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Comment by parsimo2010 | Hacker News Reader

parsimo2010

Australia has the right idea with cigarettes. They aren’t outlawed, but the packaging shows decayed lungs and the marketing is very regulated.

We shouldn’t outlaw vaping, but we do need to clamp down on targeting kids with their design and marketing. Maybe we should force all vape packages to include information on the harmful effects of nicotine.

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We do the same thing in the UK, with explicit images of diseased lungs, eyes etc.

Taxes have also escalated year on year, so it now costs around £12.50 (~$15) for a pack of 20 cigarettes - I guess this has cut smoking rates more than the graphic imagery.

I've heard from people who stopped buying cigarettes once they had to come out in olive green packaging. I guess whatever works right? It can be a pretty minor benefit, but as long as the net is in the right direction.

Sure, I didn't mean to imply the imagery wasn't useful, only that the high taxes are probably more useful :)

There is the packaging, but probably more important is increasing the tax (and therefore the price) over time. Demonstrable reductions in smokers every time the price goes up.

Is there some reason we shouldn't outlaw vaping? People who want to quit nicotine, or who consciously choose to become addicted to it, already have the gum and patches. And clearly vaping is creating a lot of new addicts.

At the very best, I think we should ban all advertising and paid marketing of addictive substances, and tax them heavily enough to provide free anti-addiction services to anybody who wants them. The whole theory of free markets, after all, is people making rational decisions, and the point of addictive products is to prevent them from doing so.

I'm no expert on quitting smoking, but I understand that vaping is much more effective than other nicotine supplement methods because it replicates the physical habit of smoking, the inhaling and exhaling of the vapor.

> Is there some reason we shouldn't outlaw vaping? People who want to quit nicotine, or who consciously choose to become addicted to it, already have the gum and patches.

There are a ton of assumptions packed into these two sentences. I'm a nicotine addict, and I hate smoking (which I've done for many years), but I love nicotine; I did even before I was an addict. Vaping provides me with all the benefits of nicotine with very few of the side effects that smoking brings; nicotine patches and gums, even the lowest dosage, are way too high for me and lead to extreme anxiety (among other side effects).

I don't want to quit nicotine, I just want a better delivery system. For me, the Juul is perfect.

For me it’s about personal choice. I don’t want to prevent someone from enjoying something as long as they know the consequences and have the mental capacity to make their own choices.

Courts have long held (in multiple countries) that average teenagers are not responsible enough to make certain decisions and need to be protected until they are more mature. That’s the basic reasoning behind my opinion to not outlaw outright, but to at least not target vulnerable populations.

Humans are notoriously bad at balancing short term profit (a bump in nicotine satisfaction) and long term harm (lung cancer).

Humans absolutely need to be protected against themselves in this case.

I'm not sure how you explain the fall in cigarette smoking rates from the 80s until the present day, despite a lack of prohibition.

I'm not a smoker, but man did this comment send a chill down my spine.

pretty easy. governments took an oppositional attitude to it. they made it easier to get information about the cons and (at least as importantly) harder to get information about the pros. amongst other things.

saying that there's a "lack of prohibition" in cigarettes is kinda missing the point. the fact that one particular approach to discouraging a disapproved substance failed, doesn't mean another approach isn't being tried and - as you note - even successfully.

Sorry, I'm not quite sure if you're in agreement or not.

The claim was that humans need to be protected from themselves (in the context of the GP comment, this would mean a ban).

I meant to imply that since smoking rates declined steadily without a ban, the claim that prohibition is the correct answer because we humans can't stop trading short term pleasure for long term pain seems dubious.

That's even without considering our extensive experience with what happens when we prohibit substances which sellers want to sell and still not insignificant parts of the population want to buy.

i think we agree on the facts and disagree on the interpretation. smoking rates have gone down because the goverment has tried to eradicate it. so far, without a ban. it has been pretty successful. this doesn't say much about the success of a ban, but a lot about the government's ability to protect us from ourself.

the effectiveness of bans is far from univocal (which you see to admit by using a condition which would let you move the goalposts whenever i find a counter argument), and a ban on new nicotine products today would be completely different from the ban on alcohol in 1920s America. success doesn't have to be 100% for it to be good policy either, as the ban on murder shows.

I think the difference here is that I don't see education and internalising costs as protecting us from ourselves in the sense given by the OP (that even knowing perfectly the costs, we humans will still make the wrong decision and so need further protection from ourselves).

The effectiveness of the campaigns shows that given enough information we can in fact change our behaviours without needing to resort to prohibition, which is probably how I should have phrased my first response and skipped all of the rhetoric.

Purchasing cigarettes as a minor was prohibited in the late 80s.

The problem with addiction is that it strongly diminishes the capacity to make choices. So I think at the very least, we need to be deeply suspicious of things like Juul. And advertising, of course, is meant to subvert rational choice as well, so given that Juul is mostly a marketing company for a highly addictive drug, anybody valuing people making their own choices should be very concerned about it.

There is reason (mostly anecdotal so far) to believe that vaping is a more reliable way to keep people off tobacco. Patches and gum have pretty low success rates.

There is also reason to believe (though more research is needed) that vaping removes 90+ percent of the harms of tobacco use.

Banning them then looks like an overreaction and would be counter-productive. Restrictions on advertising and other methods to attempt to cut down numbers of new addicts? Sure, that seems more reasonable.

1. i thought the idea of banning something died with the "war on drugs".

2. alcohol and coffee are addictive substances. 88k people die from alcohol every year: https://www.niaaa.nih.gov/alcohol-facts-and-statistics

3. how about cars? 37k people die from cars every year (not including pollution-related diseases): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...

> 1. i thought the idea of banning something died with the "war on drugs".

no, I never saw that memo. I'm in favor of banning many things, including but not limited to the (literal) murder trade. I'm pretty sure you are too. and the fact that people still buy murders doesn't make anyone argue that murder should be legalised.

and if you want something benign, how about partially hydrogenated vegetable oil?

> 3. how about cars?

well, at this point I'd be happy trying the licence and regulate approach. at the moment, licensing is a farce and government thinks making roads more dangerous is how you make them safer. but that's a whole nother hn thread.

As ferzul points out, we ban plenty of things just fine. Shady-looking dealers are not selling loose asbestos and highly flammable children's pajamas on the streetcorners.

Alcohol and caffeine are at this point culturally established, so rooting them out is more trouble then it's worth. But we have the opportunity to stop Juul from foisting a highly profitable new addiction on millions, so I think the cost-benefit tradeoffs are different.

I'm entirely fine with banning private cars. Let's start by licensing and regulating them and their owners. Then we'll just keep ratcheting up safety requirements until the death toll is very low and most people are riding in safer vehicles driven by competent professionals. Looking at the progress Amsterdam has been making, I figure we can do it in 30 years if we put our minds to it.

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