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Comment by KingMachiavelli | Hacker News Reader

I've never been addicted to tobacco but I used to vape heavily in HS & currently on/off (my friend brings his vape(s) over, etc). I've never experienced anything to the extent you describe. I can definiently feel a desire, in that, I would rather be vaping vs not but not the the point that I've actually filled up any of my personal vapes recenctly or bought a new device.

It's well known that the other chemicals in tobacco act as MAIOs increasing the effect of nicotine which makes it more habbit forming - and I believe that extends to even after you switch to a nicotine replacement program.

Really, the most annoying thing is that tobaccoo is still legal are are both nicotine + cancer. At least vaping/nicotine alone won't kill you so it's strange that it gets more attention.

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Nicotine is itself a carcinogen. But in general, smokeless tobacco products (including vaping) are much less damaging to your health than smoking.

Do we know the 30 year effects of say being a heavy Juul user? It's hard to compare damage of something that has been out for 100s of years vs something that has only been out for a few years.

I don't think nicotine has been shown to be carcinogenic in humans, although there's plenty of other bad things it does.

Nicotine stimulates Growth Hormone release and GH is linked to some cancers.

For sure many tumors respond much more intensely to GH than normal tissue. Much in the same way estrogen makes some breast cancers grow faster. So it has a carcinogenic effect, and once the cancer starts, nicotine turbocharges it. (Depending on the cancer, of course).

You know what else increases HGH .fasting increases hgh by about 3 to 5 times than normal baseline .

Clearly we should ban fasting

There is a lot of other foods that do that too

I'm almost positive it's been linked to bladder cancer.

Statistically, vaping products are far more dangerous than smoking.

Smoking may cause cancer and lung disease which kills smokers over time, but that time period is measured in years and decades.

In contrast, 8 people have died in the last few months from vaping-related illnesses despite most of them being active and healthy only a month or two before their deaths. Another several hundred people are in hospital beds with severe lung diseases related to vaping and many of them could die or never regain function.

At the current rate, vaping would need to go another few decades without a single death just to achieve statistical parity with smoking.

i like how you produced statistics without a sample size, dosage regimen, or even qualifying what you mean by 'smoking'. Hookah? Cigars? Pipes? Cloves?

very acute and savvy of you.

This is blatant misinformation. The majority of those with 'vaping illnesses' that have created this Hysteria reported using black market THC vapor cartridges.

That's fairly disengenuous. When you say "smoking" you presuppose tobacco, but you use "vaping" to account for 8 cluster deaths in two decades without much thought for the substance.

By your logic, eating and shots kill 130 people a day[1], so how long would it take before vaccines are safer than cigarettes?

[1] https://www.drugabuse.gov/related-topics/trends-statistics/o...

I'm pretty hard against vaping, but this is just plain wrong. First, the statistics are bad.

Since 2011 when vaping really started taking off, there are roughly 220,000,000 vaping years: total cumulative # of years folks have vaped. And 8 deaths, or 0.000000003 deaths per vaping year. Compare to smoking, which has had about 8,000,000,000 smoker years and 28,000,000 deaths, or 0.007 deaths per smoker year. We don't know the really long term effects of vaping, so all of this is subject to change, but the idea that vaping kills more is completely unsupported by even the most basic (see above) accounting.

And that's leaving off the fact that you're ignoring the cause of death for these 8: which, while unknown, has strong indications it's not linked to mainstream vaping devices.

> Nicotine is itself a carcinogen.

No, no it's not. It's a teratogen.

Leaving this here: "an agent or factor which causes malformation of an embryo".

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