Comment by dmix | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dmix | Hacker News Reader

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I'm fine with this as a long time vape user as well. Or at least have a food safety type agency looking at the products and fining bad actors to create disincentives for mislabelling and poor/unhealthy ingredients.

Of course many people are rushing to ban it before we fully understand it and like any controversial topic FUD is everywhere. But that doesn't mean careful small steps cant be made today.

Vaping vials of THC in Long Island, NY, as what happened in this article, isn't something sold through legal channels AFAIK though so I'm not sure how much an agency could help with this specific problem (other than to highlight them).

Everyone loves to bash Juul (which is a garbage product I'd never touch) and the big tobacco company which owns it, but there's tons of small mom-and-pop style juice makers, shops, and device manufacturers which run a big part of the Vaping industry. These are the ones who will be impacted the most by the policies so we should keep them in mind when designing policy and not let Juul and their lobbyists write the legislation, in response to Juuls own bad behaviour (as always seems to happen), so we only end up with Juul type big companies.

> Or at least have a food safety type agency looking at the products and fining bad actors to create disincentives for mislabelling and poor/unhealthy ingredients.

That seems like a tricky needle to thread, though. How do you formulate a rubric that somehow places nicotine on the "fine to put into consumer products" bucket, while placing everything else that might hurt you in the "dangerous and should be banned" bucket?

The purpose of the government is not to ban everything that might hurt you. It’s simply made the decision that smoking is so harmful that it should be regulated. Just about anything can be harmful depending on how you consume it. Eat too much sugar? You’ll become obese. Eat no sugar at all, you’ll die.

Nicotine by itself is not particularly harmful. It can have acute effects if you overdose on it, but it doesn’t cause cancer. The harmful part of cigarettes is all the burnt plant matter you’re inhaling. You don’t see anybody discussing the risks of nicotine patches or gum.

I used vaping to quit smoking (and then eventually quit vaping). I’m sure vaping is better for me than smoking, and I’m sure not vaping is better for me than vaping. I’m all for safety regulations and more research to be done. But regulating or taxing the hell out of it just because it looks like smoking seems incredibly short sighted to me. Id want any regulation to be based on sound safety practices, and a legitimate understanding of the health affects.

> Nicotine by itself is not particularly harmful.

... if being a highly addictive drug isn't considered harmful.

Or being a teratogen. Or messing with sleep cycles. Or harming brain development.

In utero nicotine increases the likelihood of hypertension and diabetes.

No medical study considers nicotine harmless. Yes, it won't cause cancer. But that's not synonymous with "not particularly harmful".

I should have specified, for a fully developed adult. The risks of nicotine consumption alone are very low. Poor diet, poor physical activity, consuming alcohol, riding a skate board, walking on an icy sidewalk all present risks to your health. The role of government isn’t to prohibit anything that may cause you harm, because that’s just about everything. The reason vaping gets so much scrutiny is simply because it looks so much like smoking. Like I said, I think some safety regulation is a good idea. But “does this have any potential at all to cause harm” is not a reasonable threshold for regulating imo, and certainly not to the extent that tobacco is.

No medical studies consider alcohol or caffeine harmless, and no study has been able to tell if nicotine is more harmful than caffeine, and everyone agrees alcohol is worse than nicotine (for the doses used typically of both).

Pregnant women should definitely not drink, they probably shouldn’t use nicotine either.

It would appear, based on this fairly recent survey of the available literature, that nicotine is probably more harmful than caffeine:

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

Which is kind of also where I'm going, saying, "by what standard?" There are plenty of ways to play gotcha with any potential regulation, based on the list of findings in this survey. I mean, let's assume, for the sake of argument, that GP was thinking that maybe we shouldn't allow vape juice manufacturers to deliberately add any banned pesticides such as DDT or arsenate. . . well, it turns out that nicotine is a banned pesticide, too.

Like I said in another comment, the research on pure nicotine doesn't seem to be as extensive as one would expect. It's been overshadowed by research on smoking and chewing tobacco. But it is there, and it's not that equivocal. I've heard this meme that nobody's proven nicotine is particularly harmful plenty of times, especially among ex-smokers who still use nicotine lozenges or vape juice or whatever, and I'm not sure where it comes from, but my guess is that it's based on a motivated interpretation of the situation. Like Upton Sinclair said, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his ability to not spend the next longwhile feeling crappy due to withdrawal symptoms depends upon his not understanding it." Or something like that.

Which, again, at least in a vacuum, I'm not particularly worried if people want to vape. Me, I like alcoholic beverages. But I fully acknowledge that alcohol is a toxic chemical that's probably shortening my life. What worries me more is when people decide they're OK with vaping based on what amounts to a sort of conspiracy theory, because it's impossible to give informed consent when you're uninformed.

Being fat or excessive weightgain whilst pregnant increases the liklihood of your children being obese... Can I please see your sources?

> .. if being a highly addictive drug isn't considered harmful.

https://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/139/1/e201634...

> Or being a teratogen.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-developme...

> Or messing with sleep cycles.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3188825/

> Or harming brain development.

https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/sgr/e-cigarettes...

> In utero nicotine increases the likelihood of hypertension and diabetes.

https://www.atsjournals.org/doi/full/10.1164/rccm.201407-119...

Sorry, perhaps I was too blunt. I'm not looking to pass any sort of moral judgement against nicotine or tobacco users, here.

I'm more trying to call attention to some tension. The idea that vape juice should be tightly regulated to keep harmful chemicals out implies that we should be defining some sort of toxicological ceiling on what things are allowed. And I'm wondering what that would look like, and how it would work out in practice. If we focus on LD50, I doubt there's much that goes into vape juice with a higher LD50 than nicotine, aside from perhaps something egregious like what's killing all these kids in TFA. If we focus on some long-term health outcome, it's probably similar - nicotine in isolation hasn't been as well-studied as whole tobacco, but it seems unlikely that, upon closer scrutiny, a chemical with such strong acute physiological effects wouldn't turn out to have some fairly serious chronic health effects, too. We narrow in on cancer, sure, but that seems like a standard that's more specifically for establishing that vaping is less harmful than cigarettes than it is for establishing an overall consumer product safety standard.

My inclination would be to say that a better starting place might be just to require vape juice to post ingredients labels, and set up some enforcement there. It's possibly not as strong a regulation as tightly controlling what's allowed to go into vape juice in the first place, but I'm guessing it also has a lower risk of creating a "be careful what you wish for..." situation for people who vape.

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