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Comment by p1necone | Hacker News Reader

A lot of people in this thread seem to be under the mistaken belief that nicotine is the harmful thing in cigarettes. While rather more addictive, nicotine in isolation is really no more harmful than caffeine.

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This study argues that nicotine is indeed harmful [0]. This study argues that caffeine is harmless in healthy adult populations (although pregnant women and children shouldn't consume caffeine) [1].

[0]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4363846/

[1]: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0265203021000007...

You just linked to some random study from some random journal in order to support your statement, to make your statement sound like it's truth. [0] is an article from Indian Journal of Medical and Paediatric Oncology. No idea what the reputation of this journal is. No idea what the study does, experimental methodology, bias of the authors, reputation of the authors, who is funding the authors, etc. etc. More generally, why has internet discourse detiorated to linking to random studies to make a statement and asking people to link to random studies to support their statement.

Post a source, please. Tobacco is one of those hot button issues where people will automatically assume you're a shill if you don't have the data to back up what you're saying.

The mean LD50 of caffeine and nicotine in humans are 150-200 and 6.5-13 mg/kg, respectively.

The LD50 doesn't matter unless you have a brick of mystery drug in front of you. This is about harm from recreational doses.

It's extremely easier to ingest a fatal dose, or even just enough for nicotine poisoning when you've got a liquid flavored like a dessert vs cigarettes.

In the general case, yes. In this case, however, I'm responding to the claim that, "nicotine in isolation is really no more harmful than caffeine." (Emphasis added.)

Two orders of magnitude greater lethality by dose comports with no definition of "no more harmful" which I can conceive.

That's not how doses work. A dose of nicotine weighs less than a dose of caffeine (roughly 12mg vs 95mg). "In isolation" is talking about removing the effects of the other chemicals, probably popping one pill of each, not about putting the exact same quantity into each pill.

But more importantly LD50 is completely the wrong metric for measuring the harm of this kind of drug. The number of overdoses is statistically negligible.

Nicotine by itself is also substantially less addictive than tobacco. Tobacco contains MAOIs, which significantly enhance the addictive potential of nicotine.

https://imgur.com/a/i9rWJbb

Please stop.

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