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Comment by robertpelloni | Hacker News Reader

For those who don't know, Juul is the inventor of the "salted nicotine" vaping trend which makes the nicotine spike much faster in the bloodstream than earlier vape juice, which is more like cigarettes. They have a patent but it appears to be ignored by the vape industry as "nicotine salts" are widely available (added benzoic acid). The nicotine level is also much higher, allowing for lower wattage devices and smaller vape clouds, and a harsher hit that more closely resembles smoking. I think this technology is great if it can reduce the harm of smoking and get people off of cigarettes.

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As someone who quit a 17-year cigarette habit for vaping starting in the early-ish days (2011, and it's come so far since then), nicotine salts might be the answer to those who relapse from trying to quit via vaping because it "didn't feel right."

Quite frankly, the narrative to smokers who want to quit from vapers who have has been "it's different, but be patient"; if a closer analogue gets out there that closes the gap on attempts versus quits, I really think there's a no-lose situation.

Is it really any better than smoking? I believe nicotine itself is the carcinogen, correct? Not just the ash and other byproducts of burning...

No, nicotine is barely a carcinogen and is essentially on the same level as caffeine in terms of danger.

My impression is that nicotine is "essentially" harmless but caffeine is actually harmless, maybe even good for you (kind of like a glass of red wine a week).

Try taking a whole bunch of caffeine pills, definitely not harmless.

The dose makes the poison and tablets are about the only way you could overdose on caffeine. Your stomach will be telling you to stop long before you get to 40 cups, which isn’t enough for a healthy adult to overdose on.

They said the same thing about cigarettes decades ago, proving it with “scientific” studies.

And when it's mixed with benzoic acid? (the 'salting' process mentionned)

From Bing:

Is benzoic acid a carcinogen?

It is considered safe only at less than a .1% concentration in a finished product (Source) When benzoic acid and vitamin C (ascorbic acid) or citric acid are present, under the right conditions of heat and light, these two ingredients can combine to create the known carcinogen, benzene.

Yes it's quite a lot better than smoking.

Vaporization of juice is better on your lungs compared to inhaling smoke and tar. Less to get clogged. Nicotine itself has been shown to be significantly less addictive combared to Tobacco. Theories for this typically involve the fact that there's more than just nicotine in tobacco. There's a chemical in tobacco smoke, the name escapes me at the moment, that acts as an MAOI, reinforcing the effects of nicotine.

This isn't to say that nicotine is harmless. Rather that the consumption of nicotine via vaporization is Less Harmful compared to smoking tobacco.

Honestly saying that nicotine is far less addictive in e-cig rather than cig seems like a BIG BIG lie. At least speaking from experience.

There are a lot of people who weren't smoking at all starting to vape as well. I would consider that a pretty big lose.

Why do you assume they wouldn't have started smoking in absence of vape?

Higher amounts of them are starting to vape than the rates of smoking would predict.

I'll take you at your word (a source would be nice) but I fail to see how that is a bad thing.

You fail to see how kids getting addicted is a bad thing?

Do you have any evidence that it is?

citation?

I'll just throw in that I am one of those people who didn't smoke cigarettes but have attempted vaping multiple times. Cigarettes are gross, they stink.

I've always stopped vaping after not too long due to issues with the ejuice tanks or just not feeling like doing it anymore.. but I actually picked up juul a couple days ago because I do enjoy that occasional 'nicotine rush', so trying this again =p

I may be an idiot, but I'm also a stat. =)

Why? There’s no way nicotine inhalers are as harmful as drinking alcohol. The research on nicotine’s health effects qua nicotine is about as strong as that for caffeine. The long term health effects are small and ambiguous.

The negative health effects from smoking are from inhaling burning plant matter, overwhelmingly. If we go from the current rate of smoking to 100% of adults vaping the health effects on a population level would still look good. Smoking is really bad, vaping is new, stupid and may in the long run have some negative effects on your health but we don’t have any strong evidence it does.

Never heard about those 'nicotine salts'. Had the same problems coming from cigarettes (30+ a day) to vaping, that is, in stock juice nicotine content is just too low.

All it took was self-prepared mixes, higher in nicotine, very low in aromas and those tobacco-like, vg/pg mix just as I like it.

Came out about fifteen times cheaper than the off-the-shelf juices. Compared to the cost of cigs, even not counting health effects, vape is about two orders of magnitude cheaper.

Now I dare someone tell me that 30+ 8mg cigs a day are somehow less harmful than ~8cc of vape.

> I think this technology is great if it can reduce the harm of smoking and get people off of cigarettes.

I think this was the initial hope for e-cigs, but reality has turned out differently. These things are leading to a whole new generation of nicotine addicts at a time when smoking has fallen to all time lows in the US. Juul particularly is getting kids hooked that otherwise would have never touched tobacco, and they're getting a lot of heat over their advertising tactics now.

Getting everyone off very poisonous deadly substances is a fair tradeoff for getting new people hooked on something as dangerous as coffee.

E-cigs didn't destroy the kid's market for traditional cigarettes, though. When I was in high school (right before vaping took off), smoking was only "cool" for a small subsection of the school. For everyone else, it was a stupid thing and kinda trashy. I'm guessing that the set of high school aged kids who would have picked up cigarette smoking if not for vaping is really quite small.

So, we worked for decades to eliminate cigarette dependency, made huge progress, and now kids largely don't smoke. And then vaping came along, and a company is receiving billions from investors to get kids addicted to nicotine.

Vaping is healthier, but I can't think of a conceivable reason why this is a good idea.

Is there really evidence of an uptick in kids smoking traditional cigs due to vaping?

Even if there was, traditional cigarettes are on their way out, and what we are left with is something as dangerous as coffee and a bit more expensive.

Because the entire human experience shouldn't be an exercise in neurotic min/maxing and risk avoidance. I'd rather live in a world where people occasionally smoke or gamble or have unprotected sex than one where everyone is driven by Type A obsession with health and money and living forever.

If a kid picks up a nagging but ultimately harmless nicotine habit, is that really the end of the world? Given what we know so far about vaping and its safety, I'd say you could make an argument for the pleasure of flavored nicotine outweighing the annoyance of addiction.

As someone who smoked cigarettes and then quit by switching to vaping and weaning myself off, I can give anecdotal firsthand testimony that quitting vaping was much easier than quitting cigarettes. It's hard to say if some new vapers would have been smokers or not, and I agree that really none of it should be legal. But while any nicotine is legal, my personal experience gives me the opinion that vaping is a product which does indeed provide harm reduction.

Right, and your personal experience would probably be the same as other _pre-existing_ smokers trying to quit, and it would be providing harm reduction if it worked for you.

But doea the harm reduction to pre-existing smokers outweigh the increased uptake in youth populations?

I can provide anecdotal evidence that it’s no easier to stop vaping than to stop smoking. Should we make a poll on HN?

I'm not able to accept this without decent evidence. There's some pretty clear psychopharmacology related to burning tobacco that is absent for ecigs. Specifically one of the byproducts of burning tobacco is a compound related to early anti-depressants - a mono amine oxidase inhibitor. The effect of this compound seems to be to potentiate the addictiveness of nicotine. That is move its addictiveness from O(n) similar to caffeine to greater than heroin (citations available). This is why the buzz you don't really get a buzz from ecigs that you get from cigarettes, and also why people who are using ecigs to give up smoking should initially start with a very high nicotine concentration (i.e. as high as they can tolerate) to saturate their system, so a relapse to cigarettes does not give any satisfaction. Additionally at low doses typical of ecig use, nicotine seems to be about as harmful as caffeine. It's the byproducts of combustion that seem to be the real problem.

I doubt we will see much research on the potentiation effects of tobacco on nicotine, since broadly it seems as if tobacco is "on the way out", so to speak.

However, there is quite a bit of research available [0, 1] that suggests that an addiction to one substance can prime the brain's neurological pathways to more easily become addicted to a second, unrelated substance.

By reducing the use of addictive substances overall, it might produce some decrease in addictions to more damaging substances (i.e. meth, heroin, etc).

Of course, the same argument could be said about alcohol or caffeine, and I don't think we're likely to see those go away any time soon. However, I think that's a false dilemma fallacy, as we're much closer (in % of population, at least) to reducing the use of nicotine than either of those.

[0]: https://harvardmagazine.com/2000/03/deep-cravings.html [1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/nn1578

How many years of cigarettes smoking and vaping did you have? From what you write it seems to me that either you never smoked for years both of them or now you started vaping and you want to believe in what you write. Sadly the things that you write are extremely dangerous for all the young people that start vaping.

I was never able to give up smoking long term until the vapes turned up. Then a persistent decades long problem disappeared overnight. Funnily enough my tobacco habit got entrenched when I was in a job that allowed me to deal with it’s boring aspects by voraciously reading lots of psychopharmacology literature.

I managed to break a seventeen year old cigarette habit by switching to vaping (after dozens of failed attempts either going cold turkey or with nicotinine gum/snus), and have now vaped exclusively for almost seven years. In my opinion his comment is 100% spot on.

> Sadly the things that you write are extremely dangerous for all the young people that start vaping.

Got any evidence for that assertion? Just saying it doesn't make it true, and the big problem with this research area is there are two different powerful groups (tobacco copmanies and public health policy makers). So the entire literature needs to be treated with great care. David Nutt, the british addiction specialist is a sober, sensible guy, and I'd go to what he has to say about it as a first port of call.

> Juul particularly is getting kids hooked that otherwise would have never touched tobacco

Do you have evidence of this? From what I've read (the report I saw last had data in 2016), e-cig use is way up but general tobacco use among youth hasn't significantly changed.

Bing "benzoin acid carcinogen":

Is benzoic acid a carcinogen?

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