[thrixton]

Do you think they were really effective or was it more the large price hikes (which have now been undone by vapes and black market cigarettes)?

I guess it might have had an impact but it's hard to tell for me with the impressive mishandling of vapes and now the black market.

[Gigachad]

I mean it's hard to know the exact split, but obviously the combination of the negative advertising and price hikes killed smoking. It went from something that everyone did to only something addicts and homeless people do. Even with black market cigarettes now, kids still haven't taken up smoking.

While vaping has exploded, and while it isn't harmless, it's clearly safer than smoking so the current situation is still better.

[hnzix]

> it's clearly safer than smoking

There's a lot of anti-vaping FUD in the Oz media right now. Anecdotally a lot of people I speak with view it as more harmful than smoking. And legislation has made it extremely unpleasant and inconvenient to obtain low-nic vapes that don't taste like ass.

Fortunately every second convenience store sells high-nic illegal vapes under the counter, with $deity knows what chemicals inside. Yay?

[fc417fc802]

> while it isn't harmless

Have you actually seen reputable evidence of this? Because I went looking for it at one point and as far as I can tell there isn't any. Just a bunch of entirely baseless FUD that I'm not entirely clear who is driving.

I did come across a few papers purporting to show toxic chemicals but when digging in they had exceptionally poor methodology regarding temperature and time. Like yeah if you get a custom vape and crank the temperature up until it's belching black smoke that's going to be bad for your health but that's neither here nor there.