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by neotek 3517 days ago
Teens already experiment with smoking actual cigarettes, all vaping does is provide them with an alternative to experiment with that is far safer and less addicting than tobacco.
3 comments

It also provides a cotton candy flavored gateway into an addictive habit.
To quote the Smoking Still Kills report, which was backed by over 100 health organisations in the UK including the Royal College of Paediatricians, the British Heart Foundation, Cancer Research UK, and plenty more:

>This has raised concerns that the use of electronic cigarettes could lead to the ‘renormalisation’ of smoking and provide a gateway to smoking for young people. Yet so far there is little evidence that this is happening. The use of electronic cigarettes by people who have never smoked has been, and remains, negligible.

>If electronic cigarettes are a gateway, they currently appear to be a gateway out of smoking.

Do you also favor coffee demonization commercials being started? Anti-cola campaigns? etc?
Which addictive toxic drug are you suggesting coffee is a candy-flavored gateway to?
Which toxic drug are you suggesting is present in eliquid? You can't be talking about nicotine, since that's no more toxic than caffeine and is not carcinogenic.
frakr was implying that the ecigs are a gateway drug to cigarettes.

Hardcore coffee addicts don't usually end up smoking coffee with 4000 other random addictive chemicals mixed in.

And wrt your question, who knows what other chemicals are in ecig juice, as the ingredients seem to be completely unregulated.

That's odd, I can't reply to neotek. I didn't know there was a limit to the level of replies...

To neotek: No problem, it's easy to misunderstand people on the internet.

I do appreciate that vaping is probably safer than cigarettes, but that's a very low bar indeed...

Just because it may be (and who knows until there are long term studies), doesn't mean as a society we should be encouraging, or even allowing vaping.

At the very least I think there should be some kind of regulation around the ingredients, otherwise how can anybody say the vapor is safe for the inhaler and the people around them?

Apologies for misunderstanding your comment, however I would add that vapers don't usually end up smoking, the flow is in the other direction. I'd recommend reading the Smoking Still Kills report for more information:

http://ash.org.uk/information-and-resources/reports-submissi...

Chuckle. Nobody will go from vaping something that tastes like candy to sucking on something that tastes like an ashtray.

Even if they were having a nic fit they'd still vape - you can get stronger fluid and vape more than you can get via smoking without feeling sick.

> I do appreciate that vaping is probably safer than cigarettes, but that's a very low bar indeed...

There's no probably about it. Smoking kills, and we don't see Vaping doing that.

> Just because it may be (and who knows until there are long term studies), doesn't mean as a society we should be encouraging, or even allowing vaping.

So you'd recommend we pursue measures known to kill tens of thousands of people just because there's a vanishingly small chance of harm sometime in the distant future?

You're mainly just demonstrating the problems with democracy.

That's not a good enough reason to not have anti-vape commercials. Just because it's "less bad" than analog cigarettes doesn't mean we shouldn't speak out about their negative effects.
Nor does it mean we should arbitrarily ban or restrict them to satisfy the whims of people who haven't looked at the evidence.
Nor should we assume that people who disagree with us "haven't looked at the evidence"
We should, when they don't present their reasoning. Or when we know they're being financially influenced by "Big Tobacco". Tobacco laws are being driven by religious puritans who hate the idea that someone is enjoying a drug. To them, that's cheating at life by being happy before judgement day. They'll grasp at any straw to advance their agenda of control, even if it means cooperating with "scientists" from tobacco companies.

We should immediately reject all governmental proposals that aren't backed up by rigorous science. Not only would this stop a ton of abuse, but we'd save a fortune in tax money that could then be spent on initiatives that actually save lives.