So, let me get this straight. Our government is ok with Marijuana but not ok with nicotine? Amazing times we live in.
(I originally said 1k, which appears to have been misremembering.)
Vitamin A is far too thick to vape in a Juul type pod system. The only use it has is as a thickener for concentrates which use a whole different type of wicking system.
Concentrate cartridges use a ceramic stone with a heating element inside or encased. This ceramic greatly reduces the flow rate and allows slower vaporization of the concentrate.
I ran a vape shop for years I am more than happy to discuss safety of vaping but won't participate in whataboutism.
But how can you convince others of this view if you're "not particularly interested" in the relevant facts?
https://www.google.com/search?q=how+many+people+died+from+va...
also, vitamin e acetate was used to cut black/grey market cannabis vape products, not nicotine. nic juice is so cheap to produce that there's no reason to cut, vitamin e acetate is probably more expensive.
i quit an 8 year smoking habit the first day i purchased a vape. it's depressing and frustrating to see this option removed for others.
[0] https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/heal...)
This would be like saying Coors Light is dangerous because your cousin's moonshine had methanol in it.
https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/basic_information/e-cigarettes/s...
> National and state data from patient reports and product sample testing show tetrahydrocannabinol (THC)-containing e-cigarette, or vaping, products, particularly from informal sources like friends, family, or in-person or online dealers, are linked to most EVALI cases and play a major role in the outbreak.
Incidentally, smoking has been a pretty significant cause of car accidents. People drop them while driving and panic.
I think there is nobody in this comments section who would disagree with banning the use of Vitamin A Acetate as an additive to vape products, and also nobody who wouldn't want those responsible for the deaths to be held accountable.
None of those are in a Juul cartridge. Vitamin A Acetate is also not in a Juul cartridge.
It's like when we talk about alcohol consumption. Yes there are negative effects from the calories and other stuff in beer, but the main negative health effects come from the alcohol in the beer, so we talk in terms of alcohol consumption not beer (without the alcohol) consumption.
Nicotine is the same thing, it's far worse than the simple act of smoking. It changes the brain chemistry to be dependent on it, it hardens your vessels and leads to long term systemic hypertension (high blood pressure) that can cause tons of other issues.
Smoking is a form of nicotine consumption. If cigarettes didnt have nicotine we wouldn't smoke them.
Smoking causes X number of preventable deaths per year, which is the most preventable deaths in any one bucket. There are other forms of nicotine consumption, which also cause preventable deaths which add to that number. So Y number of additional deaths due to chewing tobacco, Z additional due to vaping nicotine and the systemic circulatory issues that come with that. It's a simple fact that X < X + Y + Z
Your argument sucks. You should feel bad about that.
> It's not that A implies B. It's that B [did you mean A?] is contained within B.
"A implies B" and "A is contained within B" are equivalent statements. For example, if you are Catholic, you are a Christian. Being Catholic implies being Christian. Catholicism is contained within Christianity. However, you can't go the other way. Being a Christian doesn't imply that you are a Catholic.
Regarding alcohol consumption, we talk about about consumption, compared to beer consumption, because we know that alcohol consumption has the same general risk profile whether or not you're drinking beer, wine, or spirits. The important part is that alcohol has been shown to have negative effects. Because alcohol has been shown to have negative effects, we can extrapolate that beer has the negative effects associated with alcohol, However, if only beer had been shown to have negative effects, we couldn't automatically assume alcohol was the cause because there is a lot of other stuff in beer that distinguishes it from wine and spirits.
Now the same thing applies to smoking. Smoking is known to produce over 9000 chemical compounds, 70 of which are known to cause cancer. At least part of the causal link to cancer is specifically tied to the compounds from combustion specific to smoking. Therefore, we can't automatically assume that nicotine is harmful just because its present in smoke and we know smoke to cause cancer.
Here is an overview from Cancer Research UK: https://www.cancerresearchuk.org/about-cancer/causes-of-canc...
> Nicotine is the chemical that makes cigarettes addictive. But it is not responsible for the harmful effects of smoking. Nicotine does not cause cancer, and people have used nicotine replacement therapy safely for many years. Nicotine replacement therapy (NRT) is safe enough to be prescribed by doctors.
So, in short, just because smoking is known to cause cancer, doesn't mean you can assume that nicotine would be responsible for the same number of deaths if you replaced smoking with some other form of nicotine consumption.
I'm not talking about a hypothetical comparison between smoking and vaping.
I'm talking about my original statement, and your misunderstanding of it.
My original statement was not to say that if you replace smoking with vaping. Of course vaping is less bad than smoking.
My original statement was to say that smoking nicotine is the leading cause of preventable death, so if we add in deaths by chewing and vaping thats even more deaths. That's all my original comment and subsequent replies are referring to - not a comparison of vaping vs smoking.
See, you've assumed that A implies B means B implies A again. Smoking tobacco is the leading cause of preventable death. Nicotine is in tobacco, but that doesn't mean you can replace "Smoking nicotine" anywhere you see "Smoking tobacco." Hope that clears it up.
Weed is addictive too. Smoking plant matter of almost any variety increases cancer risk.
If you're eating 100+mg a day you will have physical withdrawal symptoms. This kind of consumption just hasn't been possible, or more likely affordable, for a large swath of the population until a few years ago.
I think your bigger concerns at 100+mg a day will be paying for your habit, and having a life outside of melting onto the couch and watching dumb YouTube videos
In this study 57% out of 1000 persons seeking treatment for drug and alcohol dependencies said that quitting smoking was harder than their problem substance.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/37628...
From this article: 'Heroin addicts say it is easier to give up dope than it is to give up smoking,'' says Dr. Sharon Hall, a psychology professor
https://www.nytimes.com/1987/03/29/magazine/nicotine-harder-...
I dont have personal experience with opiates, but do with nicotine and I can say it took 10-15 years before I didn't have a regular desire to consume nicotine. It was the hardest thing I've ever done.
Smoking a cigarette is like taking a fast acting but short duration antidepressant along with a mild/moderate stimulant simultaneously, which has been specifically engineered to go from lungs to brain in the shortest time possible.
Switching to vaping from smoking has a transition period ranging from a few days to just over a week while the brain adjusts to receiving the nicotine much more slowly. Vaping relieves nicotine cravings, but at normal doses in an ex-smoker barely scratches the surface of the instant relief/rush delivered by a cigarette.
Nicotine itself and on its own is relatively harmless to an ex-smoker. But should still be avoided by non-smokers.
Most of the harm caused by cigarettes are related to the tobacco-specific nitrosamines found naturally in tobacco which are carcinogenic, combined with additional carcinogens and harmful compounds created when tobacco combusts.
That said many of the flavourings used in e-cigarettes are harmful to health, especially when heated. Most notably sucralose, which itself partially decomposes into carcinogenic compounds when heated to temperatures reached by vaping. But that's another problem, my main point is that nicotine is only about as harmful as caffeine when consumed alone outside the context of a cigarette.
Why is this meme so popular on HN? There's nothing 'harmless' about it, and a few minutes of Googling makes that incredibly clear. Even in the absence of tobacco compounds, nicotine unquestionably wreaks havoc on pulmonary and cardiovascular function, and promotes vascular calcification and arteriosclerosis. It's also implicated as a cause with a plethora of other horrible medical issues.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicotine_poisoning
However for nicotine addicts the e-cigarette is certainly a better method of delivery than the cigarette, as you're not getting exposure to known carcinogens like benzo[a]pyrene etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benzo(a)pyrene
> "Benzo[a]pyrene is a polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon and the result of incomplete combustion of organic matter at temperatures between 300 °C (572 °F) and 600 °C (1,112 °F). The ubiquitous compound can be found in coal tar, tobacco smoke and many foods, especially grilled meats. The substance with the formula C20H12 is one of the benzopyrenes, formed by a benzene ring fused to pyrene. Its diol epoxide metabolites (more commonly known as BPDE) react with and bind to DNA, resulting in mutations and eventually cancer."
My guess is because people who claim this rarely have any references, and when they can dig one out, it's very bad.
Chewing tobacco is about just as fast without I assume engineering or maoi.
This is literally just looking at pathways and saying "yeah that seems possible".
Not to mention there are tons of published papers that are worth less than toilet paper. This is a huge problem and pubmed is a central database that doesn't exert anywhere near enough curation, it is meant to be used by professionals of targeted interests who can exert proper critical judgement, not by random people.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6148641/
>Recent reports that PubMed, one of the world’s leading biomedical databases, includes predatory journals and their publications1,2 is cause for concern. PubMed handles millions of queries daily and represents a key source of knowledge for health researchers worldwide. Much medical research that underpins clinical practice relies on the findings generated by peer-reviewed studies that are retrieved via biomedical databases, in particular, those that are free to search such as MEDLINE and PubMed. Thus, it is imperative that these databases are free of contamination by the outputs of predatory journals with their critically flawed peer review procedures.3 We analyze why this is happening and identify some possible solutions to stop the penetration of predatory journals and publishers into biomedical databases.
https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/critical-thinking-health-a...
>Andrew Wakefield’s fraudulent paper linking the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine to inflammation of the colon and to autism, and upon whose illusory foundation the modern anti-vaccine movement rests, is listed on PubMed (though it is marked as “retracted”). There is a journal called Medical Hypotheses whose articles are also discoverable through PubMed. The journal’s purpose is to publish theoretical papers, and its editors will consider “radical, speculative and non-mainstream scientific ideas” as long as they are written in a way that makes some kind of sense. One such paper proposes that ejaculation might be a potential treatment for a congested nose. Another argues that this handy intervention is “inconvenient, unreliable and potentially hazardous.” Both are, you guessed it, found on PubMed.
Just because it's on pubmed doesn't mean anything. There are so many terrible studies published and listed there that only a researcher of the studied field can tell whether it's any good or bad.
>Nicotine itself and on its own is relatively harmless to an ex-smoker. Why is this meme so popular on HN? There's nothing 'harmless' about it, and a few minutes of Googling makes that incredibly clear. Even in the absence of tobacco compounds, nicotine unquestionably wreaks havoc on pulmonary and cardiovascular function, and promotes vascular calcification and arteriosclerosis. It's also implicated as a cause with a plethora of other horrible medical issues.
The fact that the federal government has chosen to not interfere in states that have decriminalized it is merely a policy position- it continues to have the authority to go after people in any state for the production, distribution and (I think) consumption of any Schedule 1 drug, which marijuana is currently listed as.
"Decriminalization" is a specific term with a specific meaning in the context of drugs.
When states decriminalize a drug, they reduce/eliminate enforcement of the existing laws.
When states legalize a drug, they actually remove the laws prohibiting the drug. When most states legalize marijuana, they also create regulatory regimes to dictate how when the drug can be created, sold and used.
So while you are correct that Marijuana is illegal under federal law and that there are good precedents for their ability to enforce those laws, you attempt to get this point across by nitpicking the use of "legalize" is pedantically wrong. The correct explanation is that there are many states that have legalized marijuana under state law and the federal government has a policy of decriminalization for intrastate marijuana commerce in those states.
I think that part of the reason why that approach is taken by the DEA is to avoid creating opportunity for legal challenges that might undermine the existing precedents that give them power to regulate even intrastate commerce.
Is definitely correct.
> When states legalize a drug, they actually remove the laws prohibiting the drug. When most states legalize marijuana, they also create regulatory regimes to dictate how when the drug can be created, sold and used.
This does not mean that it has been made legal in the state- the state does not have the authority to make it legal, as that power is reserved by the federal government.
I will concede that "decriminalize" may not be the best word to use, but "legalize" implies that it is legal under state law, which it cannot be.
In truth, I'm suspect of the legality of states imposing criminal punishment on drug use as well. States which have passed laws on immigration mirroring the federal government's laws (in an effort to step up what they viewed as lax enforcement) were taken to court and shot down under the Supremacy Clause: https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/11-182 and similar cases. I think the same logic would apply to drug laws, if any politician were foolhardy enough to challenge the states on it (as it would be far less popular to do so).
> I will concede that "decriminalize" may not be the best word to use, but "legalize" implies that it is legal under state law, which it cannot be.
Not true, most states have laws making marijuana illegal and when state courts prosecute people for marijuana it is under state laws. Only federal courts can prosecute you for violations of federal law. (Edit: not completely true, there are complications and exceptions.)
So when a state legalizes marijuana, it is indeed now legal under the law of that state and state prosecutors and judges can't just switch to applying the federal laws.
The supremacy clause absolutely does not say that states can't pass laws that cover the same subject matter as federal laws. There are a huge number of acts that are illegal under both state and federal law.
The supremacy clause says that federal can pass laws that supercede state laws, either explicitly or implicitly. Given the long history of cooperation between state and federal law enforcement in the war on drugs, combined with the now fairly long standing policy of the decriminalization of intrastate drug commerce in where legal at the state level, would make it really hard to argue that there is any implict intent for our current drug legislation to supercede all state law.
The supremacy clause just means that congress could pass new drug regulations that did supercede state drug laws. That would probably end up getting challenged in the supreme court and set some new precedents so this seems pretty unlikely.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commandeering
This provides a convenient upper boundary on the actual power of the federal level - they can ban all they want under the modern expansive implementation of the Commerce Clause, but to get effective enforcement, they either need to allocate enough money on the federal level to cover the entire country, or they need to convince the states to help them enforce.
"States can't legalize only decriminalize"
God I hate when HN members who are really wrong act all conceited about it.
Marijuana is a Schedule 1 drug, considered illegal for possession and consumption, at the federal level.
"In October, the FDA allowed Juul rival British American Tobacco Plc (BATS.L) to market its Vuse Solo e-cigarettes and tobacco-flavored pods, making it the first-ever vapor product to get clearance from the health regulator."
We won't know for sure until the FDA actually releases their report, but one could infer that Juul as a provider of human-consumable vapor products was unsalvageably bad, to the point of being a danger to public health (in a way that their market competition was not).
... but in this specific case, if you're already vaping, the FDA doesn't care if you switch to Vuse. It's Juul specifically that isn't getting the nod, it seems.