Second hand smoke is a significant danger caused by smoking, the children of smokers get exposed to this all the time. The danger of second hand smoke is not the nicotine in the smoke, the levels are not concentrated enough to get addicted(and we can probably assume this is true for vape), it is all the other crap that is in the smoke. If you ban e-cigarettes you are putting more non-smokers at a higher risk with a higher exposure to carcinogenic material. You could say that we don’t know the long term effect of second hand vape but we do know that the long list of carcinogens in cigarette smoke is not in it. If I had to choose which I would get exposed to it would definitely be second hand vapor rather than second hand smoke.
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For the most part. But if you’re making a conscious effort to reduce less nicotine helps, that’s the entire idea with stepped concentration nicotine replacement. These studies are all about regular use patterns with regular smokers. And the format of the nicotine is supposedly matters, free base is different then regular. Part of it is also that there often isn’t a material difference between the “low nicotine” and “high nicotine” commercial cigarettes. Often times its the same volume in the leaf itself, they just poke holes in the filter so less smoke makes it through. Holes that are conveniently placed so you cover them when holding the thing. Or “light” is 3.7mg and “regular” is 4.1 (bullshit numbers). That way they register less nicotine to a testing robot, but a human being still gets much more. Either do to holes, or said unconscious deeper inhales.
Near as I can tell there are no comparative studies between the whole leaf and the reconstituted sheet, or even cleanly establishing amounts of free base in each (some happens naturally from fire). Everything is almost completely focused on commercial cigarettes and reconstituted sheet, the additives put into it. Very occasionally comparative to cigars or smokeless. And I’ve never seem anything looking at volume of tobacco by weight as opposed to per unit.
So frankly what I’m rolling on with this is a bunch of plausible hypotheses that have never really been studied. Because when it comes to tobacco we don’t really do that. All I can really say is that the closest I’ve come to quitting long term involved hand rolling small cigarettes from very low nicotine whole leaf tobacco. There’s probably a dozen reasons for that.
But if the tobacco contains 1/3 as much nicotine by weight, and the cigarettes are 1/2 the size (again by weight). No amount of huffing and puffing or holding it weird is gonna get you close to that regular cigarette. So long as you make a conscious effort not to smoke 2. Same as stepping down from 20 a day to 10 a day (and so on). You are consuming less tobacco, and less nicotine overall. What that might mean population wide, or among regular user who aren’t consciously reducing I dunno, and frankly we dunno. We don’t seem to have ever looked at it. The closest seems to be proving marketing based false choices designed to maximize nicotine consumption in regular use can’t be used that way. And don’t have a meaningful impact on relative risk.
The problem is the smoke. Any other smoke would cause similar damage. Its just there’s very few other things were we persistently expose ourself and others to low levels of smoke inhalation.
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In general breathing smoke = not healthy, but I think there’s a bit more nuance in it. Tobacco smoke is pretty well established to cause a bunch of cancers of the respiratory and upper alimentary tracts, breast cancer, etc. And it’s also well established to cause heart attacks (including among second hand smokers, because the specific mechanisms—inflammation of the arteries and platelet activation—for increased AMI risk have a very steep dose-response at low exposure levels). Marijuana smoke is similarly rough on cardiovascular health, but marijuana’s effects, if any, on those same cancers are very small compared to tobacco.
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Why not neither? 
That’s the approach I’d take: ban retail (not at the city level, though) but continue to make (unflavoured, unscented) e-cigarettes available, perhaps in a standard, unappealing beige. Essentially, treat them solely as a utilitarian way to quit, rather than as a lifestyle adornment.
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That’s a strange way to look at it. Once a city decides that an item shouldn’t be sold in the city it becomes an illegal item to sell. I’ve rarely encountered a city that doesn’t have a set of restrictions around the sale of any number of items.
The Philly soda tax reduced soda consumption in Philly even after accounting for increased sales in surrounding areas. Chicago probably would have done the same given time. Philadelphia soda tax causes plunge in sales, study finds
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I doubt the sups thought that far afield as to smite Philip Morris, but definitely this is a proxy battle against Juul being headquartered here. They tried to evict Juul from their current location at Pier 70 (public land), Then Juul bought a beautiful building in the Financial District, which enraged the sups, so this ordinance got rushed to the top of the docket.
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It’s clear that smoking is often deadly. I don’t think it’s known whether vaping is bad for health (though it’s, at worst, much less bad than smoking). Despite this crucial gap in our collective knowledge, vaping has become immensely popular.
Solving this crucial public-health mystery would be greatly useful. This very geographically-specific ban-cum-PR-stunt, not so much.
I think what doesn’t necessarily get addressed all the time is volume of use. Marijuana smoke contains significantly more tar, including specific compounds pegged to specific cancers than typical tobacco smoke. But volume of use is much lower, even heavy users tend not to consume as much as an average smoker. And there are other factors like moisture level and burn temperature which impact the format of smoke.
So marijuana smoking is not associated with elevated cancer rates. But marijuana smoke is associated with those same cancers or carcinogens. And there are all sort of other smoke and particle inhalation risks that are significantly worse, but dont have the same broad public health impacts.
The marijuana thing is one of the reasons that I’ve been convinced for a long time that consumption level is the key thing here. And the studies don’t really seem to be too accurately looking at. Take studies on cigars as example. Everything I’ve ever seen tracks usage by number of cigars in a given time frame. But when a large format cigar might have 2-3 or even more tobacco in it than a more typical petite corona. Is number really tracking the volume consumed accurately?
We don’t tend to concern ourselves with that because it doesn’t neatly fit into a public health approach that’s narrowly focused on cessation, on only looking at no consumption vs consumption. And research funding that largely comes from the tobacco industry on both sides. But if you acknowledge that some proportion of the population is going to consume tobacco, for some portion of their lives. At some frequency. Then there may be significant public health improvements that can come with making that consumption less damaging. While that’s not really the reason the ecigs and vapes were developed. Its part of their marketing, finding a new way to push a purportedly safe versions is core tobacco industry practice. But part of the freak out about it is the unwillingness of our current approach to smoking and public health to consider risk reduction as a valid approach. And the lack of anything in the way of solid answers on a lot of this comes from our lack of interest in subjects pertaining to that end of it.
To take it back to pot. Where exactly does the idea that vaporizers are healthier than regular smoking come from. Cause I’ve looked and it doesn’t seem to be based on research. There doesn’t even seem to be anything checking up on it. So a widely held belief, about relative risk. That lead directly to these e-cigs. Doesn’t seem to have ever been comprehensively checked. And even as we’ve got a whole bunch of research now about relative risk between standard cigarettes and propylene glycol and vegetable glycerin based vape juices. We still don’t seem to have really checked out whole leaf vaporizers vs the same product full on smoldering.
In fact Juul is a spinoff from Pax. The cool techy pot vape company. Which started as a company trying to launch and market whole leaf tobacco vaporizors. Their first product was designed to vaporize whole leaf tobacco, seamingly pipe tobacco since that’s whats on the market. Stoners glommed onto as a pot vape (and complained many of its temps were too low for pot) so Pax became a bong company. They then tried to launch an e-cig designed to burn proprietary pods loaded with whole leaf cigarette tobaccos. Juul is their 3rd attempt, successful enough to spin off. So the biggest ecig company, and one of the biggest pot vape companies. Were founded on the idea that a low enough heat eliminates the bad part of the smoke. And even they don’t seem to have compared whole leaf vapes to burning an identical product.
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I saw an article a year or two ago where (paraphrasing…) some researchers had found that cannabis and cigarettes both create micro wounds in the lungs but the cigarette wounds became infected while the cannabis wounds did not. The researchers questioned if much of the damage increase of cigarettes over cannabis was this effect of long term micro infections through the lungs. And if one of the effects of the cannabis was to suppress infection.
*** NOTE: This was one study I am referencing from memory and alone doesn’t prove anything. Further research from multiple teams and corroboration and all that science stuff needs time.
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Really excellent points about exposure.
Not quite: NCI and NIDAA fund a great deal of tobacco control research, as do states and foundations. There was no tobacco money in the serious tobacco control research when I was working in it (easy to tell, because you can search the Tobacco Document Archive). The one exception being “youth access” laws, which aren’t really tobacco control, because they actually promote (illegal) youth smoking, since the thing adolescents want more than anything—as a group—is to become adults.
So SF doesn’t believe in harm reduction?
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Well, I’ll leave those specific decisions to the medical industry. They don’t go out of their way to make nicotine gum tasteless, my sense is they try to make it bearable, because if it’s disgusting, nobody will use it, and its utility as a cessation tool is nil.
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Kind of ironic that the city trying to “protect the children” has more dogs than kids these days. SF has the lowest percentage of children of any major city in the US. So this is maybe the least effective place in the country to have a law like this.
San Francisco seems intent on flushing out every last trace of the freewheeling spirit that used to make it an exciting and interesting place.
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Don’t worry, you can still take a dump on the street there in broad daylight. Freedom!
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Maybe I over spoke a bit but a lot of the money in the field comes from either the tobacco companies funding their own research on “not so bad”, or through the money they’re required to provide for research as the results of regulatory requirements and settlements. Combined with their political influence it gives them a lot of power to shape the sorts of research we do. Sort of like how the NRA has managed to shape gun research towards the “your not allowed to do any” end of the spectrum. But less insane.
The rest comes largely through things like the public health angle and pure cancer research where there’s often enough not much interest in population mitigation. So you end up with the gaps I’ve been talking about. The non tobacco industry money is interested in other things. And the tobacco industry money doesn’t want you to see those parts.
Oh its both disgusting and available unflavored.
But you NEEEEEEEEEEEED it. So it doesn’t matter.
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That sounds like a paper I would like to read. 
That said, a plug again for the Truth Tobacco Industry Documents Archive. Wanna search for how the tobacco companies market specifically to hipsters, teens, or queers? Wanna uncover paid collaborations with universities? The possibilities are many.
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What about Coffee? It’s highly addictive, increases blood pressure and heart disease if abused. Could SF legally ban the sell of coffee in city limits?
https://www.caffeineinformer.com/harmful-effects-of-caffeine
- Increased risk of heart attacks among young adults . A study conducted by Dr. Lucio Mos found that young adults who were diagnosed with mild hypertension had 4 times the risk of having a heart attack if they consumed the amount of caffeine equivalent to 4 cups of coffee. More moderate consumption showed 3 times the risk. Src.
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The harm coffee drinkers do to non-drinkers is?
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