Totally agree with you. And a functioning, well funded FDA would be the perfect solution to help get to the bottom of the use and potential dangers of such products. Hopefully we can get back to having that in the next few years.
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Yep, the statistics tell a pretty compelling story. Virtually no change whatsoever to the pre-existing downward trend line in cigarette smoking, while leading to a dramatic increase in the number of young people taking up smoking. It may have helped a few adults quit cigarettes but not enough to show up in the overall trends. It’s clearly had a net negative impact on society.
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Should they, though? And were these deaths from contaminated or defective product or not?
I mean all these vices aren’t good for you, but sugar is going a better job of shortening our live spans than booze and drugs (depending on which study you believe). But I am not sure banning them is the way to go.
Not marketing them to kids is certainly the way to go.
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If a new product is literally killing scores of people through some mechanism we don’t yet understand then I think erring on the side of “keep it off the market until we understand the risks” makes sense.
Except vaping and e-cigarettes aren’t “new”, they have been out since 2003. If this was a day one issue I’d be more inclined to agree with you.
The current most likely culprit is shoddy or contaminated products containing THC, per the CDC. Stuff that is less than legal in many places and where a demand makes an unscrupulous black market thrive.
I am actually anti-smoking and anti-vaping as a personal choice and preference for people I prefer to be around. But making them double illegal I believe is just going to make use RISKIER rather than safer.
I think the CDC’s advice is prudent. I don’t think a city banning something like this is really helping. YMMV.
https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/basic_information/e-cigarettes/severe-lung-disease.html
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They weren’t widely available in the US until 2007 and their popularity didn’t really explode to the extent it has in recent years until Juul hit the market around 2015. For much of that period the FDA’s efforts to reign in product sales (including flavored vaping pods that clearly targeted children) were hobbled by industry lobbying and court rulings limiting their authority.
We also didn’t know the health impacts of vaping on “day one” because it’s literally impossible to know the long-term health effects of ANY product on day one. We’re only just starting to learn the health dangers now, and they aren’t looking good.
Are you under the impression that vapes contain tobacco?
It looks as if the big tobacco companies would like to get vaping out of the way so they can introduce their own e-cig system -
Wait till some black kid is gunned down by a cop for the “crime” of selling black market vapes on the street corner. I’m old enough to remember when it was the religious right that wanted to ban all sorts of victimless crimes, are you?
I thank God that Scotch whisky was invented prior to the creation of the FDA.
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OK, technically the nicotine used in vaping fluid is generally harvested from a plant that is only a close relative of the tobacco plant used to manufacture cigarettes. Better?
Selling a product that kills people without disclosing or even fully investigating the risks of said product doesn’t feel like a “victimless crime” to me.
IMO the process should be reversed. Until a product is demonstrated as more dangerous than other similar products (tobacco, marijuana, alcohol, other legally available addictive substances) it should be legal by default.
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That’s not what the stats in the article show. They show a continuous downward trend in smoking in both adults and teens, at the same time as vaping is taking off.
There’s no reason to argue for a gateway effect when there’s no evidence in those graphs for one.
I’m not suggesting it’s a “gateway” to smoking regular cigarettes. But the the graph clearly shows that since vaping became widely introduced there are many more total teens inhaling nicotine (when you are include vaping + cigarettes) than there otherwise would be.
Earlier when I referred to teens “taking up smoking” I meant inhaling nicotine in either form. I guess that was the point of confusion?
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I do agree with you that it needs to be looked into and safety or quality standards in place. I doubt it is 100% safe. But it appears to be safer than smoking.
Your right that the popularity of vaping has increased recently, but thus far it seem that just using the regular e-cigarette stuff isn’t causing issues. If it was, you would see a huge number of people effected. The current evidence is some vaping products are harmful. For sure we need to figure out what and why. But if things are illegal it will be nigh impossible to insure what your inhaling is up to snuff or not (pun intended).
This reminds me of the anti-vaxxers putting too much weight on the anecdotal evidence of vaccines causing harm and them declaring that call vaccines are bad and harmful.
Let’s also not pretend that smoking weed is 100% safe. You’re putting smoke and chemicals in to your lungs and blood stream. Is it mostly safe? It seems so. Is it safer than smoking due to lower use (you aren’t smoking a pack of joints a day). Yes. Could is still cause lung problems later in life? I would bet money on it. Do I think it should be banned? No.
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I understand that was the premise everyone (including the FDA) was working from but I’m not sure the evidence bears that out, at least not yet.
The premise was that vaping would be less likely to cause lung cancer and other illnesses associated with long-term use of other tobacco products because users don’t inhale as many known carcinogens. That premise seemed like a perfectly reasonable one at the time.
However we now know that vaping appears to cause potentially lethal lung injuries that are not associated with regular cigarette use, and these injuries can be fatal for people who have been using vaping products for a year or less. It doesn’t do much good to avoid a product that can give you lung cancer 20 years down the road if you substitute it with one that kills you before you ever get a chance to live that long.
It’s going to take a lot of study to work out the real risks here but so far the epidemiology linking vaping to acute pulmonary injury looks a heck of a lot more solid than the epidemiology linking autism to vaccines.
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Oddly enough, you Americans CAN now easily “dry herb vape tobacco”, because Philip Morris’s IQOS system is basically exactly just that, and it recently passed US FDA early approval steps. Much of Europe already sells them over the counter at the newspaper/ciggie kiosks.
They don’t call it “dry herb vape tobacco” - they call it “heat not burn”, but it fulfils your criteria quite precisely.
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Thanks! Again, my tobacco needs are more than met by the very occasional cigar, but I was genuinely curious and shall look that up.
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Interesting development in the ongoing investigation of vaping-related deaths:
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In the news yesterday:
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I’m sorry, but you can’t toss out the idea that sugar kills more people than alcohol and drugs without a citation. On its face, that is ludicrous. Tobacco, alcohol, and harder drugs have huge annual death tolls directly attributable to them.
I’m not speaking to whether those things should be banned. That’s a separate thread in what you said that I’m opting not to comment on here.
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This reminds me of the anti-vaxxers putting too much weight on the anecdotal evidence of vaccines causing harm and them declaring that call vaccines are bad and harmful.
Whoa whoa whoa. Let’s be very clear on this point. We have actual science pointing to reasons to be concerned about vaping. Meanwhile, the entire antivax movement is based entirely on one fraudulent study by Wakefield who intentionally faked his data because he had a product he wanted to sell. He lost his medical license for it.
Equating those two things is grossly intellectually irresponsible.
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