard for good measure.
edit: i should be clear that the other sources don’t say exactly the same things as the NIH one, but they do talk about how nicotine itself is very addictive, and they talk about some of the harm it can cause
The links from John Hopkins, the CDC and Harvard all focus on vaping, and so are irrelevant to the question of nicotine rather than the delivery methods.
The first link has nothing wrong in it. It’s correct nicotine is toxic. So is caffeine - the LD50 of caffeine in humans is reasonably high, many grams. To the issue of ingestion, the issue is toxicity at doses people are likely to deal with.
To the cancer links, again without looking at delivery methods, this is meaningless. To let me quote one small part:
Thus, the induced activation of nAChRs in lung and other tissues by nicotine can promote carcinogenesis by causing DNA mutations[26] Through its tumor promoter effects, it acts synergistically with other carcinogens from automobile exhausts or wood burning and potentially shorten the induction period of cancers[43] [Table 2].
This makes sense. Don’t inhale lots of particulates combined with nicotine in other words.
There are also many other parts of the article that are useful. E.g. it’s perfectly reasonable to accept that e.g. if you are on chemo you should stay off nicotine, and if you breastfeed you should stay off nicotine.
What the article does not show is that nicotine, as opposed to delivery methods like inhalation, is much worse than other drugs we’re perfectly fine with.
I’ll note that the article also includes things in its conclusion that it has categorically not cites studies in support of. E.g. it just assumes the addiction potential is proven (it is, but putting that in the conclusion of a paper without citing sources is really poor form, especially in a paper claiming to set out the issues with nicotine in isolation rather than smoking).
It also tried to drive up the scare factor by pointing out its toxicity at doses irrelevant for human consumption (e.g. as an insecticide; if wildly irrelevant doses should be considered, then we could write the same paper about how apples should be banned because they contain cyanide).
The “Materials and methods” section also goes on to say “Studies that evaluated tobacco use and smoking were excluded” but then goes on to make multiple arguments on the basis of harm caused by smoking (e.g. “Nicotine plays a role in the development of emphysema in smokers, by decreasing elastin in the lung parenchyma and increasing the alveolar volume”) and cites a paper focused on smoking, in direct contradiction of the claim they made (“Endoh K, Leung FW. Effects of smoking and nicotine on the gastric mucosa: A review of clinical and experimental evidence. Gastroenterology. 1994;107:864–78.”)
So, yes, if you make claims about how you’re going to address nicotine rather than smoking, and then go on to address smoking and other means of inhalation intermingled with the rest, and if you leap to conclusions you’ve not cited works in support of, and if you throw out risks without linking them causally to nicotine, you can make nicotine look very bad.
They also end with subjective statements they’ve not even attempted to support properly. E.g. they’ve gone from “here is why it’s dangerous” to “it should be restricted”, but if that was valid logic, we should restrict sales of apples too, most cleaning agents, all caffeinated products, housepaint, paint thinners, and a host of other things, it’s a specious argument and fitting that such a badly argued paper ends with it. That this passed peer review is an incredible indictment of the journal which published it.
That doesn’t mean nicotine is risk-free, but compared to other things we’re happy to ingest, I stand by my statement. But don’t inhale it.
“I haven’t read this, but let me misrepresent what the thing I didn’t read says”.
I have not argued it isn’t unhealthy. I have argued it’s one of the safer stimulants we have, unless you ingest it in a way that is dangerous (e.g. inhalation). That does not mean it’s free of downsides, but neither are a whole lot of things we still decide it’s fine to use.
Next time maybe try abstaining from replying to something you’ve not bothered to read.
You just confirmed what I said. “One of the safest”
And yeah you wrote way more shit than you should ever expect people to read. Maybe abstain from writing 10,000 words ever but especially if you’re wrong
No, you made the false claim that I said it isn’t unhealthy. “One of the safest” is not the same as “isn’t unhealthy”.
If you can’t be bothered to read my ~600 words in reply to someone else and not directed at you, that is entirely your choice. Nobody is forcing you to. Neither are anyone forcing you to blatantly misrepresent what I’ve claimed, however.
Well of course not. You weren’t getting the dopamine rush of a large acute dose rushing from your lungs directly to your brain in a matter of seconds.
So in other words, you’re saying I didn’t pick the right delivery method to get me addicted. Which was my point.
Regardless, the dangers – including ease of addiction – are well-known and are scientifically proven. Your anecdata of one does not change that.
Missing the point: 1) a large part of the addiction for most people is down to delivery, not nicotine itself - something you yourself used as an argument against my anecdote above -, and most of the research focuses on that. 2) the remaining addiction potential of nicotine is real, and proven, but it’s also nothing particularly special compared to other things we’re fine with seeing the addiction to as ranging from a nuisance (e.g. caffeine) to a problem that doesn’t justify prohibition (any more), like alcohol.
My point was not that it’s impossible to get addicted to nicotine, but that confusing nicotine vs. nicotine via a given delivery method is not helpful.
If it’s not too harmful - what’s the problem with being addicted? I’m addicted to coffee and drink at least two cups per day, as do most people around here.
Nobody out there is just buying Nicotine gum for the flavor. The overwhelming majority are struggling with an addiction that may one day kill them.
Also, as a former smoker of over 20 years as well as a current coffee addict, I can tell you from personal experience that there is no comparison between the two. Some substances are simply more addictive than others. Nicotine is one of the worst on the planet.
Idk man, I vaped for years many times a day and was able to quit very easily, but sugar and caffeine I just can’t, they’re so much more addictive to me.
…because there isn’t a pill that instantly cures all addiction. Addiction is a complicated thing that combines a lot of factors between physical dependence, pleasure-seeking, memory formation, and a lot more.
The problem with addiction is that it’s safe to say that NOTHING is good if used to excess.
I used to be so hooked on caffeine I drank a 30-cup pot each day. It was giving me all kinds of issues, and I was only in my 20’s. I’m still addicted, but I’ve learned to moderate. It took me years. And my 4th latte of the day is telling me that I’m not exactly great at it.
If I smoked/vaped Nicotine, I would have serious problems of taking too much all the time.
Not at all. I don’t suggest any bans. I said elsewhere I would not oppose pre-rolled cigarette bans because they are especially dangerous and would not reduce access to the product itself. But I also don’t suggest pre-rolled cigarette bans.
Probably, yes. Even the age restrictions are kinda silly.
I do think it’s ok to ban sale of “prepared smokables” like cigarettes. The harm level is known to be severe. But if someone wants to buy their own tobacco+papers and roll their own cigarettes, that’s on them.
Of course, I don’t think it would be effective to ban cigarettes. Just ethically coherent.
The addicting part isnt the nicotine. Its everything atound it. The ritual, the friends the “doing something with your hands”.
The psychological addiction is way stronger than the nicotine addiction that you can just overcome in 2 weeks.
The full effects of vaping are not well understood, and while they’re almost certainly not as bad as cigarettes, they’re also almost certainly still bad for you, and they are indeed still addictive for the same reasons as cigarettes because they still use nicotine.
Further, one main reason their risks remain as poorly understood as they do is that (again, because of the same active ingredient) people who vape often also use cigarettes. The two are closely linked, I don’t think my confusion should be so easily dismissed as that.
Oh sorry, I was thinking nicotine supplements like gum and patches. In my mind, smoking and vaping are the same thing. “Don’t inhale particulate matter of any kind” is an excellent rule of thumb for all humans in all situations
You’re not that stupid. You know the difference between inhaling concentrated particulates from a cigarette or vape and smelling a fucking flower. (Which, by the way, pollen grains are average 10-20 microns, not 2.5.)
You’re not that stupid. You know the difference between inhaling concentrated particulates from a cigarette or vape and smelling a fucking flower
And you’re not that stupid. You know that fine particulate matter in the air every breath we take is different from someone vaping sometimes. There’s a reason your linked study doesn’t mention vaping AND why scientists are still saying the risks of vaping are unclear.
Your second study is more useful, but it really is not intellectually defensible to take it results as saying vaping is unhealthy. Instead, its results are saying that we need to keep regulations to control air quality with regards to vaping.
I’ll reiterate my original critique.
“Don’t inhale particulate matter of any kind” is an excellent rule of thumb for all humans in all situations
…is something I disagree with, like most extreme naive generalities.
I wasn’t trying to link evidence that vaping is unhealthy. But we know that inhaling PM2.5 is unhealthy and those size particles are present in vape. You are free to take whatever risks you would like with your body.
The full effects of vaping are not well understood, and while they’re almost certainly not as bad as cigarettes, they’re also almost certainly still bad for you
That used to say that about artificial sweeteners. The question shouldn’t be “is it bad for you” but “is it worse for you than 99 other things you do in a day”. And vaping nicotine is “almost certainly bad for you” because of the nicotine, and nicotine is a known quantity - we know how bad it is and isn’t. We don’t have evidence that the mechanism of vaping is bad for you, and there’s no “almost certainly” on that.
And the truth is, I have problems with people who lean on “poorly understood” for vaping. Evidence shows vaping as a mechanism (for THC as it were) going back over 2000 years to ancient Egypt. Widespread use of hookahs started in the 19th century and has tons mechanically in common with modern vaporization. There are some differences, but short of a few badly-designed vapes that let air reach the lungs while superheated, it looks a lot like people are saying “not well understood” because they cannot seem to “understand” bad things and they don’t want to say good things. We have TONS of research precedent around room-temperature air with vaporized herbs in it.
If I were going to imbibe nicotine (or CBD or THC for that matter), I would probably prefer to vape it. I think the stigma against vaping needs to step aside for the vaccine research considering using vapes as an alternative to needle injection.
Hookah is pretty bad for you too, my friend. From Wikipedia, emphasis mine:
The major health risks of smoking tobacco, cannabis, opium and other drugs through a hookah include exposure to toxic chemicals, carcinogens and heavy metals that are not filtered out by the water,[3][8][9][10][11] alongside those related to the transmission of infectious diseases and pathogenic bacteria when hookahs are shared.[3][9][12][13] Hookah and waterpipe use is a global public health concern, with high rates of use in the populations of the Middle East and North Africa as well as in young people in the United States, Europe, Central Asia, and South Asia.[3][8][9][10][11]
If the best you can say is “it’s pretty much a mini hookah, don’t worry”, then I’m going back to the best you can say for it is that it’s poorly understood. Vaping doesn’t burn anything, unlike a hookah, but the vaporized oils still contain toxins and novel toxins not in the smoke from cigarettes or hookah. The health consequences of that are not well understood, but are probably not as bad as cigarette smoking. That’s the best we’ve got.
I didn’t say it wasn’t. I said we have a lot more context than people want to pretend about vaping in general.
And I’m not trying to say “it’s a mini hookah”, nor am I trying to say you should vape.
Vaping doesn’t burn anything, unlike a hookah, but the vaporized oils still contain toxins and novel toxins not in the smoke from cigarettes or hookah
If they contain toxins, we probably know quite a bit about those toxins right now. But what about pure vaporized solids? In the CBD and Cannabis community, dry herb vaporizing is the hot new thing specifically because 99% of complaints about vaping being unhealthy are irrelevant. All they do is get the herbs hot without burning it, run it through cooling, and inhale it. I laugh, but I used to do that with lavender with an aromatic herb heating unit.
The health consequences of that are not well understood, but are probably not as bad as cigarette smoking. That’s the best we’ve got.
Despite your incredulity, you really haven’t shown that. The consequences are not perfectly understood, but we understand enough to start making educated opinions about vaping. Even your points about hookahs work towards that, with the worst cons being that you still get Carbon Monoxide and the intensity of Nicotine is high. The problem is that we don’t want to tell people that the educated opinion is “probably better for you than that glazed donut”
But why? The full effects of vaping are not well understood, and while they’re almost certainly not as bad as cigarettes, they’re also almost certainly still bad for you, and they are indeed still addictive for the same reasons as cigarettes. Further, one main reason their risks remain as poorly understood as they do is that (again, because of the same active ingredient) people who vape often also use cigarettes. The two are closely linked, I don’t think my confusion should be so easily dismissed as that.
Banning nicotine would be going too far. Nicotine in and of itself isn’t that bad, it’s the delivery methods that can be problematic. In particular the ones where you inhale things into your lungs. But there are smokeless tobacco and there are types of tobacco smoking where you don’t inhale the smoke.
Many people. There are many different tobacco products that either are smokeless or that you don’t inhale that are common in different areas, like dip, snus, snuff, cigars, pipes and what have you. In some regions those are what people start using nicotine with.
Actually I started with nicorette because of nootropics blogs and nasal snuff. I’ve only ever smoked 1 cigarette although I did partake in some hookah.
I tried to start with both a patch and gums years ago because of the stimulant benefits and the decent risk profile of nicotine on its own. I’ve never smoked, never will. Didn’t stick - it was too hard to get used to. If I could get it as a flavourless pill, maybe.
It’s “psychoactive” in the same way that caffeine is. That is, it’s a stimulant. Using that term only serves the purpose of making it sound scarier. And it’s far less addictive on its own than when smoked. It’s not harmless, but it’s also nowhere near as big a problem in itself as specific product categories and delivery methods, and no worse than any number of other things we’re perfectly fine with people using.
You can go EU-way and say that all vapes should be rechargable(in both meanings), repairable and intercompatible. Basically opposite of what Big Tabacco does.
Though even the reusable ones generate a decent amount of waste between coil assemblies that get replaced and the plastic bottles the juice comes in. I mean, I hope we eventually get to managing waste at that level, though I’m not holding my breath since it would require huge changes to the way we handle food logistics, which eclipses vape juice waste by a lot per person.
You can build your own coils and mix your own liquid. Me and my mate both do it it’s far cheaper and better for the environment, not too hard either once uve learnt the basics of materials and ohms n all.
At all or while making insane profit and producing a lot of waste? At all simple: just look how vapes looked like before Big Tabacco came and enshittified them.
I’m not sure what this has to do with climate scientists. What am I supposed to be looking at?
Rishi has a history of making legislation to benefit the companies run or owned by friends and family. I would be extremely surprised if this didn’t also have a similar angle.
Climate activists want to, among other things, pass extremely unpopular carbon taxes as they’re the most serious effort toward cutting fossil fuels usage
Extremely unpopular ideas that inevitably favor certain products are not always moves to sell those products, is the point
It’s pretty reasonable to assume no one outside the UK knows much about Sunak’s history with handouts to friends.
That’s a matter of proper implementation. Tax & dividend! Distribute the tax revenue to the population per capita.
That means:
If your emissions are average, you pay/earn net zero.
If you emit more than average, you pay. This will affect mostly rich people, since emissions strongly correlate with available money.
If you emit less than average, you net earn. This effectively rewards people with money gained for emissions prevented.
Since money is distributed unequally in society, this means most people will have to pay less in such a system.
The beautiful thing is, the financial incentive to emit less remains even for people who gain more than they pay. It’s also an incentive both for buyers and sellers, researchers and investors.
Rishi Sunak also just promised to ensure cars will be able to drive through heavily populated areas indefinitely and has pushed back plans to introduce electric-only cars. He absolutely does not care about peoples’ health.
Everyone here is arguing the benefits of prohibition. I’m just interested to know how much money Rishi (and/or his family members/friends/donors) have invested in vaping and nicotine alternatives.
It always confuses me to learn that when people want to ban smoking it somehow means ban “cigarettes” and not “nicotine”
Because smoking is WILDLY more harmful than vaping.
Yes vaping has SOME health risks, but it’s like saying drinking tea and drinking four loko are just as bad because they both have nicotine.
Bro what tea are you drinking that has nicotine
I can only imagine they meant caffeine, another common drug that’s heavily abused but a little more socially accepted
Tbf, caffeine is not bad for you, it might even be good for you
How much did big coffee pay you to make this comment? I bet that link installs covfefe!
Yes, because not all drugs are bad for you.
I mean lets not pretend it’s risk free, it raises blood pressure, causes headaches, can trigger arrhythmia in those at risk, etc. As far as drugs go it is probably the least risky, but it’s not like it comes with zero health impacts.
I don’t think anything is risk-free, including the vital molecules that we need to live. But caffeine has way a longer and significant list of health benefits that offset the risks at even moderate doses. So much so that there’s enough evidence to encourage people to drink more as a prophylaxis. That list includes protection from gallstones, cancers, asthma, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, and cardiovascular disease among other thing like a potential aide in weight loss and even a significant performance boost in sports. What’s more, there have been large cohort studies that have found a 3% decreased in risk of developing arrhythmia per daily cup even when controlling for genetics. So the risks shouldn’t be used to discourage or scare people away from a proven benefit when the therapeutic window includes up to 4 cups a day. Would I risk the occasional insomnia, headaches, and temporary increase in blood pressure for all the other positive effects given such a lenient margin? Absolutely.
So, really, the public perception that caffeine is somehow dangerous for being labeled a drug is on par with the belief that other substances are inherently dangerous. I think it spills over from the war on drugs, and the delusion of clean eating that often emerges from the dregs of misinformation on the internet and those who perpetuate those beliefs for monetary gain within the wellness communities, ironically enough.
I’ve known people, myself included, that have had negative health impacts from coffee, so that could be biasing my perspective. My father nearly died from heart complications after coffee, I bleed at the exit 100% of the time I drink coffee. I love coffee, but I can’t drink it. There’s probably something genetic that makes my line intolerant. I know people that end up in a migraine caffeine withdrawal cycle on a regular basis. Obviously these are person specific, so you really just need to know your body and act accordingly.
Nicoteane 😉
Well what’s wrong with nicotine? In itself it’s not worse than booze. It’s all the other crap they add that makes it so terrible
Hi from the depths of a nicotine addiction and struggling to quit. Its a worthless chemical that gets more expensive everyday and my brain SCREAMS at me for a fix if I try to go more than even a few hours. At least heroin gets you high.
And even when you break free for the most part the chemical which is classified as a poison will make you crave it years later.
Every time I smell somebody smoking I need a pouch or I’ll go ask for a bum
I switched to CBD only vape juice and it helped!
I suspect your struggle comes mostly from the habits, rather than the chemicals involved? I’ve known a number of cigar addicts that managed to quit, they often said that the hardest part was avoiding it after an activity, like a cigar after a cup of coffe, a cigar after a meal, etc. Being allowed cigar breaks during work also encourages use, since it’s a “free pause”
You don’t have any fucking idea what your talking about. I stopped smoking cigarettes 2 months ago and switched to tobacco free pouches. I have been tapering down from 6 mg to 4 to now 2. And here’s a good tip, especially when talking about addiction. You don’t get a say in anyone else’s experience amd diminishing another persons struggle makes you look like a real jackass, especially considering you have no experience of your own. I can tell because if you did you wouldn’t be spouting this bullshit
That’s really not the case. Nicotine is highly physically addictive. “Habits” are involved in the way the mind links itself to the addictive substances and the effect of consuming them. My wife quit smoking 15 years ago, and walking in the woods still gives her near-uncontrollable urges to light a cigarette. Because she and I camped a couple time the first year of our relationship and she smoked a cigarette on a hiking trail. That’s not habit-related. Having a cigarette was a more formative and powerful influencing memory to her than basically anything else in her life.
That’s just anti-smoker bullshit. Honestly, if you work at a job where you need to smoke to get a break, you should be finding another job anyway. Let’s just stick to hating the drug instead of the smokers.
I mean I’m no expert but I do have some knowledge on the subject.
The difference is how you injest it. Our stomachs are much more resilient than our lungs. Your stomach is, for all intents and purposes, a sac of acid that dissolves mostly anything you put in it, your lungs on the other hand literally only do 1 thing all day and it’s breathe air. There are different qualities of air of course, and microparticles in it that could cause harm, but on the whole it’s more or less all the same.
Its like dumping garbage into a sink vs. a paper bag. The sink will get disgusting, and you may end up with a clogged drain, messed up pipes, or worse. But at the end of the day if you just clean the mess and don’t do it too often it will probably be fine. The paper bag on the other hand is gonna get Soggy, gross, and start falling apart in your hands. You can dry it out but it will never quite be the same…
Absolutely, and that’s the problem. The same argument you just posed could also be used against intentionally smelling flowers, or sticking your nose over a pot of boiling broth to smell that chicken deliciousness.
We don’t know that vaped nicotine is more harmful than most things we breathe. In fact, I’d say there are non-drug things people do that we already know to be worse than vaping. Ever go camping? The smoke from that fire is worse than vaping, worse than almost any substance you might want to smoke.
So the question is how bad vaping (the action, not the drug) is. Is it as bad as sniffing a rose, as bad as lighting a scented candle? As bad as incense? As bad as a campfire? If, as many suspect, it’s near the beginning of that scale, then the only critique we can rightly have is towards the substance vaped. If it’s near the end of the scale, we kinda need some research to support that claim.
As of yet, the medical and scientific community have not found solid evidence that it’s “like…garbage” at all if you don’t like it on fire.
Which is where things get complicated. Because it MIGHT be terrible for you. Or it might not be bad at all.
is not doing your argument any favors.
Are you kidding? Booze is incredibly harmful!
Yup, and it’s allowed and easily accessible
Nicotine is one of the safest stimulants we know, up there with caffeine in terms of safety. There’s little meaningful reason to ban nicotine. You’re more likely to harm yourself with any number of other things we readily allow.
The addiction potential of nicotine alone is also far lower than people assume, because smoking is highly addictive both due to the rituals and the other substances involved. I tried to get used to nicotine via patches years back to use as a safe stimulant, and not only did I not get addicted, I couldn’t get used to it (and I was not willing to get myself used to smoking, given the harm that involves). That’s not to say you can’t develop addictions to patches or vapes etc. too, but much more easily when it’s as a substitution for smoking than “from scratch”.
Restrictions on delivery methods that are harmful or not well enough understood, and combining nicotine with other substances that make the addiction and harm potential greater, sure.
this is from a 2015 article i found on the NIH library:
source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4363846/
in case you think i might be cherry picking, here’s something from johns hopkins, and here’s a source from the cdc. here’s something recent from harvard for good measure.
edit: i should be clear that the other sources don’t say exactly the same things as the NIH one, but they do talk about how nicotine itself is very addictive, and they talk about some of the harm it can cause
The links from John Hopkins, the CDC and Harvard all focus on vaping, and so are irrelevant to the question of nicotine rather than the delivery methods.
The first link has nothing wrong in it. It’s correct nicotine is toxic. So is caffeine - the LD50 of caffeine in humans is reasonably high, many grams. To the issue of ingestion, the issue is toxicity at doses people are likely to deal with.
To the cancer links, again without looking at delivery methods, this is meaningless. To let me quote one small part:
This makes sense. Don’t inhale lots of particulates combined with nicotine in other words. There are also many other parts of the article that are useful. E.g. it’s perfectly reasonable to accept that e.g. if you are on chemo you should stay off nicotine, and if you breastfeed you should stay off nicotine.
What the article does not show is that nicotine, as opposed to delivery methods like inhalation, is much worse than other drugs we’re perfectly fine with.
I’ll note that the article also includes things in its conclusion that it has categorically not cites studies in support of. E.g. it just assumes the addiction potential is proven (it is, but putting that in the conclusion of a paper without citing sources is really poor form, especially in a paper claiming to set out the issues with nicotine in isolation rather than smoking).
It also tried to drive up the scare factor by pointing out its toxicity at doses irrelevant for human consumption (e.g. as an insecticide; if wildly irrelevant doses should be considered, then we could write the same paper about how apples should be banned because they contain cyanide).
The “Materials and methods” section also goes on to say “Studies that evaluated tobacco use and smoking were excluded” but then goes on to make multiple arguments on the basis of harm caused by smoking (e.g. “Nicotine plays a role in the development of emphysema in smokers, by decreasing elastin in the lung parenchyma and increasing the alveolar volume”) and cites a paper focused on smoking, in direct contradiction of the claim they made (“Endoh K, Leung FW. Effects of smoking and nicotine on the gastric mucosa: A review of clinical and experimental evidence. Gastroenterology. 1994;107:864–78.”)
So, yes, if you make claims about how you’re going to address nicotine rather than smoking, and then go on to address smoking and other means of inhalation intermingled with the rest, and if you leap to conclusions you’ve not cited works in support of, and if you throw out risks without linking them causally to nicotine, you can make nicotine look very bad.
They also end with subjective statements they’ve not even attempted to support properly. E.g. they’ve gone from “here is why it’s dangerous” to “it should be restricted”, but if that was valid logic, we should restrict sales of apples too, most cleaning agents, all caffeinated products, housepaint, paint thinners, and a host of other things, it’s a specious argument and fitting that such a badly argued paper ends with it. That this passed peer review is an incredible indictment of the journal which published it.
That doesn’t mean nicotine is risk-free, but compared to other things we’re happy to ingest, I stand by my statement. But don’t inhale it.
I didn’t read this novel but you’re arguing nicotine isn’t unhealthy and that makes you wrong
“I haven’t read this, but let me misrepresent what the thing I didn’t read says”.
I have not argued it isn’t unhealthy. I have argued it’s one of the safer stimulants we have, unless you ingest it in a way that is dangerous (e.g. inhalation). That does not mean it’s free of downsides, but neither are a whole lot of things we still decide it’s fine to use.
Next time maybe try abstaining from replying to something you’ve not bothered to read.
You just confirmed what I said. “One of the safest”
And yeah you wrote way more shit than you should ever expect people to read. Maybe abstain from writing 10,000 words ever but especially if you’re wrong
No, you made the false claim that I said it isn’t unhealthy. “One of the safest” is not the same as “isn’t unhealthy”.
If you can’t be bothered to read my ~600 words in reply to someone else and not directed at you, that is entirely your choice. Nobody is forcing you to. Neither are anyone forcing you to blatantly misrepresent what I’ve claimed, however.
Well of course not. You weren’t getting the dopamine rush of a large acute dose rushing from your lungs directly to your brain in a matter of seconds.
What the heck kind of hot take is this?
Regardless, the dangers – including ease of addiction – are well-known and are scientifically proven. Your anecdata of one does not change that.
So in other words, you’re saying I didn’t pick the right delivery method to get me addicted. Which was my point.
Missing the point: 1) a large part of the addiction for most people is down to delivery, not nicotine itself - something you yourself used as an argument against my anecdote above -, and most of the research focuses on that. 2) the remaining addiction potential of nicotine is real, and proven, but it’s also nothing particularly special compared to other things we’re fine with seeing the addiction to as ranging from a nuisance (e.g. caffeine) to a problem that doesn’t justify prohibition (any more), like alcohol.
My point was not that it’s impossible to get addicted to nicotine, but that confusing nicotine vs. nicotine via a given delivery method is not helpful.
Well, nicotine isn’t the part of smoking that causes cancer
But it’s the part that is addictive and keeps you smoking.
If it’s not too harmful - what’s the problem with being addicted? I’m addicted to coffee and drink at least two cups per day, as do most people around here.
Nobody out there is just buying Nicotine gum for the flavor. The overwhelming majority are struggling with an addiction that may one day kill them.
Also, as a former smoker of over 20 years as well as a current coffee addict, I can tell you from personal experience that there is no comparison between the two. Some substances are simply more addictive than others. Nicotine is one of the worst on the planet.
Idk man, I vaped for years many times a day and was able to quit very easily, but sugar and caffeine I just can’t, they’re so much more addictive to me.
You say that, but even if there was a pill that instantly cured all addiction, I’d probably still crave coffee every day.
…because there isn’t a pill that instantly cures all addiction. Addiction is a complicated thing that combines a lot of factors between physical dependence, pleasure-seeking, memory formation, and a lot more.
nah, it’s cause it’s delicious.
The problem with addiction is that it’s safe to say that NOTHING is good if used to excess.
I used to be so hooked on caffeine I drank a 30-cup pot each day. It was giving me all kinds of issues, and I was only in my 20’s. I’m still addicted, but I’ve learned to moderate. It took me years. And my 4th latte of the day is telling me that I’m not exactly great at it.
If I smoked/vaped Nicotine, I would have serious problems of taking too much all the time.
Are you suggesting you want caffeine banned?
Not at all. I don’t suggest any bans. I said elsewhere I would not oppose pre-rolled cigarette bans because they are especially dangerous and would not reduce access to the product itself. But I also don’t suggest pre-rolled cigarette bans.
If addiction is a problem, should the general use of caffine be banned then? Thats why its kinda odd to specifically ban nicotine.
Choosing to ban specifically nicotine and not caffine is as silly as the idea that cigarettes should be legal but weed shouldnt.
Probably, yes. Even the age restrictions are kinda silly.
I do think it’s ok to ban sale of “prepared smokables” like cigarettes. The harm level is known to be severe. But if someone wants to buy their own tobacco+papers and roll their own cigarettes, that’s on them.
Of course, I don’t think it would be effective to ban cigarettes. Just ethically coherent.
The addicting part isnt the nicotine. Its everything atound it. The ritual, the friends the “doing something with your hands”.
The psychological addiction is way stronger than the nicotine addiction that you can just overcome in 2 weeks.
What do you think is fuelling that connection?
The full effects of vaping are not well understood, and while they’re almost certainly not as bad as cigarettes, they’re also almost certainly still bad for you, and they are indeed still addictive for the same reasons as cigarettes because they still use nicotine.
Further, one main reason their risks remain as poorly understood as they do is that (again, because of the same active ingredient) people who vape often also use cigarettes. The two are closely linked, I don’t think my confusion should be so easily dismissed as that.
Oh sorry, I was thinking nicotine supplements like gum and patches. In my mind, smoking and vaping are the same thing. “Don’t inhale particulate matter of any kind” is an excellent rule of thumb for all humans in all situations
Exactly my point. It always throws me for a minute when I realize people are treating them so separately.
So you’re against smelling flowers, too? And scented candles?
The problem is that we “inhale particulate matter” all the time. Every day of our lives.
Yes, and it kills people.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8140409/#:~:text=The World Health Organization estimates,PM2.5)%20in%20polluted%20air.
You’re not that stupid. You know the difference between inhaling concentrated particulates from a cigarette or vape and smelling a fucking flower. (Which, by the way, pollen grains are average 10-20 microns, not 2.5.)
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7937385/#:~:text=Many studies have reported that,2020%3B Schober et al.%2C
And you’re not that stupid. You know that fine particulate matter in the air every breath we take is different from someone vaping sometimes. There’s a reason your linked study doesn’t mention vaping AND why scientists are still saying the risks of vaping are unclear.
Your second study is more useful, but it really is not intellectually defensible to take it results as saying vaping is unhealthy. Instead, its results are saying that we need to keep regulations to control air quality with regards to vaping.
I’ll reiterate my original critique.
…is something I disagree with, like most extreme naive generalities.
I wasn’t trying to link evidence that vaping is unhealthy. But we know that inhaling PM2.5 is unhealthy and those size particles are present in vape. You are free to take whatever risks you would like with your body.
That used to say that about artificial sweeteners. The question shouldn’t be “is it bad for you” but “is it worse for you than 99 other things you do in a day”. And vaping nicotine is “almost certainly bad for you” because of the nicotine, and nicotine is a known quantity - we know how bad it is and isn’t. We don’t have evidence that the mechanism of vaping is bad for you, and there’s no “almost certainly” on that.
And the truth is, I have problems with people who lean on “poorly understood” for vaping. Evidence shows vaping as a mechanism (for THC as it were) going back over 2000 years to ancient Egypt. Widespread use of hookahs started in the 19th century and has tons mechanically in common with modern vaporization. There are some differences, but short of a few badly-designed vapes that let air reach the lungs while superheated, it looks a lot like people are saying “not well understood” because they cannot seem to “understand” bad things and they don’t want to say good things. We have TONS of research precedent around room-temperature air with vaporized herbs in it.
If I were going to imbibe nicotine (or CBD or THC for that matter), I would probably prefer to vape it. I think the stigma against vaping needs to step aside for the vaccine research considering using vapes as an alternative to needle injection.
Hookah is pretty bad for you too, my friend. From Wikipedia, emphasis mine:
If the best you can say is “it’s pretty much a mini hookah, don’t worry”, then I’m going back to the best you can say for it is that it’s poorly understood. Vaping doesn’t burn anything, unlike a hookah, but the vaporized oils still contain toxins and novel toxins not in the smoke from cigarettes or hookah. The health consequences of that are not well understood, but are probably not as bad as cigarette smoking. That’s the best we’ve got.
I didn’t say it wasn’t. I said we have a lot more context than people want to pretend about vaping in general.
And I’m not trying to say “it’s a mini hookah”, nor am I trying to say you should vape.
If they contain toxins, we probably know quite a bit about those toxins right now. But what about pure vaporized solids? In the CBD and Cannabis community, dry herb vaporizing is the hot new thing specifically because 99% of complaints about vaping being unhealthy are irrelevant. All they do is get the herbs hot without burning it, run it through cooling, and inhale it. I laugh, but I used to do that with lavender with an aromatic herb heating unit.
Despite your incredulity, you really haven’t shown that. The consequences are not perfectly understood, but we understand enough to start making educated opinions about vaping. Even your points about hookahs work towards that, with the worst cons being that you still get Carbon Monoxide and the intensity of Nicotine is high. The problem is that we don’t want to tell people that the educated opinion is “probably better for you than that glazed donut”
In the US it’s the opposite, which is absolutely bizarro land. Want to ban vapes but not cigarettes.
Because probably it was defined as burning, not usage of nicotine
But why? The full effects of vaping are not well understood, and while they’re almost certainly not as bad as cigarettes, they’re also almost certainly still bad for you, and they are indeed still addictive for the same reasons as cigarettes. Further, one main reason their risks remain as poorly understood as they do is that (again, because of the same active ingredient) people who vape often also use cigarettes. The two are closely linked, I don’t think my confusion should be so easily dismissed as that.
Banning nicotine would be going too far. Nicotine in and of itself isn’t that bad, it’s the delivery methods that can be problematic. In particular the ones where you inhale things into your lungs. But there are smokeless tobacco and there are types of tobacco smoking where you don’t inhale the smoke.
Who would want other nicotine options without cigarettes or vaping? No one is starting out with nicorette.
Many people. There are many different tobacco products that either are smokeless or that you don’t inhale that are common in different areas, like dip, snus, snuff, cigars, pipes and what have you. In some regions those are what people start using nicotine with.
Actually I started with nicorette because of nootropics blogs and nasal snuff. I’ve only ever smoked 1 cigarette although I did partake in some hookah.
I tried to start with both a patch and gums years ago because of the stimulant benefits and the decent risk profile of nicotine on its own. I’ve never smoked, never will. Didn’t stick - it was too hard to get used to. If I could get it as a flavourless pill, maybe.
Nicotine is the active psychoactive poison that gets you hooked. Its not harmless.
It’s “psychoactive” in the same way that caffeine is. That is, it’s a stimulant. Using that term only serves the purpose of making it sound scarier. And it’s far less addictive on its own than when smoked. It’s not harmless, but it’s also nowhere near as big a problem in itself as specific product categories and delivery methods, and no worse than any number of other things we’re perfectly fine with people using.
A lot of the alternatives are already owned by Big Tobacco
You can go EU-way and say that all vapes should be rechargable(in both meanings), repairable and intercompatible. Basically opposite of what Big Tabacco does.
Disposable vapes should be banned.
Though even the reusable ones generate a decent amount of waste between coil assemblies that get replaced and the plastic bottles the juice comes in. I mean, I hope we eventually get to managing waste at that level, though I’m not holding my breath since it would require huge changes to the way we handle food logistics, which eclipses vape juice waste by a lot per person.
But the disposable ones are ridiculous.
You can build your own coils and mix your own liquid. Me and my mate both do it it’s far cheaper and better for the environment, not too hard either once uve learnt the basics of materials and ohms n all.
But you cannot use them in disposable shit. Selling and producing disposable shit should be banned.
Glycerin costs 2.5$ for 1 liter bottle. And food flavoring about 6-10$ for 0.1 liter bottle.
Halp! I have no idea how to recharge my cigar! Beyond that, i really have no idea how Big Tobacco would comply with these regulations.
At all or while making insane profit and producing a lot of waste? At all simple: just look how vapes looked like before Big Tabacco came and enshittified them.
That isn’t always the case though. Just look at climate scientists.
Some just want to ban smoking because they see how much damage it has done in their community.
But I’d also like to know if there was any vested interests.
I’m not sure what this has to do with climate scientists. What am I supposed to be looking at?
Rishi has a history of making legislation to benefit the companies run or owned by friends and family. I would be extremely surprised if this didn’t also have a similar angle.
Just some good old “whataboutism”. Maybe he sprinkles some climate-change denial into some prohibition discussion to distract us?
Climate activists want to, among other things, pass extremely unpopular carbon taxes as they’re the most serious effort toward cutting fossil fuels usage
Extremely unpopular ideas that inevitably favor certain products are not always moves to sell those products, is the point
It’s pretty reasonable to assume no one outside the UK knows much about Sunak’s history with handouts to friends.
Who are carbon taxes unpopular with? Aside from politicians?
The people that have to pay them, I assume
People who don’t understand we need to break our addiction to petroleum based fuel. Also People who make money off of petroleum based products.
I think you overestimate the size of these two groups. The group of people who care more about their own financials is likely a lot larger.
Don’t care thier fucking size.
I care how loud these choads are and how many they might sway.
Good luck eating and drinking money.
That’s a matter of proper implementation. Tax & dividend! Distribute the tax revenue to the population per capita.
That means:
Since money is distributed unequally in society, this means most people will have to pay less in such a system.
The beautiful thing is, the financial incentive to emit less remains even for people who gain more than they pay. It’s also an incentive both for buyers and sellers, researchers and investors.
It’s Rishi Sunak. Of course he has a financial interest somewhere.
It won’t work, though. Hell. He might be getting paid off by big Tabacco- make smoking edgy and rebellious again so more kids start up.
It’s the kind of thing those ghouls would try.
Rishi Sunak also just promised to ensure cars will be able to drive through heavily populated areas indefinitely and has pushed back plans to introduce electric-only cars. He absolutely does not care about peoples’ health.