Everyone here is arguing the benefits of prohibition. I'm just interested to know how much money Rishi (and/or his family members/friends/donors) have invested in vaping and nicotine alternatives.
It always confuses me to learn that when people want to ban smoking it somehow means ban "cigarettes" and not "nicotine"
Because smoking is WILDLY more harmful than vaping.
Yes vaping has SOME health risks, but it's like saying drinking tea and drinking four loko are just as bad because they both have caffeine
Bro what tea are you drinking that has nicotine
I can only imagine they meant caffeine, another common drug that's heavily abused but a little more socially accepted
I mean lets not pretend it's risk free, it raises blood pressure, causes headaches, can trigger arrhythmia in those at risk, etc. As far as drugs go it is probably the least risky, but it's not like it comes with zero health impacts.
I don't think anything is risk-free, including the vital molecules that we need to live. But caffeine has way a longer and significant list of health benefits that offset the risks at even moderate doses. So much so that there's enough evidence to encourage people to drink more as a prophylaxis. That list includes protection from gallstones, cancers, asthma, diabetes, Alzheimer's, and cardiovascular disease among other thing like a potential aide in weight loss and even a significant performance boost in sports. What's more, there have been large cohort studies that have found a 3% decreased in risk of developing arrhythmia per daily cup even when controlling for genetics. So the risks shouldn't be used to discourage or scare people away from a proven benefit when the therapeutic window includes up to 4 cups a day. Would I risk the occasional insomnia, headaches, and temporary increase in blood pressure for all the other positive effects given such a lenient margin? Absolutely.
So, really, the public perception that caffeine is somehow dangerous for being labeled a drug is on par with the belief that other substances are inherently dangerous. I think it spills over from the war on drugs, and the delusion of clean eating that often emerges from the dregs of misinformation on the internet and those who perpetuate those beliefs for monetary gain within the wellness communities, ironically enough.
I've known people, myself included, that have had negative health impacts from coffee, so that could be biasing my perspective. My father nearly died from heart complications after coffee, I bleed at the exit 100% of the time I drink coffee. I love coffee, but I can't drink it. There's probably something genetic that makes my line intolerant. I know people that end up in a migraine caffeine withdrawal cycle on a regular basis. Obviously these are person specific, so you really just need to know your body and act accordingly.
Well what's wrong with nicotine? In itself it's not worse than booze. It's all the other crap they add that makes it so terrible
Hi from the depths of a nicotine addiction and struggling to quit.
Its a worthless chemical that gets more expensive everyday and my brain SCREAMS at me for a fix if I try to go more than even a few hours. At least heroin gets you high.
And even when you break free for the most part the chemical which is classified as a poison will make you crave it years later.
Every time I smell somebody smoking I need a pouch or I'll go ask for a bum
Stay strong on your recovery friend ๐ช
Thank you for your comment, this is always my biggest beef with those defending nicotine (smoking/vaping).
I mean I'm no expert but I do have some knowledge on the subject.
The difference is how you injest it. Our stomachs are much more resilient than our lungs. Your stomach is, for all intents and purposes, a sac of acid that dissolves mostly anything you put in it, your lungs on the other hand literally only do 1 thing all day and it's breathe air. There are different qualities of air of course, and microparticles in it that could cause harm, but on the whole it's more or less all the same.
Its like dumping garbage into a sink vs. a paper bag. The sink will get disgusting, and you may end up with a clogged drain, messed up pipes, or worse. But at the end of the day if you just clean the mess and don't do it too often it will probably be fine. The paper bag on the other hand is gonna get Soggy, gross, and start falling apart in your hands. You can dry it out but it will never quite be the same..
There are different qualities of air of course, and microparticles in it that could cause harm, but on the whole itโs more or less all the same.
Absolutely, and that's the problem. The same argument you just posed could also be used against intentionally smelling flowers, or sticking your nose over a pot of boiling broth to smell that chicken deliciousness.
We don't know that vaped nicotine is more harmful than most things we breathe. In fact, I'd say there are non-drug things people do that we already know to be worse than vaping. Ever go camping? The smoke from that fire is worse than vaping, worse than almost any substance you might want to smoke.
So the question is how bad vaping (the action, not the drug) is. Is it as bad as sniffing a rose, as bad as lighting a scented candle? As bad as incense? As bad as a campfire? If, as many suspect, it's near the beginning of that scale, then the only critique we can rightly have is towards the substance vaped. If it's near the end of the scale, we kinda need some research to support that claim.
Its like dumping garbage into a sink vs. a paper bag
As of yet, the medical and scientific community have not found solid evidence that it's "like...garbage" at all if you don't like it on fire.
Which is where things get complicated. Because it MIGHT be terrible for you. Or it might not be bad at all.
In the US it's the opposite, which is absolutely bizarro land. Want to ban vapes but not cigarettes.
Well, nicotine isn't the part of smoking that causes cancer
But it's the part that is addictive and keeps you smoking.
If addiction is a problem, should the general use of caffine be banned then? Thats why its kinda odd to specifically ban nicotine.
Choosing to ban specifically nicotine and not caffine is as silly as the idea that cigarettes should be legal but weed shouldnt.
Probably, yes. Even the age restrictions are kinda silly.
I do think it's ok to ban sale of "prepared smokables" like cigarettes. The harm level is known to be severe. But if someone wants to buy their own tobacco+papers and roll their own cigarettes, that's on them.
Of course, I don't think it would be effective to ban cigarettes. Just ethically coherent.
If it's not too harmful - what's the problem with being addicted? I'm addicted to coffee and drink at least two cups per day, as do most people around here.
Nobody out there is just buying Nicotine gum for the flavor. The overwhelming majority are struggling with an addiction that may one day kill them.
Also, as a former smoker of over 20 years as well as a current coffee addict, I can tell you from personal experience that there is no comparison between the two. Some substances are simply more addictive than others. Nicotine is one of the worst on the planet.
The problem with addiction is that it's safe to say that NOTHING is good if used to excess.
I used to be so hooked on caffeine I drank a 30-cup pot each day. It was giving me all kinds of issues, and I was only in my 20's. I'm still addicted, but I've learned to moderate. It took me years. And my 4th latte of the day is telling me that I'm not exactly great at it.
If I smoked/vaped Nicotine, I would have serious problems of taking too much all the time.
The full effects of vaping are not well understood, and while they're almost certainly not as bad as cigarettes, they're also almost certainly still bad for you, and they are indeed still addictive for the same reasons as cigarettes because they still use nicotine.
Further, one main reason their risks remain as poorly understood as they do is that (again, because of the same active ingredient) people who vape often also use cigarettes. The two are closely linked, I don't think my confusion should be so easily dismissed as that.
Oh sorry, I was thinking nicotine supplements like gum and patches. In my mind, smoking and vaping are the same thing. "Don't inhale particulate matter of any kind" is an excellent rule of thumb for all humans in all situations
Exactly my point. It always throws me for a minute when I realize people are treating them so separately.
The full effects of vaping are not well understood, and while theyโre almost certainly not as bad as cigarettes, theyโre also almost certainly still bad for you
That used to say that about artificial sweeteners. The question shouldn't be "is it bad for you" but "is it worse for you than 99 other things you do in a day". And vaping nicotine is "almost certainly bad for you" because of the nicotine, and nicotine is a known quantity - we know how bad it is and isn't. We don't have evidence that the mechanism of vaping is bad for you, and there's no "almost certainly" on that.
And the truth is, I have problems with people who lean on "poorly understood" for vaping. Evidence shows vaping as a mechanism (for THC as it were) going back over 2000 years to ancient Egypt. Widespread use of hookahs started in the 19th century and has tons mechanically in common with modern vaporization. There are some differences, but short of a few badly-designed vapes that let air reach the lungs while superheated, it looks a lot like people are saying "not well understood" because they cannot seem to "understand" bad things and they don't want to say good things. We have TONS of research precedent around room-temperature air with vaporized herbs in it.
If I were going to imbibe nicotine (or CBD or THC for that matter), I would probably prefer to vape it. I think the stigma against vaping needs to step aside for the vaccine research considering using vapes as an alternative to needle injection.
Nicotine is one of the safest stimulants we know, up there with caffeine in terms of safety. There's little meaningful reason to ban nicotine. You're more likely to harm yourself with any number of other things we readily allow.
The addiction potential of nicotine alone is also far lower than people assume, because smoking is highly addictive both due to the rituals and the other substances involved. I tried to get used to nicotine via patches years back to use as a safe stimulant, and not only did I not get addicted, I couldn't get used to it (and I was not willing to get myself used to smoking, given the harm that involves). That's not to say you can't develop addictions to patches or vapes etc. too, but much more easily when it's as a substitution for smoking than "from scratch".
Restrictions on delivery methods that are harmful or not well enough understood, and combining nicotine with other substances that make the addiction and harm potential greater, sure.
Nicotine is one of the safest stimulants we know, up there with caffeine in terms of safety. There's little meaningful reason to ban nicotine.
this is from a 2015 article i found on the NIH library:
Nicotine poses several health hazards. There is an increased risk of cardiovascular, respiratory, gastrointestinal disorders. There is decreased immune response and it also poses ill impacts on the reproductive health. It affects the cell proliferation, oxidative stress, apoptosis, DNA mutation by various mechanisms which leads to cancer. It also affects the tumor proliferation and metastasis and causes resistance to chemo and radio therapeutic agents. The use of nicotine needs regulation. The sale of nicotine should be under supervision of trained medical personnel.
in case you think i might be cherry picking, hereโs something from johns hopkins, and hereโs a source from
the cdc.
hereโs something recent from harvard for good measure.
edit: i should be clear that the other sources donโt say exactly the same things as the NIH one, but they do talk about how nicotine itself is very addictive, and they talk about some of the harm it can cause
The links from John Hopkins, the CDC and Harvard all focus on vaping, and so are irrelevant to the question of nicotine rather than the delivery methods.
The first link has nothing wrong in it. It's correct nicotine is toxic. So is caffeine - the LD50 of caffeine in humans is reasonably high, many grams. To the issue of ingestion, the issue is toxicity at doses people are likely to deal with.
To the cancer links, again without looking at delivery methods, this is meaningless. To let me quote one small part:
Thus, the induced activation of nAChRs in lung and other tissues by nicotine can promote carcinogenesis by causing DNA mutations[26] Through its tumor promoter effects, it acts synergistically with other carcinogens from automobile exhausts or wood burning and potentially shorten the induction period of cancers[43] [Table 2].
This makes sense. Don't inhale lots of particulates combined with nicotine in other words.
There are also many other parts of the article that are useful. E.g. it's perfectly reasonable to accept that e.g. if you are on chemo you should stay off nicotine, and if you breastfeed you should stay off nicotine.
What the article does not show is that nicotine, as opposed to delivery methods like inhalation, is much worse than other drugs we're perfectly fine with.
I'll note that the article also includes things in its conclusion that it has categorically not cites studies in support of. E.g. it just assumes the addiction potential is proven (it is, but putting that in the conclusion of a paper without citing sources is really poor form, especially in a paper claiming to set out the issues with nicotine in isolation rather than smoking).
It also tried to drive up the scare factor by pointing out its toxicity at doses irrelevant for human consumption (e.g. as an insecticide; if wildly irrelevant doses should be considered, then we could write the same paper about how apples should be banned because they contain cyanide).
The "Materials and methods" section also goes on to say "Studies that evaluated tobacco use and smoking were excluded" but then goes on to make multiple arguments on the basis of harm caused by smoking (e.g. "Nicotine plays a role in the development of emphysema in smokers, by decreasing elastin in the lung parenchyma and increasing the alveolar volume") and cites a paper focused on smoking, in direct contradiction of the claim they made ("Endoh K, Leung FW. Effects of smoking and nicotine on the gastric mucosa: A review of clinical and experimental evidence. Gastroenterology. 1994;107:864โ78.")
So, yes, if you make claims about how you're going to address nicotine rather than smoking, and then go on to address smoking and other means of inhalation intermingled with the rest, and if you leap to conclusions you've not cited works in support of, and if you throw out risks without linking them causally to nicotine, you can make nicotine look very bad.
They also end with subjective statements they've not even attempted to support properly. E.g. they've gone from "here is why it's dangerous" to "it should be restricted", but if that was valid logic, we should restrict sales of apples too, most cleaning agents, all caffeinated products, housepaint, paint thinners, and a host of other things, it's a specious argument and fitting that such a badly argued paper ends with it. That this passed peer review is an incredible indictment of the journal which published it.
That doesn't mean nicotine is risk-free, but compared to other things we're happy to ingest, I stand by my statement. But don't inhale it.
The links from John Hopkins, the CDC and Harvard all focus on vaping, and so are irrelevant to the question of nicotine rather than the delivery methods.
they do focus on vaping, that does not mean they are irrelevant to the question of nicotine.
from the cdc link:
Nicotine is highly addictive and can harm adolescent brain development, which continues into the early to mid-20s.
there are also sections of that page titled "Why Is Nicotine Unsafe for Kids, Teens, and Young Adults?" and "How Does Nicotine Addiction Affect Youth Mental Health?" that focus only on nicotine.
from the harvard article:
Nicotine is highly addictive and can affect the developing brain, potentially harming teens and young adults.
from johns hopkins:
Nicotine is the primary agent in regular cigarettes and e-cigarettes, and it is highly addictive. It causes you to crave a smoke and suffer withdrawal symptoms if you ignore the craving. Nicotine is a toxic substance. It raises your blood pressure and spikes your adrenaline, which increases your heart rate and the likelihood of having a heart attack.
Both e-cigarettes and regular cigarettes contain nicotine, which research suggests may be as addictive as heroin and cocaine.
to your second point
To the cancer links, again without looking at delivery methods, this is meaningless.
i agree that it would be better to focus only on nicotine. i disagree that ignoring delivery methods is "meaningless". form the johns hopkins article:
And, getting hooked on nicotine often leads to using traditional tobacco products down the road.
this is only to say that the cancer bit is not irrelevant.
This makes sense. Donโt inhale lots of particulates combined with nicotine in other words.
the part you quoted says that nicotine acts as an accelerator for the development of cancers from other sources, including things like car exhaust. these carcinogens are widespread in the modern world, so accelerating the development of cancer associated with them is a bad thing. eg, car exhaust fumes are everywhere.
Iโll note that the article also includes things in its conclusion that it has categorically not cites studies in support of.
i agree, this is bad. the problem you brought up with the "materials and methods" section is also bad. i'm not trying to defend the article holistically, i'm even particularly attached to that source (which is why i included a few different ones). the only reason i picked that article was that it explains some of the harmful effects of nicotine, and then backs them with citations. the article did this by reviewing "90 relevant articles" from PubMed and Medline, then discussing what those articles found - and these are the parts of the article i was interested in. i probably wouldn't use this approach if i were writing an academic paper on the subject, but i think it's fine for arguing on the internet that nicotine isn't "one of the safest stimulants we know". (i also included a few different sources to counteract the limitations of this approach.)
That doesnโt mean nicotine is risk-free, but compared to other things weโre happy to ingest, I stand by my statement.
your statements were
Nicotine is one of the safest stimulants we know, up there with caffeine in terms of safety.
and
The addiction potential of nicotine alone is also far lower than people assume,
i think the second statement was thoroughly debunked by the sources i've included: they all say nicotine is highly addictive, and one of them says it's "as addictive as heroin and cocaine". i think the sources i've shared also discredit the idea that nicotine is "up there with caffeine in terms of safety". i'm not trying to say nicotine is extremely dangerous, but rather that its danger is underestimated.
they do focus on vaping, that does not mean they are irrelevant to the question of nicotine. from the cdc link:
To this and your subsequent points, these claims are not backed up by sources in the pages you linked to, and as we've seen from the other paper as well, there's good reason to be cautious about assuming their claims are separating the effects of nicotine from the effects of the delivery method, especially given every single sourceactually cited by the CDC article is about smoking. Neither the Johns Hopkins or Harvard article cites any sources on nicotine alone that I can see.
i disagree that ignoring delivery methods is โmeaninglessโ. form the johns hopkins article:
And, getting hooked on nicotine often leads to using traditional tobacco products down the road.
A claim that is not backed by sources, and has divorced this from delivery method. E.g. how many people starts with gum or a patch and goes on to tobacco? I can certainly see there being some transfer from vaping to tobacco, but that is very different from the blanket claim and illustrates the problem with these sources that fail to disambiguate and extrapolates very wide claim from sources that looks at specific modes of use.
the part you quoted says that nicotine acts as an accelerator for the development of cancers from other sources, including things like car exhaust. these carcinogens are widespread in the modern world, so accelerating the development of cancer associated with them is a bad thing. eg, car exhaust fumes are everywhere.
Yes, inhaling nicotine is bad. That we can agree on, and the source supports the limited claim that if you get nicotine in a way that binds to cites in your lungs, that is bad. The sources do not provide evidence that this risk is present for other modes of use. Maybe it is, but they've not shown that.
i agree, this is bad. the problem you brought up with the โmaterials and methodsโ section is also bad. iโm not trying to defend the article holistically, iโm even particularly attached to that source (which is why i included a few different ones).
But that article is the best of the sources you gave. The others cite nothing of relevance to the claim I made that I can see after going through their links.
the article did this by reviewing โ90 relevant articlesโ from PubMed and Medline, then discussing what those articles found
But the problem is that not nearly all of those "90 relevant articles" are relevant to their claim, and so they start off by misrepresenting what they're about to do. They then fail to quantify their claim in any way that supports their conclusion. They back up some specific claims without quantifying them (e.g. I can back up the claim that apples can be lethal, but you'd need vast quantities to get enough cyanide from an apple to harm you, so a claim they can be lethal in isolation is meaningless) or unpacking whether they are risks from nicotine in general, or nicotine via a specific delivery method. This is an ongoing problem with research on this subject.
They have not provided an argument for how any of those "90 relevant articles" supports their conclusion.
i think the second statement was thoroughly debunked by the sources iโve included: they all say nicotine is highly addictive, and one of them says itโs โas addictive as heroin and cocaineโ. i think the sources iโve shared also discredit the idea that nicotine is โup there with caffeine in terms of safetyโ. iโm not trying to say nicotine is extremely dangerous, but rather that its danger is underestimated.
The say that, but they don't back it up. Ironically, pointing to heroin is interesting, because the addiction potential of heroin has also been subject to a lot of fearmongering and notoriously exaggerated, and we've known this for nearly half a century -- a seminal study of addiction in Vietnam war vets found the vast majority of those with extensive heroin use in Vietnam just stopped cold turkey when they returned to the US and the vast majority didn't relapse, the opposite of what the authors assumed going into the study. A study that was commissioned as part of Nixons then-newly started politically motivated and racist War of Drugs with the intent of providing evidence of how bad it was.
That's also not to say that heroin isn't dangerous or seriously addictive because it is. Nobody should use heroin. But it's also frequently used as a means of exaggerating by implication because peoples idea of the addiction potential of heroin is largely way out of whack with reality and heavily context-dependent. So when someone drags out a heroin comparison without heavy caveats, that's reason to assume there is a good chance they're full of bullshit.
In other words: It's perfectly possible that some ways of taking nicotine can be as addictive as heroin, but that doesn't tell us what most people think it does. E.g. UK hospitals sometimes use heroin (as diamorphine; its generic name) for post-op pain management because it's far better than many alternatives.
The sources you've given do not present any support for claims that nicotine considered separate from delivery methods is particularly risky. They do provide support for claims it's dangerous when smoked, and possibly dangerous when inhaled even via vaping, and the takeaway that you should generally avoid inhaling stuff other than clean air without good reason is good. The other claims about nicotine in general do not appear to be backed up at all.
iโm not trying to say nicotine is extremely dangerous, but rather that its danger is underestimated.
I find the notion that the danger is underestimated hilarious when one of the claims used a comparison with heroin to fearmonger.
Your source, if anything, is evidence to me of the opposite.
A lot of the alternatives are already owned by Big Tobacco
You can go EU-way and say that all vapes should be rechargable(in both meanings), repairable and intercompatible. Basically opposite of what Big Tabacco does.
Disposable vapes should be banned.
Though even the reusable ones generate a decent amount of waste between coil assemblies that get replaced and the plastic bottles the juice comes in. I mean, I hope we eventually get to managing waste at that level, though I'm not holding my breath since it would require huge changes to the way we handle food logistics, which eclipses vape juice waste by a lot per person.
But the disposable ones are ridiculous.
You can build your own coils and mix your own liquid. Me and my mate both do it it's far cheaper and better for the environment, not too hard either once uve learnt the basics of materials and ohms n all.
I see angry wankers want to moan for the sake of moaning.
Eliminating smoking is a goos thing! I'll take my wins whenever possible, doesn't happen all that often.
But but there are other things that are also bad and if one proposal doesn't solve everything it is complete trash!!!
Yea not everything is a partisan issue, and this seems like a good thing? Antismoking efforts have largely been successful in a lot of places.
It's not one of those things where someone is choosing to harm themselves only. Smoking affects the people around you
So many people like to portray everything as a 'personal choice' while ignoring all said implications to others. Very rarely does something only actually impact you.
With enough hoop jumping anything can have a terinary chain of impact if you need to justify your cause.
Too many people use it as a cop-out to avoid being accountable. It's like when meat eaters say it's a 'personal choice.' Like yeah, it is a choice you mean, but it also implicates other things not only you.
Of course, not counting the smoke, ash, and other toxic oxidized chemicals that will be kicked up by gas and diesel vehicles with his scrapping the HS2 Manchester line. What a fucking idiot.
"Oh no, we brexited ourselves so hard that we're poor now and can't afford to build infrastructure that would stand to enrich multiple cities for hundreds of years!"
Such classic smooth brained thatcherite conservatives. It's mind numbing that people keep voting for them.
Calling him smooth brained is looking past the fact that it's just plain corruption. He has interests in the oil industry, and they are against public rail. Hold him to account for what he is, a criminal.
Honestly he's more corrupt than Boris Johnson which is saying something.
Of course. Why else would a billionaire want the job of leading a country?
I mean, Sunak is a complete and utter bellend and cancelling half of HS2 is a ridiculous and nonsensical move.
But I think that the good old idiom about broken clocks might just apply here. Smoking bans are a good thing.
Yep, arresting a 47yo for smoking will be very on point for a broken clock.
Keep in mind, this will be policed only on poor ethnic minorities. Rich white guys in their private club s will still smoke with impunity.
Keep in mind, this will be policed only on poor ethnic minorities. Rich white guys in their private club s will still smoke with impunity.
This is the real answer right here - this is just another poverty tax/punishment.
I don't smoke, never have, but I know why people smoke, and it's now (that it's no longer seen as "cool") almost exclusively to try and relieve a tiny bit of the mountain of stress that existing in the world today (especially as part of a marginalised group) brings, and there are a million better ways to reduce the need to smoke, and improve the health outcomes of smokers (eventually, hopefully, to the point where they are able to reduce smoking or stop altogether).
Sunak is looking for a quick "win" for headlines and distraction, not to actually help people live healthier better lives (E: just seen his transphobic comments, which only reinforce this point). Why target the source of the problem when you can slap a band aid on it and bask in your own glory for a couple of days before your next bit of corruption is exposed?
Counterpoint: A lot of people that smoke want to stop smoking. A lot of people would more easily stop smoking if it was banned or not so easily available.
Also from the title of the article it seems that this would never apply to people that already smoke legally. The idea is that you set a minimum age and then you increase it every year. Meaning that in 100 years smoking is banned for everyone. But nobody was never banned from smoking when they were legal before. They were just never allowed to. So it prevents young people from picking up the habit.
So it prevents young people from picking up the habit.
right, just like how it being illegal prevents young people from drinking and smoking weed... ๐๐๐
Do you really disagree that it reduces the amount of young people consuming those substances?
Yes, For example, youth cannabis use halved in Canada after legalization. Also, when I was in HS, people were smoking even though it's illegal under the age of 18. People would just buy cigarettes from reserves and sell them to each other. If made illegal, people will just find other means to get it.
Prohibition doesn't work but better education does.
The proposal is to raise the legal smoking age every year. Meaning each yearly increase, this hypothetical 47yo will also age a year and so will be able to smoke forever
Not if he wanted to pick up smoking one year before legal age. So he will be chasing that legal age forever and can't smoke even if he's 68
////Edit: it seems like I need to give an example to explain this apparently very difficult problem:
Person A is 17 , smoking is allowed from 18
Next year Person A is 18, he could under normal circumstances smoke with 18, but now smoking is legal with 19. Continue to age 68 but smoking is now allowed from 69. It's even implied in the article
Ah yes, because making drugs illegal has worked so well in the past.
Setting age limits on substance use is a little different from criminalizing possession/use. In the case of smoking, it has helped reduce rates. This is something backed by people working in public health, who also support decriminalization for possession and bringing in safe consumption sites. It's all about finding the right approach for an issue.
I'd rather focus on calling out the OTHER bad stuff his government is doing, instead of turning this one partisan based on which party introduced it
It's not really an age limit when you'll never reach it, it's just gradual criminalization.
But this isn't am age limit, its using an age limit as a hack to basically grandfather in a smoking ban. It is about finding the right approach, and this ain't it.
Raising age limits on smoking has not reduced rates, making tobacco use taboo in society and knowing how dangerous it is for you has. In the US like 9% use any form of tobacco (which it's more likely around 7% or less because they include people who have smoked in their lives and quit as well). At this point no one is really smoking... going after tobacco still is just stupid.
Smoking is redundant today. Kids are getting enough cancer from the environment already.
It's not redundant. Harms compound. It's not like people max out their carcinogenic index or something. ๐
Pretty much anything in the state of California
This product is known to the state of California
Why not making the warnings be available elsewhere?
That law is an excellent example of knowledge vs wisdom. Knowledge is knowing that some substances may be carcinogenic. Wisdom is knowing that the dosage of a carcinogen is so low it hardly poses any risk.
To be fair though that's hard to put on a warning label and harder to explain.
So we would eliminate smoking the same way we eliminated drug use...by making it illegal.
/S if necessary
I'm generally pro legalization of drugs, but will say this is likely to be much more effective than the war on drugs ever was.
You don't outlaw possession, just the sales age. You'll see significantly fewer new starters as time goes because after 20 years 40 year olds that can buy wont be bothered to support fresh 18 year olds looking to start a new habit or whatever. The ones that really want to start can buy from abroad without any form of punishment.
I think it's different because I don't think anyone turns to their first cigarette looking to try and attain some new feeling. It's usually one of those things like... My friends were so I grabbed one from them and blah blah.
I would say I'm for the progressive increase in age, and I wrestle with my own hypocrisy seeing that I support legalizing other drugs. But maybe that's rooted in the basis that I've never had a pothead or dude on shrooms negatively impact me. Cigarettes however--littered everywhere, get smoke in your face, etc
people could easily say they hate the smell of weed - is that a good reason to outlaw?
I keep thinking of the rat experiments where rats in cages took drugs until they died but happy rats in rat societies turned away from drugs.
I think people take drugs, including cigarettes, to cope. If they didn't need to cope with terrible conditions, they wouldn't use the drugs (except a few outliers). To me, taking away people's cope is punching down.
We can't get rid of tobacco like we can quaaludes or some synthetic drug. It's going to be available to people. The question is do you want to create a huge black market for it (where people can easily lace cigarettes with fentanal, bonus? ), or do you want to address the reasons that people chain smoke?
Part of the point of a gradual ban is to avoid creating a supply vacuum that gets filled by a black market.
Is there any evidence to suggest a gradual ban actually prevents a black market?
It's worth noting that even the happy rats would go get the occasional hit, they just weren't dependent on the drugs. They did it for fun once in a while, not frequently as an escape from reality. This is how healthy people enjoy drugs.
That doesn't change the end result though. Addiction is the result of profound despair, not the cause of it. Giving people hope and support keeps them from needing to escape.
I think people want to do things they are not allowed to. They will go through the effort to find a way. In a lot of states that legalized Marijuana, its use went down after legalization. Once it was normalized, some people lost interest. I think the opposite happens when you make it illegal, you're basically making it cool again. This isn't just drug use, it's with a lot of things, if you forbid it, people will suddenly want that thing more than they did before. Religion comes to mind. Authoritarian countries that want to stamp out a religion or all religion often cause a religious resurgence. There's nothing quite like being told you can't do something to make you want to do it or visa versa. People are naturally oppositional.
Smoking's already dramatically fallen out of popularity with younger people, being replaced by vaping. So I don't think it really matters what they do at this point - smoking's a dinosaur waiting to die.
Although vaping is far more popular and at least better than smoking, it's still actively bad for health. I'd be interested to see how a similar policy to ban vapes would go over in the west like they're trying in Taiwan.
Fast food, alcohol, motorcycles, and Instagram are also bad for your health. I'm not sure how vaping compares. Vaping is definitely easier to demonize.
Motorcycles aren't bad for your health. Crashing them is, but just driving them isn't, even doing it a lot. Unlike the other things you mentioned where doing them a lot is unhealthy.
Vaping isn't bad for your health, it's what you put into the vape that might be. There are already commonly used medical technologies that are adjacent to vaping, and many researchers think we will be able to use vaping in the future to replace hypodermic needles in some situations.
That is indeed true, but don't forget that vaping addiction comes from the nicotine inside it that gets into your body physically. Riding a motorcycle or being on Instagram are still addictive but they don't "force" it upon you
Interesting turn of phrase. What is "actively bad for health", really? Experts seem to be pretty convinced that as bad as Vaping might be, it's not as bad as alcohol. And we in the US know what happens when you try to ban alcohol. I have Prohibition to thank for the incredible Whiskey industry of today.
From someone who has smoked and quit, I was really blind sided by how addictive nicotine was. People talk about adults and what they put in there body but nicotine really is a different monster
I never felt the same buzz after my first cigarette, it felt like I was fucking drunk after my first smoke lol.
After that I was basically just chasing the dragon, I was smoking about 15-30 cigarettes a day for about 1-2 years. Never again.
Huh. I gave it a try, and while drunk, i just went on and on, but overall it just smelled so bad that it never became a habit. I guess i'm lucky
Some people definitely don't respond the same and it real does take 1-3 days to really start to notice for some people
What I don't see is why smoking should be the main nicotine delivery device when it can easily be done without the cancerous smoke.
Isolated nicotine is apparently not cancerous. We just choose to enforce the continued coupling of nicotine and cancer, and refuse to permit alternatives that decouple if from cancer if their dosage isn't pitiful.
"Either get the weak alternatives, or the cancerous ones."
The moderate non-cancerous alternatives are illegal.
Or do it like Germany: make vaping extremely expensive so people go back to smoking. Stupid.
Absolutely obscene and short sighted what the German government have done. Everything is taxed per ml, even if it has no nicotine in it. As you say it's cheaper to actually smoke.
So are you for or against Sunak's proposal?
One problem: most smokers start as teens, all while it's forbidden to sell kids the cancer sticks.
Addition: I would punish the selling of tobbaco products to kids even more, including the ability of suing the adults for damages in the future (If it won't cause a cobra problem later on), and also give the ability to non-smoking workers to sue their employers if they give smokers more breaks.
My 13-year-old daughter already has friends who vape. That's how insidious it is and how deeply embedded in the public consciousness nicotine-based products are.
And where does teens get the idea to smoke from? Is it from grandpa that coughs louder than a jet engine? Or is it the older cooler teens who got the idea from older teens, who got the....
You get the point.
I smoked as a teen because some of my friends did, they smoked because some of their friends did. And you don't have to look very far to find the 18-20 year olds who provided them.
Luckily, I never smoked much and mostly kept it to social smoking which made it very easy for me to quit once I grew up and developed some brain-cells that enjoyed co-operating with eachother.
I think New Zealand implemented a similar measure some years back, it should probably be good to see how well it works there. Hopefully this doesn't create a black market for tobacco.
Yes we did. Have not heard anything about it since... so it's probably working as intended.
We're currently freaking out about vape shops springing up every ten feet.
My first cig was illegally imported and sold by a dealer involved with gangs. All its done is make people get tobacco from their dealer rather than the guy outside the shop.
Yeah but the 18 year old buys for the 15 year old-- brothers, sisters, upperclassmen, etc.
The more that gap becomes larger, the less likely they have social interaction and access. How many 40 year olds buy for 15 year olds today? In 20 something years, 40 year olds will be the youngest purchasers.
He should also star making crimes illegal so that they can live in a society without crime /s.
Finally something sensible from this guy. Last week it was all big auto lobby nonsense.
I feel we've done a good enough job at making smoking undesirable, effectively banning it is excessive. It would be better to focus on doing what was done to cigarettes to vapes. Kids arent smoking nearly as much but theyre vaping like mad. I see kids as young as 13-14 doing it. Vapes are allowed to look appealing, combine that with their nice smell and flavour, ofc young people are going to gravitate toward them instead.
Make it so vape packaging is bland and has similar warnings as cigarretes, and actually teach kids about addiction instead of just a hard "dont touch these". Everyone with a braincell knows that if you ban something from young people, theyre gonna do it more
Broken clock right twice a day type of deal with Sunak
That's gonna work splendidly since underage people would never dare to smoke!
Ehhhhhh, you make it permanently harder for a generation and eventually, barring a political change, you need to find an 80 year old to boot cigarettes for you from that one shop down the road that still caters to a rapidly shrinking audience.
Not to say that this is a good idea or one with which but long-term, it could work. (Or at least reduce smoking to a relatively minor few.)
Eventually stores will just stop selling them. Why stock cigarette when you only sell 10 packs a month.
I think itโs a great idea. People will create a black market for them, but it will be really small and die out.
Itโs not like you really get anything from it like you do from alcohol or other drugs.
People will create a black market for them, but it will be really small and die out.
There's already a black market for tobacco, and it will just grow in size not shrink. You can buy 50g for like ยฃ5 on DNMs.
Yeah, the risk is that if the black market becomes large enough, it will mean youths will have easier access to cheaper cigarettes than the current situation (with the added issue of cigarettes being entirely unregulated, meaning they're going to put God knows what in them).
Itโs not like you really get anything from it like you do from alcohol or other drugs.
Similar ehhhhhh as earlier.
There are moments when a cigarette gives you an amazing or just right, feeling, for lack of a better word. In reality you're just sating a self inflicted addiction, but it can feel great to do so.
I don't think it's a good trade, that's why I no longer smoke, but I understand the simple pleasure. Even if in the long, medium, heck, often even short term that pleasure has stupid costs.
It's a nice theory but it does sort of forget that other countries exist - the black marketeers will just smuggle tobacco in. They're also going to be guaranteed a market of younger immigrants who've gotten addicted in another country.
Sure, at first, absolutely, though even then you are raising the cost of smokes, not just financially but convenience, potential customer base (not everyone has the connections or would feel comfortable buying on the resale market) etc.
Long run, sure, smokers will probably always exist. But at the point where it's awkward to smoke in public you've probably cut down on a good percentage of smoking at all.
How is this supposed to be enforced? In a decade's time are shopkeepers going to have to challenge anyone buying a packet of fags who looks under 28? And then later it'll be "sorry mate, can you prove you're 44?" and so on.
Asking for ID when buying cigarettes is not exactly an outlandish proposal. It's already done around the current legal smoking age.
Arguably, this proposal makes it easier, since there's a fixed cutoff date of birth instead of calculating their age.
I loathe Sunak, his political party and their ideals... but this is pretty good actually
Maybe he'll manage to do a single worthwhile thing
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Addressing the annual Tory party conference today, Mr Sunak also promised to restrict the availability of vapes under plans to "put the next generation first".
Read More:Rishi Sunak confirms northern leg from Birmingham to Manchester will be scrappedSunak says nobody wants an election - the truth is he can't risk one | Beth Rigby
Ministers have faced repeated calls to ban vapes to help protect children and reduce the significant environmental impact of the single-use products.
It commissioned a review, published last June and led by Dr Javed Khan, which made a series of recommendations, including increasing the legal age for buying tobacco.
Cancer Research UK's chief executive Michelle Mitchell said: "Raising the age of sale on tobacco products is a critical step on the road to creating the first ever smoke-free generation."
"Future generations of adults who are considered old enough to vote, pay taxes, drive a car and drink alcohol are going to be treated like children and denied the right to buy a product that can be purchased legally by people a year older than them."
The original article contains 665 words, the summary contains 179 words. Saved 73%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
I don't know if that's feasible given that adults are adults after all. But maybe just restrict the sale of cigarettes and make it so burdensome to sell them in shops so most don't even bother. And do the same for vapes. Vapes are ridiculously easy to buy so stick them in the same locked cabinet that other nicotine products go in and ban all advertising and signage.
just restrict the sale of cigarettes and make it so burdensome to sell them in shops so most donโt even bother
I think that might help. Increasing friction for an activity makes it less likely to happen (like when your TV remote is in another room).
And do the same for vapes. Vapes are ridiculously easy to buy so stick them in the same locked cabinet that other nicotine products go in
That needs a bit more differentiation, no? After all, there are vapes without nicotine. I would also differentiate between single-use vapes (just ban these, wtf) and refillables. They're also (most probably) much less unhealthy compared to smoking tobacco.
In my country (Germany), vapes are only available in shops, and most sadly only offer single-use vapes. Cigarettes were (are?) also sold in vending machines, on streets or in bars. So from my point of view, vapes are already harder to buy than cigarettes. What situation did you have in mind?
All in all, I think it would make sense to make access to these things harder / price higher based on how harmful they are, and how addictive they are.
ban all advertising
All for it!
Imagine turning 18 (or whatever the smoking age is in the UK) and starting to smoke during the year this rule takes effect. Then, every year from that point forward, you'd have to wait for your birthday to start smoking again.
It is 18.
But this law will be designed to target current 14 year olds. In theory they will never legally be allowed to smoke.
If you're smoking now, this will not affect you.
Oh, the horror!
It's DOB not age.
Or just... don't smoke?
I don't and never have, but this doesn't make the proposed rule less ridiculous.
Everyone here is arguing the benefits of prohibition. I'm just interested to know how much money Rishi (and/or his family members/friends/donors) have invested in vaping and nicotine alternatives.
It always confuses me to learn that when people want to ban smoking it somehow means ban "cigarettes" and not "nicotine"
Because smoking is WILDLY more harmful than vaping.
Yes vaping has SOME health risks, but it's like saying drinking tea and drinking four loko are just as bad because they both have caffeine
Bro what tea are you drinking that has nicotine
I can only imagine they meant caffeine, another common drug that's heavily abused but a little more socially accepted
Tbf, caffeine is not bad for you, it might even be good for you
How much did big coffee pay you to make this comment? I bet that link installs covfefe!
Yes, because not all drugs are bad for you.
I mean lets not pretend it's risk free, it raises blood pressure, causes headaches, can trigger arrhythmia in those at risk, etc. As far as drugs go it is probably the least risky, but it's not like it comes with zero health impacts.
I don't think anything is risk-free, including the vital molecules that we need to live. But caffeine has way a longer and significant list of health benefits that offset the risks at even moderate doses. So much so that there's enough evidence to encourage people to drink more as a prophylaxis. That list includes protection from gallstones, cancers, asthma, diabetes, Alzheimer's, and cardiovascular disease among other thing like a potential aide in weight loss and even a significant performance boost in sports. What's more, there have been large cohort studies that have found a 3% decreased in risk of developing arrhythmia per daily cup even when controlling for genetics. So the risks shouldn't be used to discourage or scare people away from a proven benefit when the therapeutic window includes up to 4 cups a day. Would I risk the occasional insomnia, headaches, and temporary increase in blood pressure for all the other positive effects given such a lenient margin? Absolutely.
So, really, the public perception that caffeine is somehow dangerous for being labeled a drug is on par with the belief that other substances are inherently dangerous. I think it spills over from the war on drugs, and the delusion of clean eating that often emerges from the dregs of misinformation on the internet and those who perpetuate those beliefs for monetary gain within the wellness communities, ironically enough.
I've known people, myself included, that have had negative health impacts from coffee, so that could be biasing my perspective. My father nearly died from heart complications after coffee, I bleed at the exit 100% of the time I drink coffee. I love coffee, but I can't drink it. There's probably something genetic that makes my line intolerant. I know people that end up in a migraine caffeine withdrawal cycle on a regular basis. Obviously these are person specific, so you really just need to know your body and act accordingly.
Nicoteane ๐
Well what's wrong with nicotine? In itself it's not worse than booze. It's all the other crap they add that makes it so terrible
Hi from the depths of a nicotine addiction and struggling to quit. Its a worthless chemical that gets more expensive everyday and my brain SCREAMS at me for a fix if I try to go more than even a few hours. At least heroin gets you high.
And even when you break free for the most part the chemical which is classified as a poison will make you crave it years later.
Every time I smell somebody smoking I need a pouch or I'll go ask for a bum
Stay strong on your recovery friend ๐ช
Thank you for your comment, this is always my biggest beef with those defending nicotine (smoking/vaping).
It's like, WHAT DO YOU EVEN GAIN FROM IT?
I switched to CBD only vape juice and it helped!
is not doing your argument any favors.
I mean I'm no expert but I do have some knowledge on the subject.
The difference is how you injest it. Our stomachs are much more resilient than our lungs. Your stomach is, for all intents and purposes, a sac of acid that dissolves mostly anything you put in it, your lungs on the other hand literally only do 1 thing all day and it's breathe air. There are different qualities of air of course, and microparticles in it that could cause harm, but on the whole it's more or less all the same.
Its like dumping garbage into a sink vs. a paper bag. The sink will get disgusting, and you may end up with a clogged drain, messed up pipes, or worse. But at the end of the day if you just clean the mess and don't do it too often it will probably be fine. The paper bag on the other hand is gonna get Soggy, gross, and start falling apart in your hands. You can dry it out but it will never quite be the same..
Absolutely, and that's the problem. The same argument you just posed could also be used against intentionally smelling flowers, or sticking your nose over a pot of boiling broth to smell that chicken deliciousness.
We don't know that vaped nicotine is more harmful than most things we breathe. In fact, I'd say there are non-drug things people do that we already know to be worse than vaping. Ever go camping? The smoke from that fire is worse than vaping, worse than almost any substance you might want to smoke.
So the question is how bad vaping (the action, not the drug) is. Is it as bad as sniffing a rose, as bad as lighting a scented candle? As bad as incense? As bad as a campfire? If, as many suspect, it's near the beginning of that scale, then the only critique we can rightly have is towards the substance vaped. If it's near the end of the scale, we kinda need some research to support that claim.
As of yet, the medical and scientific community have not found solid evidence that it's "like...garbage" at all if you don't like it on fire.
Which is where things get complicated. Because it MIGHT be terrible for you. Or it might not be bad at all.
Are you kidding? Booze is incredibly harmful!
Yup, and it's allowed and easily accessible
In the US it's the opposite, which is absolutely bizarro land. Want to ban vapes but not cigarettes.
Well, nicotine isn't the part of smoking that causes cancer
But it's the part that is addictive and keeps you smoking.
If addiction is a problem, should the general use of caffine be banned then? Thats why its kinda odd to specifically ban nicotine.
Choosing to ban specifically nicotine and not caffine is as silly as the idea that cigarettes should be legal but weed shouldnt.
Probably, yes. Even the age restrictions are kinda silly.
I do think it's ok to ban sale of "prepared smokables" like cigarettes. The harm level is known to be severe. But if someone wants to buy their own tobacco+papers and roll their own cigarettes, that's on them.
Of course, I don't think it would be effective to ban cigarettes. Just ethically coherent.
If it's not too harmful - what's the problem with being addicted? I'm addicted to coffee and drink at least two cups per day, as do most people around here.
Nobody out there is just buying Nicotine gum for the flavor. The overwhelming majority are struggling with an addiction that may one day kill them.
Also, as a former smoker of over 20 years as well as a current coffee addict, I can tell you from personal experience that there is no comparison between the two. Some substances are simply more addictive than others. Nicotine is one of the worst on the planet.
The problem with addiction is that it's safe to say that NOTHING is good if used to excess.
I used to be so hooked on caffeine I drank a 30-cup pot each day. It was giving me all kinds of issues, and I was only in my 20's. I'm still addicted, but I've learned to moderate. It took me years. And my 4th latte of the day is telling me that I'm not exactly great at it.
If I smoked/vaped Nicotine, I would have serious problems of taking too much all the time.
The full effects of vaping are not well understood, and while they're almost certainly not as bad as cigarettes, they're also almost certainly still bad for you, and they are indeed still addictive for the same reasons as cigarettes because they still use nicotine.
Further, one main reason their risks remain as poorly understood as they do is that (again, because of the same active ingredient) people who vape often also use cigarettes. The two are closely linked, I don't think my confusion should be so easily dismissed as that.
Oh sorry, I was thinking nicotine supplements like gum and patches. In my mind, smoking and vaping are the same thing. "Don't inhale particulate matter of any kind" is an excellent rule of thumb for all humans in all situations
Exactly my point. It always throws me for a minute when I realize people are treating them so separately.
That used to say that about artificial sweeteners. The question shouldn't be "is it bad for you" but "is it worse for you than 99 other things you do in a day". And vaping nicotine is "almost certainly bad for you" because of the nicotine, and nicotine is a known quantity - we know how bad it is and isn't. We don't have evidence that the mechanism of vaping is bad for you, and there's no "almost certainly" on that.
And the truth is, I have problems with people who lean on "poorly understood" for vaping. Evidence shows vaping as a mechanism (for THC as it were) going back over 2000 years to ancient Egypt. Widespread use of hookahs started in the 19th century and has tons mechanically in common with modern vaporization. There are some differences, but short of a few badly-designed vapes that let air reach the lungs while superheated, it looks a lot like people are saying "not well understood" because they cannot seem to "understand" bad things and they don't want to say good things. We have TONS of research precedent around room-temperature air with vaporized herbs in it.
If I were going to imbibe nicotine (or CBD or THC for that matter), I would probably prefer to vape it. I think the stigma against vaping needs to step aside for the vaccine research considering using vapes as an alternative to needle injection.
Because probably it was defined as burning, not usage of nicotine
Nicotine is one of the safest stimulants we know, up there with caffeine in terms of safety. There's little meaningful reason to ban nicotine. You're more likely to harm yourself with any number of other things we readily allow.
The addiction potential of nicotine alone is also far lower than people assume, because smoking is highly addictive both due to the rituals and the other substances involved. I tried to get used to nicotine via patches years back to use as a safe stimulant, and not only did I not get addicted, I couldn't get used to it (and I was not willing to get myself used to smoking, given the harm that involves). That's not to say you can't develop addictions to patches or vapes etc. too, but much more easily when it's as a substitution for smoking than "from scratch".
Restrictions on delivery methods that are harmful or not well enough understood, and combining nicotine with other substances that make the addiction and harm potential greater, sure.
this is from a 2015 article i found on the NIH library:
source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4363846/
in case you think i might be cherry picking, hereโs something from johns hopkins, and hereโs a source from the cdc. hereโs something recent from harvard for good measure.
edit: i should be clear that the other sources donโt say exactly the same things as the NIH one, but they do talk about how nicotine itself is very addictive, and they talk about some of the harm it can cause
The links from John Hopkins, the CDC and Harvard all focus on vaping, and so are irrelevant to the question of nicotine rather than the delivery methods.
The first link has nothing wrong in it. It's correct nicotine is toxic. So is caffeine - the LD50 of caffeine in humans is reasonably high, many grams. To the issue of ingestion, the issue is toxicity at doses people are likely to deal with.
To the cancer links, again without looking at delivery methods, this is meaningless. To let me quote one small part:
This makes sense. Don't inhale lots of particulates combined with nicotine in other words. There are also many other parts of the article that are useful. E.g. it's perfectly reasonable to accept that e.g. if you are on chemo you should stay off nicotine, and if you breastfeed you should stay off nicotine.
What the article does not show is that nicotine, as opposed to delivery methods like inhalation, is much worse than other drugs we're perfectly fine with.
I'll note that the article also includes things in its conclusion that it has categorically not cites studies in support of. E.g. it just assumes the addiction potential is proven (it is, but putting that in the conclusion of a paper without citing sources is really poor form, especially in a paper claiming to set out the issues with nicotine in isolation rather than smoking).
It also tried to drive up the scare factor by pointing out its toxicity at doses irrelevant for human consumption (e.g. as an insecticide; if wildly irrelevant doses should be considered, then we could write the same paper about how apples should be banned because they contain cyanide).
The "Materials and methods" section also goes on to say "Studies that evaluated tobacco use and smoking were excluded" but then goes on to make multiple arguments on the basis of harm caused by smoking (e.g. "Nicotine plays a role in the development of emphysema in smokers, by decreasing elastin in the lung parenchyma and increasing the alveolar volume") and cites a paper focused on smoking, in direct contradiction of the claim they made ("Endoh K, Leung FW. Effects of smoking and nicotine on the gastric mucosa: A review of clinical and experimental evidence. Gastroenterology. 1994;107:864โ78.")
So, yes, if you make claims about how you're going to address nicotine rather than smoking, and then go on to address smoking and other means of inhalation intermingled with the rest, and if you leap to conclusions you've not cited works in support of, and if you throw out risks without linking them causally to nicotine, you can make nicotine look very bad.
They also end with subjective statements they've not even attempted to support properly. E.g. they've gone from "here is why it's dangerous" to "it should be restricted", but if that was valid logic, we should restrict sales of apples too, most cleaning agents, all caffeinated products, housepaint, paint thinners, and a host of other things, it's a specious argument and fitting that such a badly argued paper ends with it. That this passed peer review is an incredible indictment of the journal which published it.
That doesn't mean nicotine is risk-free, but compared to other things we're happy to ingest, I stand by my statement. But don't inhale it.
they do focus on vaping, that does not mean they are irrelevant to the question of nicotine. from the cdc link:
there are also sections of that page titled "Why Is Nicotine Unsafe for Kids, Teens, and Young Adults?" and "How Does Nicotine Addiction Affect Youth Mental Health?" that focus only on nicotine.
from the harvard article:
from johns hopkins:
to your second point
i agree that it would be better to focus only on nicotine. i disagree that ignoring delivery methods is "meaningless". form the johns hopkins article:
this is only to say that the cancer bit is not irrelevant.
the part you quoted says that nicotine acts as an accelerator for the development of cancers from other sources, including things like car exhaust. these carcinogens are widespread in the modern world, so accelerating the development of cancer associated with them is a bad thing. eg, car exhaust fumes are everywhere.
i agree, this is bad. the problem you brought up with the "materials and methods" section is also bad. i'm not trying to defend the article holistically, i'm even particularly attached to that source (which is why i included a few different ones). the only reason i picked that article was that it explains some of the harmful effects of nicotine, and then backs them with citations. the article did this by reviewing "90 relevant articles" from PubMed and Medline, then discussing what those articles found - and these are the parts of the article i was interested in. i probably wouldn't use this approach if i were writing an academic paper on the subject, but i think it's fine for arguing on the internet that nicotine isn't "one of the safest stimulants we know". (i also included a few different sources to counteract the limitations of this approach.)
your statements were
and
i think the second statement was thoroughly debunked by the sources i've included: they all say nicotine is highly addictive, and one of them says it's "as addictive as heroin and cocaine". i think the sources i've shared also discredit the idea that nicotine is "up there with caffeine in terms of safety". i'm not trying to say nicotine is extremely dangerous, but rather that its danger is underestimated.
To this and your subsequent points, these claims are not backed up by sources in the pages you linked to, and as we've seen from the other paper as well, there's good reason to be cautious about assuming their claims are separating the effects of nicotine from the effects of the delivery method, especially given every single source actually cited by the CDC article is about smoking. Neither the Johns Hopkins or Harvard article cites any sources on nicotine alone that I can see.
A claim that is not backed by sources, and has divorced this from delivery method. E.g. how many people starts with gum or a patch and goes on to tobacco? I can certainly see there being some transfer from vaping to tobacco, but that is very different from the blanket claim and illustrates the problem with these sources that fail to disambiguate and extrapolates very wide claim from sources that looks at specific modes of use.
Yes, inhaling nicotine is bad. That we can agree on, and the source supports the limited claim that if you get nicotine in a way that binds to cites in your lungs, that is bad. The sources do not provide evidence that this risk is present for other modes of use. Maybe it is, but they've not shown that.
But that article is the best of the sources you gave. The others cite nothing of relevance to the claim I made that I can see after going through their links.
But the problem is that not nearly all of those "90 relevant articles" are relevant to their claim, and so they start off by misrepresenting what they're about to do. They then fail to quantify their claim in any way that supports their conclusion. They back up some specific claims without quantifying them (e.g. I can back up the claim that apples can be lethal, but you'd need vast quantities to get enough cyanide from an apple to harm you, so a claim they can be lethal in isolation is meaningless) or unpacking whether they are risks from nicotine in general, or nicotine via a specific delivery method. This is an ongoing problem with research on this subject.
They have not provided an argument for how any of those "90 relevant articles" supports their conclusion.
The say that, but they don't back it up. Ironically, pointing to heroin is interesting, because the addiction potential of heroin has also been subject to a lot of fearmongering and notoriously exaggerated, and we've known this for nearly half a century -- a seminal study of addiction in Vietnam war vets found the vast majority of those with extensive heroin use in Vietnam just stopped cold turkey when they returned to the US and the vast majority didn't relapse, the opposite of what the authors assumed going into the study. A study that was commissioned as part of Nixons then-newly started politically motivated and racist War of Drugs with the intent of providing evidence of how bad it was.
(see https://www.mayooshin.com/heroin-vietnam-war-veterans-addiction which gives a reasonable account of Robins study, and gives full reference to the paper)
That's also not to say that heroin isn't dangerous or seriously addictive because it is. Nobody should use heroin. But it's also frequently used as a means of exaggerating by implication because peoples idea of the addiction potential of heroin is largely way out of whack with reality and heavily context-dependent. So when someone drags out a heroin comparison without heavy caveats, that's reason to assume there is a good chance they're full of bullshit.
In other words: It's perfectly possible that some ways of taking nicotine can be as addictive as heroin, but that doesn't tell us what most people think it does. E.g. UK hospitals sometimes use heroin (as diamorphine; its generic name) for post-op pain management because it's far better than many alternatives.
The sources you've given do not present any support for claims that nicotine considered separate from delivery methods is particularly risky. They do provide support for claims it's dangerous when smoked, and possibly dangerous when inhaled even via vaping, and the takeaway that you should generally avoid inhaling stuff other than clean air without good reason is good. The other claims about nicotine in general do not appear to be backed up at all.
I find the notion that the danger is underestimated hilarious when one of the claims used a comparison with heroin to fearmonger.
Your source, if anything, is evidence to me of the opposite.
Well of course not. You weren't getting the dopamine rush of a large acute dose rushing from your lungs directly to your brain in a matter of seconds.
What the heck kind of hot take is this?
Regardless, the dangers โ including ease of addiction โ are well-known and are scientifically proven. Your anecdata of one does not change that.
A lot of the alternatives are already owned by Big Tobacco
You can go EU-way and say that all vapes should be rechargable(in both meanings), repairable and intercompatible. Basically opposite of what Big Tabacco does.
Disposable vapes should be banned.
Though even the reusable ones generate a decent amount of waste between coil assemblies that get replaced and the plastic bottles the juice comes in. I mean, I hope we eventually get to managing waste at that level, though I'm not holding my breath since it would require huge changes to the way we handle food logistics, which eclipses vape juice waste by a lot per person.
But the disposable ones are ridiculous.
You can build your own coils and mix your own liquid. Me and my mate both do it it's far cheaper and better for the environment, not too hard either once uve learnt the basics of materials and ohms n all.
I see angry wankers want to moan for the sake of moaning.
Eliminating smoking is a goos thing! I'll take my wins whenever possible, doesn't happen all that often.
But but there are other things that are also bad and if one proposal doesn't solve everything it is complete trash!!!
Yea not everything is a partisan issue, and this seems like a good thing? Antismoking efforts have largely been successful in a lot of places.
It's not one of those things where someone is choosing to harm themselves only. Smoking affects the people around you
So many people like to portray everything as a 'personal choice' while ignoring all said implications to others. Very rarely does something only actually impact you.
With enough hoop jumping anything can have a terinary chain of impact if you need to justify your cause.
Too many people use it as a cop-out to avoid being accountable. It's like when meat eaters say it's a 'personal choice.' Like yeah, it is a choice you mean, but it also implicates other things not only you.
Of course, not counting the smoke, ash, and other toxic oxidized chemicals that will be kicked up by gas and diesel vehicles with his scrapping the HS2 Manchester line. What a fucking idiot. "Oh no, we brexited ourselves so hard that we're poor now and can't afford to build infrastructure that would stand to enrich multiple cities for hundreds of years!"
Such classic smooth brained thatcherite conservatives. It's mind numbing that people keep voting for them.
Calling him smooth brained is looking past the fact that it's just plain corruption. He has interests in the oil industry, and they are against public rail. Hold him to account for what he is, a criminal.
Honestly he's more corrupt than Boris Johnson which is saying something.
Of course. Why else would a billionaire want the job of leading a country?
I mean, Sunak is a complete and utter bellend and cancelling half of HS2 is a ridiculous and nonsensical move.
But I think that the good old idiom about broken clocks might just apply here. Smoking bans are a good thing.
Yep, arresting a 47yo for smoking will be very on point for a broken clock.
Keep in mind, this will be policed only on poor ethnic minorities. Rich white guys in their private club s will still smoke with impunity.
This is the real answer right here - this is just another poverty tax/punishment.
I don't smoke, never have, but I know why people smoke, and it's now (that it's no longer seen as "cool") almost exclusively to try and relieve a tiny bit of the mountain of stress that existing in the world today (especially as part of a marginalised group) brings, and there are a million better ways to reduce the need to smoke, and improve the health outcomes of smokers (eventually, hopefully, to the point where they are able to reduce smoking or stop altogether).
Sunak is looking for a quick "win" for headlines and distraction, not to actually help people live healthier better lives (E: just seen his transphobic comments, which only reinforce this point). Why target the source of the problem when you can slap a band aid on it and bask in your own glory for a couple of days before your next bit of corruption is exposed?
Counterpoint: A lot of people that smoke want to stop smoking. A lot of people would more easily stop smoking if it was banned or not so easily available.
Also from the title of the article it seems that this would never apply to people that already smoke legally. The idea is that you set a minimum age and then you increase it every year. Meaning that in 100 years smoking is banned for everyone. But nobody was never banned from smoking when they were legal before. They were just never allowed to. So it prevents young people from picking up the habit.
right, just like how it being illegal prevents young people from drinking and smoking weed... ๐๐๐
Do you really disagree that it reduces the amount of young people consuming those substances?
Yes, For example, youth cannabis use halved in Canada after legalization. Also, when I was in HS, people were smoking even though it's illegal under the age of 18. People would just buy cigarettes from reserves and sell them to each other. If made illegal, people will just find other means to get it.
Prohibition doesn't work but better education does.
The proposal is to raise the legal smoking age every year. Meaning each yearly increase, this hypothetical 47yo will also age a year and so will be able to smoke forever
Not if he wanted to pick up smoking one year before legal age. So he will be chasing that legal age forever and can't smoke even if he's 68
Yes, I love it when people buy things from black markets too.
It's hard to believe so many people vote for them
Well recent polling would suggest that they no longer will be voting for them.
Ah yes, because making drugs illegal has worked so well in the past.
Setting age limits on substance use is a little different from criminalizing possession/use. In the case of smoking, it has helped reduce rates. This is something backed by people working in public health, who also support decriminalization for possession and bringing in safe consumption sites. It's all about finding the right approach for an issue.
I'd rather focus on calling out the OTHER bad stuff his government is doing, instead of turning this one partisan based on which party introduced it
It's not really an age limit when you'll never reach it, it's just gradual criminalization.
But this isn't am age limit, its using an age limit as a hack to basically grandfather in a smoking ban. It is about finding the right approach, and this ain't it.
Raising age limits on smoking has not reduced rates, making tobacco use taboo in society and knowing how dangerous it is for you has. In the US like 9% use any form of tobacco (which it's more likely around 7% or less because they include people who have smoked in their lives and quit as well). At this point no one is really smoking... going after tobacco still is just stupid.
It's more like 18-19% in the US.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10168602/#:~:text=In%202021%2C%20an%20estimated%2046,hookah)*%20(0.9%25).
Edit: not sure why the link got all fucky but it still works, somehow.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/1717/Tobacco-Smoking.aspx
%11...not 18-19% at all.
That's smoking, not tobacco products use. Vaping, for instance, is its own category.
Tobacco use includes more options, so the numbers will be higher
Read the article for fucks sake.
They're not making the drug illegal, just cigarettes. People who want nicotine still have other options.
It's like how no one goes out of their way to make/sell pure ethanol, because you can still buy beer or vodka.
That's still prohibition.... it's flat out dumb. A kid isn't smoking a $10 cigar...
Smoking is redundant today. Kids are getting enough cancer from the environment already.
It's not redundant. Harms compound. It's not like people max out their carcinogenic index or something. ๐
Pretty much anything in the state of California
This product is known to the state of California
Why not making the warnings be available elsewhere?
That law is an excellent example of knowledge vs wisdom. Knowledge is knowing that some substances may be carcinogenic. Wisdom is knowing that the dosage of a carcinogen is so low it hardly poses any risk.
To be fair though that's hard to put on a warning label and harder to explain.
So we would eliminate smoking the same way we eliminated drug use...by making it illegal.
/S if necessary
I'm generally pro legalization of drugs, but will say this is likely to be much more effective than the war on drugs ever was.
You don't outlaw possession, just the sales age. You'll see significantly fewer new starters as time goes because after 20 years 40 year olds that can buy wont be bothered to support fresh 18 year olds looking to start a new habit or whatever. The ones that really want to start can buy from abroad without any form of punishment.
I think it's different because I don't think anyone turns to their first cigarette looking to try and attain some new feeling. It's usually one of those things like... My friends were so I grabbed one from them and blah blah.
I would say I'm for the progressive increase in age, and I wrestle with my own hypocrisy seeing that I support legalizing other drugs. But maybe that's rooted in the basis that I've never had a pothead or dude on shrooms negatively impact me. Cigarettes however--littered everywhere, get smoke in your face, etc
people could easily say they hate the smell of weed - is that a good reason to outlaw?
I keep thinking of the rat experiments where rats in cages took drugs until they died but happy rats in rat societies turned away from drugs.
I think people take drugs, including cigarettes, to cope. If they didn't need to cope with terrible conditions, they wouldn't use the drugs (except a few outliers). To me, taking away people's cope is punching down.
We can't get rid of tobacco like we can quaaludes or some synthetic drug. It's going to be available to people. The question is do you want to create a huge black market for it (where people can easily lace cigarettes with fentanal, bonus? ), or do you want to address the reasons that people chain smoke?
Part of the point of a gradual ban is to avoid creating a supply vacuum that gets filled by a black market.
Is there any evidence to suggest a gradual ban actually prevents a black market?
It's worth noting that even the happy rats would go get the occasional hit, they just weren't dependent on the drugs. They did it for fun once in a while, not frequently as an escape from reality. This is how healthy people enjoy drugs.
That doesn't change the end result though. Addiction is the result of profound despair, not the cause of it. Giving people hope and support keeps them from needing to escape.
I think people want to do things they are not allowed to. They will go through the effort to find a way. In a lot of states that legalized Marijuana, its use went down after legalization. Once it was normalized, some people lost interest. I think the opposite happens when you make it illegal, you're basically making it cool again. This isn't just drug use, it's with a lot of things, if you forbid it, people will suddenly want that thing more than they did before. Religion comes to mind. Authoritarian countries that want to stamp out a religion or all religion often cause a religious resurgence. There's nothing quite like being told you can't do something to make you want to do it or visa versa. People are naturally oppositional.
Smoking's already dramatically fallen out of popularity with younger people, being replaced by vaping. So I don't think it really matters what they do at this point - smoking's a dinosaur waiting to die.
Although vaping is far more popular and at least better than smoking, it's still actively bad for health. I'd be interested to see how a similar policy to ban vapes would go over in the west like they're trying in Taiwan.
Fast food, alcohol, motorcycles, and Instagram are also bad for your health. I'm not sure how vaping compares. Vaping is definitely easier to demonize.
Motorcycles aren't bad for your health. Crashing them is, but just driving them isn't, even doing it a lot. Unlike the other things you mentioned where doing them a lot is unhealthy.
Vaping isn't bad for your health, it's what you put into the vape that might be. There are already commonly used medical technologies that are adjacent to vaping, and many researchers think we will be able to use vaping in the future to replace hypodermic needles in some situations.
That is indeed true, but don't forget that vaping addiction comes from the nicotine inside it that gets into your body physically. Riding a motorcycle or being on Instagram are still addictive but they don't "force" it upon you
Interesting turn of phrase. What is "actively bad for health", really? Experts seem to be pretty convinced that as bad as Vaping might be, it's not as bad as alcohol. And we in the US know what happens when you try to ban alcohol. I have Prohibition to thank for the incredible Whiskey industry of today.
Yeah the only thing raising the smoking age will do is make smoking cool again.
Have you been literally anywhere in Europe? Smoking is not a dinosaur waiting to die
From someone who has smoked and quit, I was really blind sided by how addictive nicotine was. People talk about adults and what they put in there body but nicotine really is a different monster
I never felt the same buzz after my first cigarette, it felt like I was fucking drunk after my first smoke lol.
After that I was basically just chasing the dragon, I was smoking about 15-30 cigarettes a day for about 1-2 years. Never again.
Huh. I gave it a try, and while drunk, i just went on and on, but overall it just smelled so bad that it never became a habit. I guess i'm lucky
Some people definitely don't respond the same and it real does take 1-3 days to really start to notice for some people
What I don't see is why smoking should be the main nicotine delivery device when it can easily be done without the cancerous smoke.
Isolated nicotine is apparently not cancerous. We just choose to enforce the continued coupling of nicotine and cancer, and refuse to permit alternatives that decouple if from cancer if their dosage isn't pitiful.
"Either get the weak alternatives, or the cancerous ones."
The moderate non-cancerous alternatives are illegal.
Or do it like Germany: make vaping extremely expensive so people go back to smoking. Stupid.
Absolutely obscene and short sighted what the German government have done. Everything is taxed per ml, even if it has no nicotine in it. As you say it's cheaper to actually smoke.
So are you for or against Sunak's proposal?
One problem: most smokers start as teens, all while it's forbidden to sell kids the cancer sticks.
Addition: I would punish the selling of tobbaco products to kids even more, including the ability of suing the adults for damages in the future (If it won't cause a cobra problem later on), and also give the ability to non-smoking workers to sue their employers if they give smokers more breaks.
My 13-year-old daughter already has friends who vape. That's how insidious it is and how deeply embedded in the public consciousness nicotine-based products are.
Yeah, but then ultimately it becomes illegal for everyone to own them. Meaning shops cant sell them.
Then comes the black-market.
And where does teens get the idea to smoke from? Is it from grandpa that coughs louder than a jet engine? Or is it the older cooler teens who got the idea from older teens, who got the....
You get the point.
I smoked as a teen because some of my friends did, they smoked because some of their friends did. And you don't have to look very far to find the 18-20 year olds who provided them.
Luckily, I never smoked much and mostly kept it to social smoking which made it very easy for me to quit once I grew up and developed some brain-cells that enjoyed co-operating with eachother.
I think New Zealand implemented a similar measure some years back, it should probably be good to see how well it works there. Hopefully this doesn't create a black market for tobacco.
Yes we did. Have not heard anything about it since... so it's probably working as intended.
We're currently freaking out about vape shops springing up every ten feet.
My first cig was illegally imported and sold by a dealer involved with gangs. All its done is make people get tobacco from their dealer rather than the guy outside the shop.
Yeah but the 18 year old buys for the 15 year old-- brothers, sisters, upperclassmen, etc.
The more that gap becomes larger, the less likely they have social interaction and access. How many 40 year olds buy for 15 year olds today? In 20 something years, 40 year olds will be the youngest purchasers.
Afaik NZ has already implemented such a rule.
It has.
He should also star making crimes illegal so that they can live in a society without crime /s.
Finally something sensible from this guy. Last week it was all big auto lobby nonsense.
I feel we've done a good enough job at making smoking undesirable, effectively banning it is excessive. It would be better to focus on doing what was done to cigarettes to vapes. Kids arent smoking nearly as much but theyre vaping like mad. I see kids as young as 13-14 doing it. Vapes are allowed to look appealing, combine that with their nice smell and flavour, ofc young people are going to gravitate toward them instead.
Make it so vape packaging is bland and has similar warnings as cigarretes, and actually teach kids about addiction instead of just a hard "dont touch these". Everyone with a braincell knows that if you ban something from young people, theyre gonna do it more
But what will boebert do while jerking off dudes at movie theaters?
This won't affect her as Sunak is the Prime Minister of the UK.
No, no, they have a point.
She was vaping, not smoking.
She went from suck to blow
Fucking surveillance state you have there
It's a camera... in private property....
I don't see anything wrong with having cameras in cinemas and theatres.
You say that, but yet bringing a camera is guaranteed to get you kicked out of a cinema.
I think they should raise it by 1 year every 2 years.
Every year should be fine, illegal to buy cigarettes if you're born after 1945 so we can finally stomp out the tobacco
Broken clock right twice a day type of deal with Sunak
That's gonna work splendidly since underage people would never dare to smoke!
Ehhhhhh, you make it permanently harder for a generation and eventually, barring a political change, you need to find an 80 year old to boot cigarettes for you from that one shop down the road that still caters to a rapidly shrinking audience.
Not to say that this is a good idea or one with which but long-term, it could work. (Or at least reduce smoking to a relatively minor few.)
Eventually stores will just stop selling them. Why stock cigarette when you only sell 10 packs a month.
I think itโs a great idea. People will create a black market for them, but it will be really small and die out.
Itโs not like you really get anything from it like you do from alcohol or other drugs.
There's already a black market for tobacco, and it will just grow in size not shrink. You can buy 50g for like ยฃ5 on DNMs.
Yeah, the risk is that if the black market becomes large enough, it will mean youths will have easier access to cheaper cigarettes than the current situation (with the added issue of cigarettes being entirely unregulated, meaning they're going to put God knows what in them).
Similar ehhhhhh as earlier.
There are moments when a cigarette gives you an amazing or just right, feeling, for lack of a better word. In reality you're just sating a self inflicted addiction, but it can feel great to do so.
I don't think it's a good trade, that's why I no longer smoke, but I understand the simple pleasure. Even if in the long, medium, heck, often even short term that pleasure has stupid costs.
It's a nice theory but it does sort of forget that other countries exist - the black marketeers will just smuggle tobacco in. They're also going to be guaranteed a market of younger immigrants who've gotten addicted in another country.
Sure, at first, absolutely, though even then you are raising the cost of smokes, not just financially but convenience, potential customer base (not everyone has the connections or would feel comfortable buying on the resale market) etc.
Long run, sure, smokers will probably always exist. But at the point where it's awkward to smoke in public you've probably cut down on a good percentage of smoking at all.
It's still gonna slowly reduce use. And that's better than nothing.
How is this supposed to be enforced? In a decade's time are shopkeepers going to have to challenge anyone buying a packet of fags who looks under 28? And then later it'll be "sorry mate, can you prove you're 44?" and so on.
Asking for ID when buying cigarettes is not exactly an outlandish proposal. It's already done around the current legal smoking age.
Arguably, this proposal makes it easier, since there's a fixed cutoff date of birth instead of calculating their age.
I think you answered your own question.
I loathe Sunak, his political party and their ideals... but this is pretty good actually Maybe he'll manage to do a single worthwhile thing
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Addressing the annual Tory party conference today, Mr Sunak also promised to restrict the availability of vapes under plans to "put the next generation first".
Read More:Rishi Sunak confirms northern leg from Birmingham to Manchester will be scrappedSunak says nobody wants an election - the truth is he can't risk one | Beth Rigby
Ministers have faced repeated calls to ban vapes to help protect children and reduce the significant environmental impact of the single-use products.
It commissioned a review, published last June and led by Dr Javed Khan, which made a series of recommendations, including increasing the legal age for buying tobacco.
Cancer Research UK's chief executive Michelle Mitchell said: "Raising the age of sale on tobacco products is a critical step on the road to creating the first ever smoke-free generation."
"Future generations of adults who are considered old enough to vote, pay taxes, drive a car and drink alcohol are going to be treated like children and denied the right to buy a product that can be purchased legally by people a year older than them."
The original article contains 665 words, the summary contains 179 words. Saved 73%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
I don't know if that's feasible given that adults are adults after all. But maybe just restrict the sale of cigarettes and make it so burdensome to sell them in shops so most don't even bother. And do the same for vapes. Vapes are ridiculously easy to buy so stick them in the same locked cabinet that other nicotine products go in and ban all advertising and signage.
I think that might help. Increasing friction for an activity makes it less likely to happen (like when your TV remote is in another room).
That needs a bit more differentiation, no? After all, there are vapes without nicotine. I would also differentiate between single-use vapes (just ban these, wtf) and refillables. They're also (most probably) much less unhealthy compared to smoking tobacco.
In my country (Germany), vapes are only available in shops, and most sadly only offer single-use vapes. Cigarettes were (are?) also sold in vending machines, on streets or in bars. So from my point of view, vapes are already harder to buy than cigarettes. What situation did you have in mind?
All in all, I think it would make sense to make access to these things harder / price higher based on how harmful they are, and how addictive they are.
All for it!
Imagine turning 18 (or whatever the smoking age is in the UK) and starting to smoke during the year this rule takes effect. Then, every year from that point forward, you'd have to wait for your birthday to start smoking again.
It is 18.
But this law will be designed to target current 14 year olds. In theory they will never legally be allowed to smoke.
If you're smoking now, this will not affect you.
Oh, the horror!
It's DOB not age.
Or just... don't smoke?
I don't and never have, but this doesn't make the proposed rule less ridiculous.