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Comment by boourns311 | Hacker News Reader

This whole thing has nothing to do with keeping kids off nicotine and everything to do with keeping people of all ages on cigarettes.

Vaping is safer than smoking.

Let's say I'm Phillip Morris. I sell Marlboro and a slew of other cigarette brands. E-cigs come along, offering a safer alternative that is importantly much more cost effective. They're eating my lunch.

How do I kill this industry? I buy Juul. I remove the fruity flavors (which people of all ages enjoy more than tobacco flavors) and I claim that I'm doing it to protect the children.

Juul is now much worse off; big tobacco gets to claim that it's looking out for the kids; last step is to manufacture a public crisis to have cover for over-reaching legislation that bans what would otherwise be the least harmful of all age-restricted products.

Keep smoking.

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> Vaping is safer than smoking

We don't have evidence for this. Vaping appears, due to its lack of combustion, safer than cigarettes. But we don't have the science to say it's safer.

This unfounded leap--from reasonable hypothesis to finding--is part of what is getting Juul in trouble.

I do agree with you that, until we've had it around for decades, the real long-term effects of vaping are hard to pin down.

However, as a person who has smoked a pack a day and has vaped, it's my unscientific opinion that the latter is much less harmful than the former. And I think most people who have the experience of using both will agree.

The negative health impact of smoking tobacco is so massive that it's pretty hard for anything to top it. Could vaping be worse than smoking cigarettes over a 40-year period? Maybe. But it seems unlikely because tobacco is so clearly harmful, and so much of that harm we know comes from combustion.

Okay, let's say we accept this. We have plenty of science and evidence to say that smoking cigarettes directly leads to cancer, yet we are fine with cigarettes being legal. Why are we ready to ban vaping because of what we don't know, but we're fine keeping cigarettes despite what we do know?

Cigarettes are heavily regulated, rarely allowed in public places any longer, banned for sale to minors, taxed, and societally increasingly unacceptable.

We’re not making them illegal, but we’re making them as undesirable as we can.

No, I'm not fine with keeping cigarettes. They are so dangerous that they kill even non-smokers who are nearby.

Pretty please, can we make them illegal?

Not a vaper or smoker, and I think both are terrible habits. Is there any reason to believe vaping is more dangerous than smoking? Even if it's only equally dangerous, it should still be allowed to remain legal, right? Albeit with all the same marketing and packaging restrictions that cigarettes have.

At first glance, I thought this theory didn’t hold up to logical sense because ideally the cigarette companies would just switch to selling vapes and dominate that market as well (like Altria buying juul). But then I realized actually this makes perfect sense because no one is going to ban cigarettes. They are too entrenched and the interests too strong. It’s simply not going to happen. But banning vaping is a much more real possibility due to it being “new” and unregulated.

Much easier to kill your competitors than to dominate the market through aquisition.

Very insightful, thanks for your comment.

8 people went from healthy to dead in the space of 3 months. From vaping-relates illness.

So far, the evidence is that vaping is more dangerous than smoking, which merely increases the likelihood of death from other causes (i.e., lung cancer) decades later but does not itself directly cause death.

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