Or even marijuana. Legalizing marijuana is popular now, and so is banning nicotine. The cognitive dissonance in that is something to marvel at.
Cigarettes have few positive side effects and heavily contributes to the #1 preventable disease in the US: cardiovascular disease. AFAIK there are no outright bans on nicotine or tobacco products. However, the places you may consume them in public are shrinking (and often the same restrictions are placed on marijuana). Also the kind of products that are attractive to kids are being targeted (again, AFAIK companies are not allowed to market marijuana - or alcohol - to children).
It seems to me that tobacco used to be much more prevalent but is being re-categorized from "acceptable everywhere" into the same group as alcohol. And marijuana is being re-categorized from Schedule 1 to the same category as alcohol.
2. juul is bringing millions of new people to tobacco products, not just providing a way for smokers to ease off cigarettes.
this claim is not uncontroversial. they don't cause physical dependence in the way we think of with drugs (ie, no physical withdrawal syndrome), but eating junk food can be an exceptionally difficult habit to break. humans can become addicted to almost anything that gives a moderate to strong immediate reward.
I don't disagree with your broader point though. as long as you are focused on preventing new users rather than making the lives of existing users needlessly difficult, you'll get no argument from me.
2. If Juul offered nicotine from non tobacco sources, would that change things? Calling nicotine tobacco still doesn't make vaping anywhere close to being as deadly as cigarettes.
[1] Lennerz, B., & Lennerz, J. K. (2018). Food addiction, high-glycemic-index carbohydrates, and obesity. Clinical chemistry, 64(1), 64-71.
2. everybody in this thread is conflating nicotine and tobacco, but the difference is moot. the point is health risks and addiction. Whatever is in your vape is an unquantified health risk, and is definitely addictive. We won't know if vape chemicals and usage patterns cause more or less damage than cigarettes until people have been huffing them at scale for 20-30 years at least.
Even if they do cause less damage than cigarettes, how much less is ok? half? a tenth? a one-hundreth?
You ask how much less damage is ok. Half would be great! But it is likely to be more than that. The sun causes more cancer than Juul, that is worth keeping in mind. It's a free country.
[2] Olekalns, N., & Bardsley, P. (1996). Rational addiction to caffeine: An analysis of coffee consumption. Journal of Political Economy, 104(5), 1100-1104.
Addictive alone is not necessarily a problem, but it does mean there is the potential for companies to exploit that addiction to make money while causing great harm along the way.
> It's a free country.
A "free country" and regulated capitalism are not mutually exclusive. It's a free country and you need a license to drive a car. It's a free country and you can't sell someone baking soda disguised as flour. Regulations, done right, have the potential to make us all safer, and protect us from exploitation by capitalist interests. For example, stealing is very profitable... but we made it illegal in order to discourage corporations from forming around theft as a business model.
All that said, to be perfectly honest, my actual biggest beef with juul is the stupid disposable plastic pods. Everything else is... well, capitalism exploiting addiction for profit... at the cost of people's health. Which as you point out, is not exclusive to juul.