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Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.

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.

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?

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