Forgot how Pro-drug the fediverse is as well; vapes should be regulated as heavily as cigarettes and other tobacco products. Just because it's less harmful doesn't mean it's not harmful.
The laws around vapes are nonsense and pseudoscience. That's what really pisses people off.
Flat prohibitions aren't saving any lives or ending any health crisis. Meanwhile cigarettes are widely available with a dozen flavors.
The laws around vapes are nonsense and pseudoscience.
Recognising that there are health issues, without fully understanding them yet due to there having not been enough time to form complete and solid conclusions, doesn't make it pseudoscience. It means we should be cautious and continue to study, and certainly not widely adopt their use in the mean time assuming everything will be fine. Especially as it directly interacts with such a sensitive part of our inner bodies, and especially as the largest group taking up their use are teenagers.
Flat prohibitions aren't saving any lives or ending any health crisis. Meanwhile cigarettes are widely available with a dozen flavors.
I disagree, to blanket suggest prohibitions don't save lives is not based in fact. Even the misguided alcohol prohibition over in the USA saved lives, reducing the number of deaths that would have otherwise been caused by intoxication (dangerous driving being an obvious example, domestic abuse, etc).
And take this example from literally only yesterday, where a child almost died due to electronic cigarettes and the complications therein (often when people discuss the danger of X and Y, they assume a completely healthy person to begin with, and ignore that a large percentage of the population has at least one illness or environmental factor that it can complicate).
Also, yes cigarettes are available, but their use in public is heavily restricted, and they aren't attractive to young people any more thanks to decades of hard work in education. Electronic cigarettes however are targeted directly at teenagers in a very predatory way, suggested to be safe and clean, and thus we have these new issues.
In the end, I suspect electronic cigarettes are less dangerous than breathing in smoke from tobacco, which is insanely dangerous, but that will not make them safe, either, and the cumulative effects of electronic cigarette use over decades simply isn't fully known yet.
We're working on it, and where our health is concerned, especially that of our impressionable youth, an abundance of caution is always the best course of action.
Thank you for taking the time to develop a well thought response. I learned some things and it got me thinking in a new way!
I was under the impression that prohibition of alcohol did not reduce any harm, because people flocked to speakeasys, and the quality of the homemade alcohol was not good. A good chunk of the alcohol beverages people drank during prohibition would give them poisoning of some kind.
People didn't stop drinking, they just started drinking homemade alcohol made with industrial alcohol. The US government also made sure that the only kind of alcohol people could aquire to make drinks was not good for human consumption.
Your comment is the first time I've ever heard anybody say anything good about prohibition. Maybe it saved a few people, like you said, but overall alcohol related deaths probably stayed around the same, or even went up thanks to all the poisoning. It's hard to tell, because the US didn't keep track of these numbers at the time.
I'm more worried about the shit in the air around me than what is in my vape juice. At least I know what's in that
you're very wrong. Prohibition ONLY means lower quality, more dangerous products on the streets and it's another excuse to criminalize poverty/mental illness.
Yawn. Prohibition is not about protecting youths, its about protecting income. Your conclusions regarding the supposed benefits of prohibition are largely opinion, a generally refuted by historians. Flat bans produce unregulated markets, which lead to excess death and injury.
Maybe both should have restrictions?
Well they are bad for you so it's not exactly pseudo science, and the problem is that kids are using them.
Vapes come in candy flavour which is ridiculous, not because it exists, but because is sold to children.
At the very least I think we should say that you have to be at least what 18 to buy them. I don't think that's too bad.
How exactly are they bad for you? Where's the studies? You gotta be 21 to buy them, at least in the US. I quit smoking and use vapes exclusively and I can tell a huge difference in how I feel and breathe
I've been vaping for 10 years and you're kidding me with this right? Of course it's not good for you.
Yeah I was about to say, I quit smoking like 10 years ago. Then due to stressful situations and poor decisions making skills, I began vaping (I want to quit, fuck past me). I 100% know for a fact my lungs are way worse than before. Not as bad as when I was smoking a pack and a half a day, but I play guitar and sing often. It's noticable.
Just because it isn't good for you doesn't mean it is bad for you
In this case yes, it absolute does. But justify it however you need.
Do you think inhaling anything besides air on a regular basis could possibly be good for your lungs?
There's multiple completed ten-year studies on vaporizer use available with pretty high N. More frequent sickness and lung injury are shown to raise demonstrably over a five to ten year use period. It's less pronounced than cigarette smoking, but it is an unhealthy choice.
So you're breathing slightly less toxic gas and therefore clearly it's great and good for you.
Absolutely zero logic.
I'm not going to try and find the studies for you because I'm on a phone right now, you can go Google it if you're actually interested, not that you will, but be assured the studies are out there otherwise they wouldn't be talking about regulation.
you can go Google it if you’re actually interested
Fuck that, you made a claim and the onus on you is to back it up.
Ah the classic except it isn't on me because my claim isn't extraordinary, your claim is your claim is that in taking toxic gases is not bad for you that's the extraordinary claim the onus is on you to back it.
Quote me where I made that claim, much less any claim at all, go ahead.
The only comment I have in this entire thread is calling you out about your "you google it" bs.
Where did I say vapes are good for you? Still don't see any links to any studies. They're better than cigarettes, period.
Vaping should be limited to 18+ consumers just like "standard" nicotine products. But we shouldn't pretend, like the WHO and other organizations do, that Vaping hasn't been used by many (myself included) to effectively quit nicotine. Personally I kicked a 2 pack a day habit because of vaping and today I use no nicotine products (including vaping) because of it.
Agreed.
More restrictions is uncalled for.
I quit smoking cigarettes using a "box mod" in 2016 and gradually tapered down from a very high nicotine blend to 0 nicotine using 100% vegetable glycerin and peppermint flavoring and then I finally literally lost my vape and just never bothered to replace it...
So anyways, I started smoking over 30 years ago and I don't vape or smoke anymore.
We need stricter regulations on the production of disposables or ingredients. Like, using diacetyl which is known to cause popcorn lung. Or the whole vitamin E oil causing lung disease in black market vapes...
Maybe something similar to the regulations around alcohol. We know alcohol is bad, but the long term effects are much different than going blind from methanol.
Smoking or vaping isn't good long term, but it shouldn't be able to kill your lungs after a few uses.
While the popcorn lung and vitamin e oil shit were both real they were not truly widespread problems and they were already regulated /legislated against.
Those people broke the fucking law.
More regulations don't prevent lawbreakers.
That was a problem with black market and unregulated Vape production, especially in the early days. It was never widespread, it just happened in a few places where people were buying vape products off of some random guy on the street. This was mostly a problem when this stuff first came out, because there wasn't a lot of legitimate companies making the vape juice and cartridges at first.
I do agree that we need regulation on the disposable vapes just for the amount of trash that they create. Disposables are so much worse for the environment than refillable vapes.
Shouldn't that be an argument to regulate it less, not "as heavily"?
Many mundane things are less harmful than cigarettes and shouldn't be regulated as heavily.
Edit: typo
yup zero logic in his comment, still has 30 upvotes right now.
I mean what I said reflects reality, is that so troubling for you?
If it's less harmful why on earth should it be regulated just as heavily?
Of course I agree it shouldn't be sold to kids, but what the EU did to vaping is a massive shit show.
I quitted smoking overnight thanks to vaping and then also stopped vaping a few years later. That was before the regulations though. I honestly don't believe I could pull this off today with all the braindead rules and let's not forget the massive price increase for liquids.
I agree it should be regulated. But that's not what's happening. What's happening is prohibition.
What's too heavy about how cigarettes are regulated in your country? I'm in Canada and when I smoked cigarettes I never felt like I was obstructed in making my own choices.
Many mundane things are less harmful than cigarettes and shouldn't be regulated as heavily
Why not? We regulate the shit out of food and medicine and those are the exact opposite of harmful when everything goes as planned.
vapes should be regulated as heavily as cigarettes
My comment referred to this quote. It's a comparison between how heavy two things are regulated. Neither needs to be heavily regulated for this comparison to work.
What’s too heavy about how cigarettes are regulated in your country? I’m in Canada and when I smoked cigarettes I never felt like I was obstructed in making my own choices.
I'm fine with how cigarretes are regulated in Germany. Could be still heavier. I'm not fine with regulating vapes as heavy. Especially taxes.
It's ridiculous when vaping becomes more expensive than smoking. This creates incentive to quit vaping and smoke. Should be reversed.
Many mundane things are less harmful than cigarettes and shouldn’t be regulated as heavily
Why not? We regulate the shit out of food and medicine and those are the exact opposite of harmful when everything goes as planned.
That's two different kinds of regulation. You're referring to regulations to make things safer. These are great.
I was talking about regulations to make things less accessible. These are great if the things are dangerous.
It makes sense to make things less accessible which are more dangerous.
I'd ban cigarettes and legalise heroin
fuck vapes and drug abuse in general, but the fedi isn't pro fucking anything. Just because you see a pattern doesn't mean it's there.
I thought vaping was fine because I didn’t know it had nicotine in it.
Super fucking addictive, it should absolutely be regulated because currently in most places it isn’t, as evidenced by all the kids buying vapes.
it should absolutely be regulated because currently in most places it isn’t, as evidenced by all the kids buying vapes.
They're regulated the same as cigarettes. Kids find ways to get cigarettes, alcohol, and drugs, too, despite how regulated they are.
It's more to do with the fact that they're intentionally marketed towards kids in a way cigarettes and alcohol aren't so much anymore.
People say that but I've never seen a vape ad for kids.
In what way are they marketed towards kids?
Just a few examples. I sure hope you don't think Philip Morris is too ethical to use this kind of advertising science.
Very little is known about how e-cigarette marketing is being perceived by youth...
Very first sentence from the first link lol.
Of course PH wants young addicts. They always have.
I'm asking for advertisements aimed at kids because I have never seen any. None of those links show any ads. All they're saying is that vapes were advertised and people bought vapes.
What even would meet your standards here? Only an ad that started "Hey, kids!"?
Juul was buying ads on Cartoon Network/Seventeen/Nickelodeon and youth education sites. They got sued for it. They then fired the ad firm that developed an adult-oriented campaign for them in favor of the vaporized campaign which I definitely see plainly targets teens -- and the courts agreed, since they paid over $400 mil in fines because of it.
Companies do what they can to maintain plausible deniability. But it's also an absolute fact that the fruit/candy-flavored vapes are vastly more popular among youths. The FDA has entire teams dedicated to "advising" producers on how not to market these things to kids based on expert advice.
Your position here is one where you default to giving the producers of harmful, addictive products the benefit of the doubt. When I see Puff Bar being ranked among the most popular vape brands for teens, my assumption is that there is actual malice leading to that position.
And to be clear, the youth vaping market did not exist until the era of Juul reinvented it through advertising. These were not particularly new products, just new ways of selling them. Smoking was solidly on the decline among teens. It was new sales strategies that reversed that trend.
What even would meet your standards here?
An actual advertisement, for one.
That's all I'm asking for. An advertisement for vapes directed at kids. That's it. Just an example. Preferably two, but one is fine.
I'm not asking for essays about how it's possible kids are attracted to bright colors or how ads cause sales to increase. Especially when those essays admit front and center that no one actually knows the answer.
Just link to an ad. Goddamn lol
... Already happened.
Where? I've yet to be shown an ad.
Bright colors absolutely does count, but so do candy-like flavors. We've actually seen similar issues with cannabis edibles, selling the oil or butter is fine but selling cannacandy or brownies causes a big uptick in teen use and the health effects of heavy cannabis use during puberty aren't well understood yet (mostly because America is a fucking asshole).
So I can't enjoy a candy taste as an adult? Just because children like it?
Yeah, me too. But I think the point was about ads, not usage.
No, you can, but for a dangerous product like this it'd be more responsible for the company to sell the flavoring in a separate package that can be mixed with the actual vape juice and let consumers combine them.
With nicotine in particular, that would be a fatal idea. It doesn't take much nicotine at all to kill a human, and it absorbs through your skin, so.... Yeah. Pure nicotine shouldn't be sold to just anyone.
Banning candy and such flavors was provably effective at reducing youth smoking rates in many studies, even knowing that other flavored tobacco/nicotine products were still available to absorb some of that demand. There's no reason to think vaping would be different.
And banning walking I'm sure would lead to fewer falls
They absolutely are. Even the anti-vape ads seem to be made to promote it. They look super friendly and don't show the actual harm it does like smoking ads used to.
In the same way everything is. It's friendly and bright, and yes those are valid criteria.
Edit: I'm being downvoted, but how else do you advertise towards children? If your vape ad looks like the toy aisle then who is it marketing towards? Toys are marketed towards children by being bright, colorful, and friendly looking. They aren't marketing towards the parents with that, right? If it's valid to say that about toys then it must be valid about other products as well. Disagree? Give a counter argument. Can't come up with one? Why do you disagree then?
Idk but you're probably being disagreed with because by that line of thought adult products can't have any color on them.
Which is exactly what I mean. Just because something has brought colors it doesn't make it for children.
Having bright colors makes it more appealing to everyone but is an especially effective marketing tactic for children. Of course it doesn't only appeal to children, but it's a provably effective way to get children's attention.
Everyone is drawn to bright colors, not just children.
I still haven't been shown any ads at all, much less any aimed at children.
I'm not about to watch some ads to win an argument on the internet. Here's this though, which I added into an edit above but you may have not seen that.
This video is unbearable to watch. It's even worse than the DARE crap in the 80's. If this is your proof that there are ads directed at kids I'm sorry but it ain't it.
Nicotine on its own is ballpark as addictive as caffeine, vapes lack the MAOIs contained in cigarettes which on their own are much more addictive (atypical antidepressants, hardly surprising) but in synergy with nicotine even more.
as evidenced by all the kids buying vapes.
They also bought fidget spinners. Also I've never seen a kid with a vape.
If I could just push a button and make all non medical use tobacco become impossible to grow, I would push that button a million times just to be sure. I hope everyone working for Philip Morris gets lung cancer.
That should just be an accepted cost to enter the industry.
Double standards everywhere, Alcohol should get kicked too.
Frankly, we need fewer prohibitions on substances, not more. I drink responsibly and like it. We also know you can't ban alcohol without a black market, so why even feign that it could be done?
We need better enforcement to prevent people acting like idiots when they drink. I don't have ideas to offer on how, as I haven't pondered it at length, but that's the best path in my mind.
Thank you for having some common sense. If we know anything about history, prohibitions on substances just lead to worse outcomes with black market activity and criminal enterprises.
Tobacco is a weird one, because most people I know that smoke, don't really enjoy it, they are just literally addicted. Still, I don't think banning nicotine would be a great move.
I think the taxes are pretty effective. I smoked for a few years in my younger days, and I quit when the prices started to go way up, thanks to taxes.
I don't smoke but I love nicotine. Hope they don't go too wild trying to regulate smokeless alternatives out of existence. Nicotine is a fun drug.
I agree with this. I used nicotine lozenges to wean myself off cigarettes and this was successful.
However, I did notice as a side effect that they helped me concentrate on complex tasks.
So, although I don't use them daily, I leave a pack lying around just to suck on in the same way I might use a cup of coffee to sharpen up in the morning.
I genuinely believe this does me no harm. I think the debates started to get heated when inhalation is involved.
My bourbon French toast says otherwise.
Hence, double standard lol
true, but most if not all tobacco users get addicted and smoke every day, killing our young people.
alcohol, while dangerous is not as habit forming, but I see where you're coming from
It's entirely possible to enjoy alcohol responsibly and the vast majority of people do. Shall we can cars because some people can't stop getting in them while inebriated and crashing them?
99.999% of smokers are doing substantial damage to themselves and others.
Fuuuuck Philip Morris.
Tax them heavily and use the proceeds to pay their customers' medical expenses
I interviewed with them once, and they swore up and down that they were cleaning up and divesting of all the harmful stuff, and wanted me to trust they were all about health and a smoke-free future.
Thankfully they were so staggeringly full of bullshit during the interviews that I quickly realized it'd be an absolutely horrifically toxic (groan, yes, sorry) place to work irrespective of my other doubts, and I ended up telling them I didn't want to continue the process and that I was so unhappy with the assorted bullshit during the process that I didn't want to ever be approached by them again.
That's the very long way of saying I'm not the slightest bit surprised it turns out they are in fact still massive asshats, and I'm very happy I caught on early enough.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
In a message sent by the PMI’s senior vice-president of external affairs last month and seen by the Guardian, staff were told to find “any connection, any lead, whether political or technical” before a meeting of delegates from 182 countries.
The email sent on 22 September by Grégoire Verdeaux, the senior vice-president of external affairs at PMI, said: “The agenda and meeting documents have been made public for the main part.
Unfortunately they reconfirmed every concern we had that this conference may remain as the biggest missed opportunity ever in tobacco control’s history … WHO’s agenda is nothing short of a systematic, methodical, prohibitionist attack on smoke-free products.”
Without “reasonable, constructive outcomes” , Verdeaux wrote, the “WHO will have irreversibly compromised the historic opportunity for public health presented by the recognition that smoke-free products, appropriately regulated, can accelerate the decline of smoking rates faster than tobacco control combined”.
Tobacco companies are not invited to the event and Verdeaux said despite this he would be in Panama “to publicly denounce the absurdity of being excluded from it while PMI today” was “undoubtedly the most helpful private partner WHO could have in the fight against smoking”.
Asked about the leaked email, Verdeaux said in a statement: “What I say publicly and what I say to our employees is exactly the same: I am proud to make the case to governments and media that innovation drives down smoking rates faster and for that reason should be supported and regulated.
The original article contains 880 words, the summary contains 246 words. Saved 72%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Given the damage they have done to society is there a good reason the fines aren't all your companies money and all of your executives money we seize and destroy and products farms and machinery that can't be sold for non-tobacco use?
so glad I quit.
Now can someone give a probability for the success of that?
It's an international organism, with scientific input from almost every nation of the world.
Tell me more about this organism.
Wikipedia is your friend for a quick overlook. Next stop would be their own site.
I think he was taking the piss out of your use of "organism" instead of "organization".
Couldn't care less.
Cool, thanks for letting me know
Really, it's fine. Of by small means it contributed towards the persons happiness, great. Doesn't diminishes me in any way.
^ This is what happens when someone's only social interaction is their parents.
Did that snark remark made you feel better about yourself? Are you now more comfortable in your own skin? Good for you!
Couldn't care less
Vaping seems to be healthier than cigarette smoking from what I've read, and it makes sense. Burnt particulate matter is hell on your lungs.
But it should be used for smokers to break addiction. And recreational use needs to be heavily regulated until we can do long term studies that show it's relatively safe.
I'll explain as someone with professional chemistry experience. Vaping vaporizes water to deliver the nicotine -- or just to deliver flavored vapor without the nicotine. This process gives me two major concerns:
It isn't pure water vapor, there's additives and oils even for juices with no nicotine. We don't know what breathing in the vaporized flavor additives does. And, we don't know if the process is generating enough heat to cause chemical reactions and degradation of the non water components. It's completely possible that carcinogenic or toxic compounds could come from this. This warrants a lot more study, and fortunately, it should be quite doable. Spectroscopy could tell us a lot.
Remember how Flint had a lot of lead in their water? Heavy metals in water come from surface atoms on the metal leaching into the water. You can treat the water to either discourage this or cause it to precipitate out. Heat increases the frequency of leaching -- so vaporizing water with the coils is going to lead to heavy metal particles in the vapor. This is where we really don't have information. We can likely determine the quantity and type of metal atoms, but we can't determine what it's going to do to the lungs. A big safety concern with tiny particles is breathing them in, because nanoparticles and the like will also ravage your lungs when inhaled. Doesn't even matter what the solid particle is.
The latter concern is where we need long term research. We need to know if the heavy metal particles in the vapor are causing damage in the same way that nanoparticles do. And we need to know what prolonged exposure to those metal particles does. After 40 years of vaping, would enough metal have deposited in airways to cause health issues? It's very possible.
Is that to say stop right this second? No, but just be aware of the risks and don't go overboard. Heavy drinking is probably still worse for you than this, and smoking is definitely worse.
Water? VG and PG.
It's not just glycols/oils for all of them at least I thought
Care to cite your sources in that claim? I'm know they are far from anything that could be considered "good" but "worse than cigs" is news to me.
I am not the previous poster, but the argument that I've heard on that front is that smoking was already trending rapidly downwards in use and would have made itself obsolete within a couple generations.
Vaping on the other hand established itself as a "safer" alternative to smoking and became trendy with more younger people who wouldn't have smoked in the first place.
Yeah, that's in no way worse than inhaling smoke and dozens of proven carcinogens...
Vaping is worse than nothing, but the notion that it's worse than smoking is completely deranged.
Unless those Truth ads are to be believed; the ones that claim vapes release toxic heavy metals from the coils.
They are not to be believed. I'm shocked you fell for a Truth campaign, if that's what you're insinuating.
No one claims vaping is good for you, but there is very little evidence of the damage they may cause up until this point, and basically anything is better than smoking a cigarette.
There are a lot of issues we could discuss, such as how addictive they are, or how they're often owned by big tobacco rebranding themselves in deceitful ways, but the grandiose claims are overwhelmingly fabricated.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29467105/ so this study is bullshit? I know Truth likes to bend what the truth is, but there are several studies indicating the metal presence in many brands of vape products. Even the American Lung Association warns of it.
While I can't speak to this specific paper, I know that the methodologies of several of these kind of "studies" are horribly flawed. I know there was one that found that heavy metals were released by coils ... when the wattage was cranked up so high that no person would ever even be able to use the product that way. For non-vapers, if the wattage is too high, the cotton wick burns as well, and is impossible to inhale. The simple fact is that if the cotton wick isn't burning, there's no way the coil is getting hot enough to produce free metal vapors.
Remember when there was that rash of deaths? And nicotine vapes got the blame right away? Yeah, that was because some bathtub lab THC vape carts had vitamin E acetate in them. Remember when there was a lot of talk about popcorn lung? That was because of diacetyl, which is a butter flavor. Nobody has used it for a very long time.
I'm not trying to say that vaping is healthier than not vaping, but it is definitely safer than smoking tobacco. As a harm reduction method, it is a valuable tool.
Thank you for the knowledge and patience you've demonstrated, I agree with and appreciate everything you wrote.
Without access to the full paper, it's hard to say. The abstract only mentions how many products they tested, but not what those products were. There's no way of knowing if those products came from reputable manufacturers or if they were shady knock-off or low-quality products.
See the long reply to your comment. I've seen you around whenever I log on, and you're often loud and wrong. I've discovered it's a safe bet to go against most of what you say.
I'd rather take the word of actual established centers of study, like the ALA, over random people on the internet. But you do you.
Whether metals are transferred from the coil to the aerosol is unknown.
In this study, they heated the coil to a very high temp that is not indicative of actual e cig usages.
Additionally, we use different metals for coils now. Instead deferring to stainless steel or ceramic heating elements which are not affected in the same way as this study indicates.
It's still not as bad as smoking but it is dangerous, especially with off brand or damaged vapes. If you don't regularly clean and inspect your vape you can end up getting terrible infections or some fairly toxic chemicals.
Vaping has also caused a spike in STDs which is fun.
Completely anecdotal, but it was able to get me, my wife and my father to all stop smoking by switching to vaping and then eventually quitting vaping.
A wonderful outcome!
Nicotine pouches are same as any gum, patch etc.
Ditto. Both my wife and I were heavy smokers and moved to vapes. As soon as I used a vape I thought "this is the solution!" after trying to quit smoking many times for decades.
They really provide 80 to 90% of the satisfaction of a cigarette and take the edge off those moments when you damn well need a ciggie.
After a couple of years of vaping I find it now much easier to do without them for a few days, although I do like one with a beer.
You have to have been on that 10 or 20 year journey of smoking cigarettes to understand how hard they are to put down, and vaping was the tool that got me away from burning the evil tobacco leaf.
I was a a pack - pack and a half a day smoker for 12 years. Had tried to quit for many years and had all but given up when i tried a salt nicotine vape. A month later i was smoke free, and 2 weeks after that i had kicked the vape (was never a fan of nicotine by itself, so the vape was easy to kick). This was about 2 and a half years ago now. Vapes are an indispensable tool to quit smoking.
This is incorrect and an easy to debunk claim.. the tar in cigarettes is extremely harmful and vaping removes that element. However, vaping is still bad for you and it is still just as addictive.
I found it much easier to quit vaping, compared to cigarettes. There are nicotine free liquids, so you can slowly wean off.
This is my experience, having quit my 10 year cigarette addiction via vaping (after dozens of failed attempts to quit), then accidentally re-addicting myself 5 years later (via vaping) — then quitting again after another year.
Vaping is arguably more addictive due to the nicotine salts, taste, and ease of use, but it's also far easier to quit — plus my health improved dramatically when I switched to vaping.
When I first quit with vaping, I just gradually reduced the nicotine level down to zero, then continued vaping no-nic for months until I stopped completely; the key part is sticking to the no-nic no matter what (at parties or whenever drinking). Decoupling the habit from the addiction means you don't have to stop both at once. The second time around it only took a single attempt, except I went straight to no-nic.
Yes, I think decoupling is worth a lot!
Also true what you say about more addictive due to reasons.
Overall very informative comment, thanks!
Do you keep your vape device stored somewhere over the years in case of a relapse? Or do you get a new one when needed? I see arguments for both sides.
That's what I didm smoked cigs for 10 years tried quitting many times I bought a vape with blue raz juice all the way for the top to 0nic and every two weeks I would lower my nicotine levels after a few months I was on 0 and tossed it. Nicotine free for 6 years. Thank you vaping for helping me quit nicotine
Well done! Stay strong 🤜🤛
110% false.
Vaping is far safer
It's different from cigarettes. You don't get all the tar and stuff, but many people get even more nicotine, which is bad for your heart and addictive. I would say it's likely better, but it's different.
(There's also non-nicotine vape products which often aren't regulated so can cause all kinds of issues.)
Easily the best answer i've gotten on this thread.
Forgot how Pro-drug the fediverse is as well; vapes should be regulated as heavily as cigarettes and other tobacco products. Just because it's less harmful doesn't mean it's not harmful.
The laws around vapes are nonsense and pseudoscience. That's what really pisses people off.
Flat prohibitions aren't saving any lives or ending any health crisis. Meanwhile cigarettes are widely available with a dozen flavors.
Recognising that there are health issues, without fully understanding them yet due to there having not been enough time to form complete and solid conclusions, doesn't make it pseudoscience. It means we should be cautious and continue to study, and certainly not widely adopt their use in the mean time assuming everything will be fine. Especially as it directly interacts with such a sensitive part of our inner bodies, and especially as the largest group taking up their use are teenagers.
I disagree, to blanket suggest prohibitions don't save lives is not based in fact. Even the misguided alcohol prohibition over in the USA saved lives, reducing the number of deaths that would have otherwise been caused by intoxication (dangerous driving being an obvious example, domestic abuse, etc).
And take this example from literally only yesterday, where a child almost died due to electronic cigarettes and the complications therein (often when people discuss the danger of X and Y, they assume a completely healthy person to begin with, and ignore that a large percentage of the population has at least one illness or environmental factor that it can complicate).
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-67081855
Also, yes cigarettes are available, but their use in public is heavily restricted, and they aren't attractive to young people any more thanks to decades of hard work in education. Electronic cigarettes however are targeted directly at teenagers in a very predatory way, suggested to be safe and clean, and thus we have these new issues.
In the end, I suspect electronic cigarettes are less dangerous than breathing in smoke from tobacco, which is insanely dangerous, but that will not make them safe, either, and the cumulative effects of electronic cigarette use over decades simply isn't fully known yet.
We're working on it, and where our health is concerned, especially that of our impressionable youth, an abundance of caution is always the best course of action.
Thank you for taking the time to develop a well thought response. I learned some things and it got me thinking in a new way!
I was under the impression that prohibition of alcohol did not reduce any harm, because people flocked to speakeasys, and the quality of the homemade alcohol was not good. A good chunk of the alcohol beverages people drank during prohibition would give them poisoning of some kind.
People didn't stop drinking, they just started drinking homemade alcohol made with industrial alcohol. The US government also made sure that the only kind of alcohol people could aquire to make drinks was not good for human consumption.
Your comment is the first time I've ever heard anybody say anything good about prohibition. Maybe it saved a few people, like you said, but overall alcohol related deaths probably stayed around the same, or even went up thanks to all the poisoning. It's hard to tell, because the US didn't keep track of these numbers at the time.
I'm more worried about the shit in the air around me than what is in my vape juice. At least I know what's in that
you're very wrong. Prohibition ONLY means lower quality, more dangerous products on the streets and it's another excuse to criminalize poverty/mental illness.
Yawn. Prohibition is not about protecting youths, its about protecting income. Your conclusions regarding the supposed benefits of prohibition are largely opinion, a generally refuted by historians. Flat bans produce unregulated markets, which lead to excess death and injury.
Maybe both should have restrictions?
Well they are bad for you so it's not exactly pseudo science, and the problem is that kids are using them.
Vapes come in candy flavour which is ridiculous, not because it exists, but because is sold to children.
At the very least I think we should say that you have to be at least what 18 to buy them. I don't think that's too bad.
How exactly are they bad for you? Where's the studies? You gotta be 21 to buy them, at least in the US. I quit smoking and use vapes exclusively and I can tell a huge difference in how I feel and breathe
I've been vaping for 10 years and you're kidding me with this right? Of course it's not good for you.
Yeah I was about to say, I quit smoking like 10 years ago. Then due to stressful situations and poor decisions making skills, I began vaping (I want to quit, fuck past me). I 100% know for a fact my lungs are way worse than before. Not as bad as when I was smoking a pack and a half a day, but I play guitar and sing often. It's noticable.
Just because it isn't good for you doesn't mean it is bad for you
In this case yes, it absolute does. But justify it however you need.
Do you think inhaling anything besides air on a regular basis could possibly be good for your lungs?
There's multiple completed ten-year studies on vaporizer use available with pretty high N. More frequent sickness and lung injury are shown to raise demonstrably over a five to ten year use period. It's less pronounced than cigarette smoking, but it is an unhealthy choice.
So you're breathing slightly less toxic gas and therefore clearly it's great and good for you.
Absolutely zero logic.
I'm not going to try and find the studies for you because I'm on a phone right now, you can go Google it if you're actually interested, not that you will, but be assured the studies are out there otherwise they wouldn't be talking about regulation.
Fuck that, you made a claim and the onus on you is to back it up.
Ah the classic except it isn't on me because my claim isn't extraordinary, your claim is your claim is that in taking toxic gases is not bad for you that's the extraordinary claim the onus is on you to back it.
Quote me where I made that claim, much less any claim at all, go ahead.
The only comment I have in this entire thread is calling you out about your "you google it" bs.
Where did I say vapes are good for you? Still don't see any links to any studies. They're better than cigarettes, period.
Vaping should be limited to 18+ consumers just like "standard" nicotine products. But we shouldn't pretend, like the WHO and other organizations do, that Vaping hasn't been used by many (myself included) to effectively quit nicotine. Personally I kicked a 2 pack a day habit because of vaping and today I use no nicotine products (including vaping) because of it.
Agreed.
More restrictions is uncalled for.
I quit smoking cigarettes using a "box mod" in 2016 and gradually tapered down from a very high nicotine blend to 0 nicotine using 100% vegetable glycerin and peppermint flavoring and then I finally literally lost my vape and just never bothered to replace it...
So anyways, I started smoking over 30 years ago and I don't vape or smoke anymore.
We need stricter regulations on the production of disposables or ingredients. Like, using diacetyl which is known to cause popcorn lung. Or the whole vitamin E oil causing lung disease in black market vapes...
Maybe something similar to the regulations around alcohol. We know alcohol is bad, but the long term effects are much different than going blind from methanol.
Smoking or vaping isn't good long term, but it shouldn't be able to kill your lungs after a few uses.
While the popcorn lung and vitamin e oil shit were both real they were not truly widespread problems and they were already regulated /legislated against.
Those people broke the fucking law.
More regulations don't prevent lawbreakers.
That was a problem with black market and unregulated Vape production, especially in the early days. It was never widespread, it just happened in a few places where people were buying vape products off of some random guy on the street. This was mostly a problem when this stuff first came out, because there wasn't a lot of legitimate companies making the vape juice and cartridges at first.
I do agree that we need regulation on the disposable vapes just for the amount of trash that they create. Disposables are so much worse for the environment than refillable vapes.
Shouldn't that be an argument to regulate it less, not "as heavily"?
Many mundane things are less harmful than cigarettes and shouldn't be regulated as heavily.
Edit: typo
yup zero logic in his comment, still has 30 upvotes right now.
I mean what I said reflects reality, is that so troubling for you?
If it's less harmful why on earth should it be regulated just as heavily? Of course I agree it shouldn't be sold to kids, but what the EU did to vaping is a massive shit show.
I quitted smoking overnight thanks to vaping and then also stopped vaping a few years later. That was before the regulations though. I honestly don't believe I could pull this off today with all the braindead rules and let's not forget the massive price increase for liquids.
I agree it should be regulated. But that's not what's happening. What's happening is prohibition.
What's too heavy about how cigarettes are regulated in your country? I'm in Canada and when I smoked cigarettes I never felt like I was obstructed in making my own choices.
Why not? We regulate the shit out of food and medicine and those are the exact opposite of harmful when everything goes as planned.
My comment referred to this quote. It's a comparison between how heavy two things are regulated. Neither needs to be heavily regulated for this comparison to work.
I'm fine with how cigarretes are regulated in Germany. Could be still heavier. I'm not fine with regulating vapes as heavy. Especially taxes.
It's ridiculous when vaping becomes more expensive than smoking. This creates incentive to quit vaping and smoke. Should be reversed.
That's two different kinds of regulation. You're referring to regulations to make things safer. These are great.
I was talking about regulations to make things less accessible. These are great if the things are dangerous.
It makes sense to make things less accessible which are more dangerous.
I'd ban cigarettes and legalise heroin
fuck vapes and drug abuse in general, but the fedi isn't pro fucking anything. Just because you see a pattern doesn't mean it's there.
I thought vaping was fine because I didn’t know it had nicotine in it.
Super fucking addictive, it should absolutely be regulated because currently in most places it isn’t, as evidenced by all the kids buying vapes.
They're regulated the same as cigarettes. Kids find ways to get cigarettes, alcohol, and drugs, too, despite how regulated they are.
It's more to do with the fact that they're intentionally marketed towards kids in a way cigarettes and alcohol aren't so much anymore.
People say that but I've never seen a vape ad for kids.
In what way are they marketed towards kids?
Bright colors doesn't count.
https://academic.oup.com/ntr/article/20/8/954/3926044
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0306460319305891
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/07439156231189181
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1054139X16301598
Just a few examples. I sure hope you don't think Philip Morris is too ethical to use this kind of advertising science.
Very first sentence from the first link lol.
Of course PH wants young addicts. They always have.
I'm asking for advertisements aimed at kids because I have never seen any. None of those links show any ads. All they're saying is that vapes were advertised and people bought vapes.
What even would meet your standards here? Only an ad that started "Hey, kids!"?
Juul was buying ads on Cartoon Network/Seventeen/Nickelodeon and youth education sites. They got sued for it. They then fired the ad firm that developed an adult-oriented campaign for them in favor of the vaporized campaign which I definitely see plainly targets teens -- and the courts agreed, since they paid over $400 mil in fines because of it.
Companies do what they can to maintain plausible deniability. But it's also an absolute fact that the fruit/candy-flavored vapes are vastly more popular among youths. The FDA has entire teams dedicated to "advising" producers on how not to market these things to kids based on expert advice.
Your position here is one where you default to giving the producers of harmful, addictive products the benefit of the doubt. When I see Puff Bar being ranked among the most popular vape brands for teens, my assumption is that there is actual malice leading to that position.
And to be clear, the youth vaping market did not exist until the era of Juul reinvented it through advertising. These were not particularly new products, just new ways of selling them. Smoking was solidly on the decline among teens. It was new sales strategies that reversed that trend.
An actual advertisement, for one.
That's all I'm asking for. An advertisement for vapes directed at kids. That's it. Just an example. Preferably two, but one is fine.
I'm not asking for essays about how it's possible kids are attracted to bright colors or how ads cause sales to increase. Especially when those essays admit front and center that no one actually knows the answer.
Just link to an ad. Goddamn lol
... Already happened.
Where? I've yet to be shown an ad.
Bright colors absolutely does count, but so do candy-like flavors. We've actually seen similar issues with cannabis edibles, selling the oil or butter is fine but selling cannacandy or brownies causes a big uptick in teen use and the health effects of heavy cannabis use during puberty aren't well understood yet (mostly because America is a fucking asshole).
So I can't enjoy a candy taste as an adult? Just because children like it?
Yeah, me too. But I think the point was about ads, not usage.
No, you can, but for a dangerous product like this it'd be more responsible for the company to sell the flavoring in a separate package that can be mixed with the actual vape juice and let consumers combine them.
With nicotine in particular, that would be a fatal idea. It doesn't take much nicotine at all to kill a human, and it absorbs through your skin, so.... Yeah. Pure nicotine shouldn't be sold to just anyone.
Only kids like candy. Got it
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0749379716306201
Banning candy and such flavors was provably effective at reducing youth smoking rates in many studies, even knowing that other flavored tobacco/nicotine products were still available to absorb some of that demand. There's no reason to think vaping would be different.
And banning walking I'm sure would lead to fewer falls
They absolutely are. Even the anti-vape ads seem to be made to promote it. They look super friendly and don't show the actual harm it does like smoking ads used to.
Edit: https://youtube.com/watch?v=bbV6I8VRMG8
And in what way are they marketed towards kids?
In the same way everything is. It's friendly and bright, and yes those are valid criteria.
Edit: I'm being downvoted, but how else do you advertise towards children? If your vape ad looks like the toy aisle then who is it marketing towards? Toys are marketed towards children by being bright, colorful, and friendly looking. They aren't marketing towards the parents with that, right? If it's valid to say that about toys then it must be valid about other products as well. Disagree? Give a counter argument. Can't come up with one? Why do you disagree then?
Idk but you're probably being disagreed with because by that line of thought adult products can't have any color on them.
Which is exactly what I mean. Just because something has brought colors it doesn't make it for children.
Having bright colors makes it more appealing to everyone but is an especially effective marketing tactic for children. Of course it doesn't only appeal to children, but it's a provably effective way to get children's attention.
Everyone is drawn to bright colors, not just children.
I still haven't been shown any ads at all, much less any aimed at children.
I'm not about to watch some ads to win an argument on the internet. Here's this though, which I added into an edit above but you may have not seen that.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=bbV6I8VRMG8
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/watch?v=bbV6I8VRMG8
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
This video is unbearable to watch. It's even worse than the DARE crap in the 80's. If this is your proof that there are ads directed at kids I'm sorry but it ain't it.
Nicotine on its own is ballpark as addictive as caffeine, vapes lack the MAOIs contained in cigarettes which on their own are much more addictive (atypical antidepressants, hardly surprising) but in synergy with nicotine even more.
They also bought fidget spinners. Also I've never seen a kid with a vape.
If I could just push a button and make all non medical use tobacco become impossible to grow, I would push that button a million times just to be sure. I hope everyone working for Philip Morris gets lung cancer.
That should just be an accepted cost to enter the industry.
Double standards everywhere, Alcohol should get kicked too.
Frankly, we need fewer prohibitions on substances, not more. I drink responsibly and like it. We also know you can't ban alcohol without a black market, so why even feign that it could be done?
We need better enforcement to prevent people acting like idiots when they drink. I don't have ideas to offer on how, as I haven't pondered it at length, but that's the best path in my mind.
Thank you for having some common sense. If we know anything about history, prohibitions on substances just lead to worse outcomes with black market activity and criminal enterprises.
Tobacco is a weird one, because most people I know that smoke, don't really enjoy it, they are just literally addicted. Still, I don't think banning nicotine would be a great move.
I think the taxes are pretty effective. I smoked for a few years in my younger days, and I quit when the prices started to go way up, thanks to taxes.
I don't smoke but I love nicotine. Hope they don't go too wild trying to regulate smokeless alternatives out of existence. Nicotine is a fun drug.
I agree with this. I used nicotine lozenges to wean myself off cigarettes and this was successful.
However, I did notice as a side effect that they helped me concentrate on complex tasks.
So, although I don't use them daily, I leave a pack lying around just to suck on in the same way I might use a cup of coffee to sharpen up in the morning.
I genuinely believe this does me no harm. I think the debates started to get heated when inhalation is involved.
My bourbon French toast says otherwise.
Hence, double standard lol
true, but most if not all tobacco users get addicted and smoke every day, killing our young people.
alcohol, while dangerous is not as habit forming, but I see where you're coming from
It's entirely possible to enjoy alcohol responsibly and the vast majority of people do. Shall we can cars because some people can't stop getting in them while inebriated and crashing them?
99.999% of smokers are doing substantial damage to themselves and others.
Fuuuuck Philip Morris. Tax them heavily and use the proceeds to pay their customers' medical expenses
I interviewed with them once, and they swore up and down that they were cleaning up and divesting of all the harmful stuff, and wanted me to trust they were all about health and a smoke-free future.
Thankfully they were so staggeringly full of bullshit during the interviews that I quickly realized it'd be an absolutely horrifically toxic (groan, yes, sorry) place to work irrespective of my other doubts, and I ended up telling them I didn't want to continue the process and that I was so unhappy with the assorted bullshit during the process that I didn't want to ever be approached by them again.
That's the very long way of saying I'm not the slightest bit surprised it turns out they are in fact still massive asshats, and I'm very happy I caught on early enough.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
In a message sent by the PMI’s senior vice-president of external affairs last month and seen by the Guardian, staff were told to find “any connection, any lead, whether political or technical” before a meeting of delegates from 182 countries.
The email sent on 22 September by Grégoire Verdeaux, the senior vice-president of external affairs at PMI, said: “The agenda and meeting documents have been made public for the main part.
Unfortunately they reconfirmed every concern we had that this conference may remain as the biggest missed opportunity ever in tobacco control’s history … WHO’s agenda is nothing short of a systematic, methodical, prohibitionist attack on smoke-free products.”
Without “reasonable, constructive outcomes” , Verdeaux wrote, the “WHO will have irreversibly compromised the historic opportunity for public health presented by the recognition that smoke-free products, appropriately regulated, can accelerate the decline of smoking rates faster than tobacco control combined”.
Tobacco companies are not invited to the event and Verdeaux said despite this he would be in Panama “to publicly denounce the absurdity of being excluded from it while PMI today” was “undoubtedly the most helpful private partner WHO could have in the fight against smoking”.
Asked about the leaked email, Verdeaux said in a statement: “What I say publicly and what I say to our employees is exactly the same: I am proud to make the case to governments and media that innovation drives down smoking rates faster and for that reason should be supported and regulated.
The original article contains 880 words, the summary contains 246 words. Saved 72%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
That's metal!
That's iron... In ya blood!
Given the damage they have done to society is there a good reason the fines aren't all your companies money and all of your executives money we seize and destroy and products farms and machinery that can't be sold for non-tobacco use?
so glad I quit.
Now can someone give a probability for the success of that?
It's an international organism, with scientific input from almost every nation of the world.
Tell me more about this organism.
Wikipedia is your friend for a quick overlook. Next stop would be their own site.
I think he was taking the piss out of your use of "organism" instead of "organization".
Couldn't care less.
Cool, thanks for letting me know
Really, it's fine. Of by small means it contributed towards the persons happiness, great. Doesn't diminishes me in any way.
^ This is what happens when someone's only social interaction is their parents.
Did that snark remark made you feel better about yourself? Are you now more comfortable in your own skin? Good for you!
Couldn't care less
Vaping seems to be healthier than cigarette smoking from what I've read, and it makes sense. Burnt particulate matter is hell on your lungs.
But it should be used for smokers to break addiction. And recreational use needs to be heavily regulated until we can do long term studies that show it's relatively safe.
I'll explain as someone with professional chemistry experience. Vaping vaporizes water to deliver the nicotine -- or just to deliver flavored vapor without the nicotine. This process gives me two major concerns:
It isn't pure water vapor, there's additives and oils even for juices with no nicotine. We don't know what breathing in the vaporized flavor additives does. And, we don't know if the process is generating enough heat to cause chemical reactions and degradation of the non water components. It's completely possible that carcinogenic or toxic compounds could come from this. This warrants a lot more study, and fortunately, it should be quite doable. Spectroscopy could tell us a lot.
Remember how Flint had a lot of lead in their water? Heavy metals in water come from surface atoms on the metal leaching into the water. You can treat the water to either discourage this or cause it to precipitate out. Heat increases the frequency of leaching -- so vaporizing water with the coils is going to lead to heavy metal particles in the vapor. This is where we really don't have information. We can likely determine the quantity and type of metal atoms, but we can't determine what it's going to do to the lungs. A big safety concern with tiny particles is breathing them in, because nanoparticles and the like will also ravage your lungs when inhaled. Doesn't even matter what the solid particle is.
The latter concern is where we need long term research. We need to know if the heavy metal particles in the vapor are causing damage in the same way that nanoparticles do. And we need to know what prolonged exposure to those metal particles does. After 40 years of vaping, would enough metal have deposited in airways to cause health issues? It's very possible.
Is that to say stop right this second? No, but just be aware of the risks and don't go overboard. Heavy drinking is probably still worse for you than this, and smoking is definitely worse.
Water? VG and PG.
It's not just glycols/oils for all of them at least I thought
Vapes are even worse than cigarettes, for real.
Care to cite your sources in that claim? I'm know they are far from anything that could be considered "good" but "worse than cigs" is news to me.
I am not the previous poster, but the argument that I've heard on that front is that smoking was already trending rapidly downwards in use and would have made itself obsolete within a couple generations.
Vaping on the other hand established itself as a "safer" alternative to smoking and became trendy with more younger people who wouldn't have smoked in the first place.
Yeah, that's in no way worse than inhaling smoke and dozens of proven carcinogens...
Vaping is worse than nothing, but the notion that it's worse than smoking is completely deranged.
Unless those Truth ads are to be believed; the ones that claim vapes release toxic heavy metals from the coils.
They are not to be believed. I'm shocked you fell for a Truth campaign, if that's what you're insinuating.
No one claims vaping is good for you, but there is very little evidence of the damage they may cause up until this point, and basically anything is better than smoking a cigarette.
There are a lot of issues we could discuss, such as how addictive they are, or how they're often owned by big tobacco rebranding themselves in deceitful ways, but the grandiose claims are overwhelmingly fabricated.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29467105/ so this study is bullshit? I know Truth likes to bend what the truth is, but there are several studies indicating the metal presence in many brands of vape products. Even the American Lung Association warns of it.
While I can't speak to this specific paper, I know that the methodologies of several of these kind of "studies" are horribly flawed. I know there was one that found that heavy metals were released by coils ... when the wattage was cranked up so high that no person would ever even be able to use the product that way. For non-vapers, if the wattage is too high, the cotton wick burns as well, and is impossible to inhale. The simple fact is that if the cotton wick isn't burning, there's no way the coil is getting hot enough to produce free metal vapors.
Remember when there was that rash of deaths? And nicotine vapes got the blame right away? Yeah, that was because some bathtub lab THC vape carts had vitamin E acetate in them. Remember when there was a lot of talk about popcorn lung? That was because of diacetyl, which is a butter flavor. Nobody has used it for a very long time.
I'm not trying to say that vaping is healthier than not vaping, but it is definitely safer than smoking tobacco. As a harm reduction method, it is a valuable tool.
Thank you for the knowledge and patience you've demonstrated, I agree with and appreciate everything you wrote.
Without access to the full paper, it's hard to say. The abstract only mentions how many products they tested, but not what those products were. There's no way of knowing if those products came from reputable manufacturers or if they were shady knock-off or low-quality products.
See the long reply to your comment. I've seen you around whenever I log on, and you're often loud and wrong. I've discovered it's a safe bet to go against most of what you say.
I'd rather take the word of actual established centers of study, like the ALA, over random people on the internet. But you do you.
In this study, they heated the coil to a very high temp that is not indicative of actual e cig usages.
Additionally, we use different metals for coils now. Instead deferring to stainless steel or ceramic heating elements which are not affected in the same way as this study indicates.
It's still not as bad as smoking but it is dangerous, especially with off brand or damaged vapes. If you don't regularly clean and inspect your vape you can end up getting terrible infections or some fairly toxic chemicals.
Vaping has also caused a spike in STDs which is fun.
Completely anecdotal, but it was able to get me, my wife and my father to all stop smoking by switching to vaping and then eventually quitting vaping.
A wonderful outcome!
Nicotine pouches are same as any gum, patch etc.
Ditto. Both my wife and I were heavy smokers and moved to vapes. As soon as I used a vape I thought "this is the solution!" after trying to quit smoking many times for decades.
They really provide 80 to 90% of the satisfaction of a cigarette and take the edge off those moments when you damn well need a ciggie.
After a couple of years of vaping I find it now much easier to do without them for a few days, although I do like one with a beer.
You have to have been on that 10 or 20 year journey of smoking cigarettes to understand how hard they are to put down, and vaping was the tool that got me away from burning the evil tobacco leaf.
I was a a pack - pack and a half a day smoker for 12 years. Had tried to quit for many years and had all but given up when i tried a salt nicotine vape. A month later i was smoke free, and 2 weeks after that i had kicked the vape (was never a fan of nicotine by itself, so the vape was easy to kick). This was about 2 and a half years ago now. Vapes are an indispensable tool to quit smoking.
This is incorrect and an easy to debunk claim.. the tar in cigarettes is extremely harmful and vaping removes that element. However, vaping is still bad for you and it is still just as addictive.
I found it much easier to quit vaping, compared to cigarettes. There are nicotine free liquids, so you can slowly wean off.
This is my experience, having quit my 10 year cigarette addiction via vaping (after dozens of failed attempts to quit), then accidentally re-addicting myself 5 years later (via vaping) — then quitting again after another year.
Vaping is arguably more addictive due to the nicotine salts, taste, and ease of use, but it's also far easier to quit — plus my health improved dramatically when I switched to vaping.
When I first quit with vaping, I just gradually reduced the nicotine level down to zero, then continued vaping no-nic for months until I stopped completely; the key part is sticking to the no-nic no matter what (at parties or whenever drinking). Decoupling the habit from the addiction means you don't have to stop both at once. The second time around it only took a single attempt, except I went straight to no-nic.
Yes, I think decoupling is worth a lot!
Also true what you say about more addictive due to reasons.
Overall very informative comment, thanks!
Do you keep your vape device stored somewhere over the years in case of a relapse? Or do you get a new one when needed? I see arguments for both sides.
That's what I didm smoked cigs for 10 years tried quitting many times I bought a vape with blue raz juice all the way for the top to 0nic and every two weeks I would lower my nicotine levels after a few months I was on 0 and tossed it. Nicotine free for 6 years. Thank you vaping for helping me quit nicotine
Well done! Stay strong 🤜🤛
110% false. Vaping is far safer
It's different from cigarettes. You don't get all the tar and stuff, but many people get even more nicotine, which is bad for your heart and addictive. I would say it's likely better, but it's different.
(There's also non-nicotine vape products which often aren't regulated so can cause all kinds of issues.)
Easily the best answer i've gotten on this thread.