this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2024
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Who cares? Nicotine isn't harmful.
Yes, it is, specially at a young age...
And for pregnant people. Which is why it's great we ban vaping and all other nicotine for young children. But by the late teens, it's not really more harmful than coffee or carbs or weed, to say nothing of alcohol.
But is it more harmful than inhaling all the other garbage in cigarettes? It becomes an issue of damage mitigation because no amount of laws are ever able to stop substance use. They often make the problem worse, too.
Of course not, cigarettes are nasty. But what I would like to understand is: are kids vaping way more nicotine now and getting every more addicted? You don't get addicted to cigarettes per se, but to nicotine.
And flavoured cigarettes were banned in many places and helped stop some young people from starting to smoke.
I remember the flavor ban and thought to myself that it was going to be good to do so that it would not be as attractive to kids. The article is implying that the flavor ban did not stop kids from vaping. In fact, the ban corresponded with a slight increase in kids vaping, which does not make sense to me.
Of course, correlation does not mean causation and the two facts may not be directly related. Maybe kids heard all the talk of the ban and that served as advertising to get them to start. More studies are needed.
I read a study that cigarettes also contain MAOIs. The MAOI dramatically increase the dopamine response from nicotine based on "desire".
This could influence the perceived potency vs the measured potency.
Interesting. Gotta look into that.
Here are the ones I am recalling from. I ended up finding them
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6872813/
https://www.nature.com/articles/npp201636
It's a moral failing to be addicted to anything you rotten son of a bitch. /s
When doctors ask if you smoke, they primarily care if you smoke things containing nicotine. Iirc, that's the cause of the smoking related heart disease risk (among other health concerns).
The vast, vast majority of the problems associated with smoking is from the carcinogens in tobacco. Nicotine can cause issues, but only on the order of caffeine. It's a massive difference in scale.
I can't be arsed to look up any actual research at the moment, but if you wanted to provide some, I'd be appreciative.
Is it the fins that use snuss that is showing to be much less dangerous? Basically nicotine by itself doesn't appear to be showing anywhere near the health issue that smoking does. But idk in this world of corporate sponsored studies maybe I've been lied to.
I'd actually be happy to, but it requires some deep diving into studies. Most studies will have a headline that says something like "using nicotine is just as bad as vaping!!!" but the data almost never actually supports the conclusion. It's terrible, terrible science and it's one of the worst examples of systemic problems with bad science. There's a clear cultural push to villify nicotine.
Then those conclusions are reported by other meta studies etc etc
I'm not saying to get your data from sketchy YouTube videos or anything, just do a critical peer analysis of the actual data from various studies. I'll do it for you. I've dived into it before and I'll be glad to do so again, but I won't have time until the weekend. It'll take a couple of hours. I'm gonna favorite your comment so I can get back to it.
Ok let me just lead with, how the FUCK is there no way to sort inbox replies by saved? Isn't that the whole damn point?
Alright, here we go. Gonna have to split this into multiple posts. Here's the first.
Let's start, like any good research, with the wikipedia article on nicotine. The intro specifically notes how it's NOT a carcinogen, and mentions a few extremely mild or disputed adverse effects, but doesn't go too much into it.
Later in the article, it says
Which should be a good indicator that the common ideas about nicotine being harmful are wrong. But, fair enough wikipedia is not a stringent source and shouldn't be taken at face value, so let's dive deeper.
Here's a search for "nicotine harmful effects". Let's separate them into broadly 3 categories of results. There's stuff like this heart.org result, which exclusively talk about "smoking and nicotine". These types of articles are dangerous in and of themselves because they require a level of critical thinking to separate out "smoking" and "nicotine". A lot of anti-vaping hit pieces have a top-level title talking about nicotine, but then the body of the article references negative effects that are exclusive to smoking. Here's one such hit piece, run by a dystopian-sounding group called the "Truth Initiative" which should immediately make anyone suspicious of their goals. Note the article is under topic "harmful effects of tobacco", subtopic "nicotine addiction".
Second, we have government pages like the CDC which very clearly state
I'll spend the next few paragraphs pointing out how this is simply declared to be so by governments, with no sources whatsoever to back it up. It's a self-referential kind of contagion of an idea being spread from government office to government office, officially by policy and unofficially by encouragement, peer pressure, and referencing other authoritative offices.
Many government pages actually have no sources listed at all; their pages are literally just political opinion dressed up in an authoritative government voice. I gave the example of the CDC because it actually does have sources: this one which just links to the home page of a different CDC department, and this one which links to an office that works on tobacco, not e-cigarette, dangers.
If you dig a bit deeper on the first page, you find this factsheet for states. Let's take California as an example. Under the section "Public Health Response to Tobacco Use in California", it proudly lists these accomplishments:
Emphasis mine. Note the lumping together. Again, vaping is just declared, by fiat, to be equally bad as smoking. DEFINED e-cigarettes as a tobacco product.