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Comment by iak8god | Hacker News Reader

> vaping/Juul has undone a decade of progress in reducing teen smoking

How much of that reduction in smoking is because of teens who would otherwise be smoking but are now vaping instead?

If you look on the graph on the tweet linked [0], very little. There's a very clear and consistent downwards linear trend in terms of cigarette use since at least 1997. Admittedly, cigarette usage does appear to have gone down faster since ~2013 (which is around the time that vapes became well known [1]). Is that caused by vapes? Maybe, maybe not. But it's clear that more teens are exposed to nicotine now that vapes are available than if vapes were not available.

[0]: https://twitter.com/themehakvohra/status/1076433054099492864

[1]: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=v...

Just look at the chart? It’s pretty obvious that smoking is consistently declining, while vaping started at a low point of smoking.

Pretty much every year on that chart is a low point for cigarette smoking compared the years that preceded it.

Note that 2015 is not when teens started vaping. It's when whoever collected this data started paying attention to vaping.

I'd rather teenagers weren't using any tobacco products whatsoever, but I'm pretty sure inhaling vaporized ecig juice is much better for people's health than cigarette smoke.

> I'm pretty sure inhaling vaporized ecig juice is much better for people's health than cigarette smoke.

I've seen this thinking many times in this thread. How is this so? Smoking seemed harmless in the 1950s as well.

http://gwern.net/Nicotine

Lighting a fire in your mouth is so obviously worse it's comical to debate.

How would adding smoke to nicotine make it healthier?

That's a drastic oversimplification. Dosage amounts and patterns are wildly different. Ecig "juice" has many components that cigarettes don't.

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