this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2024
157 points (97.0% liked)
Health - Resources and discussion for everything health-related
2231 readers
1 users here now
Health: physical and mental, individual and public.
Discussions, issues, resources, news, everything.
See the pinned post for a long list of other communities dedicated to health or specific diagnoses. The list is continuously updated.
Nothing here shall be taken as medical or any other kind of professional advice.
Commercial advertising is considered spam and not allowed. If you're not sure, contact mods to ask beforehand.
Linked videos without original description context by OP to initiate healthy, constructive discussions will be removed.
Regular rules of lemmy.world apply. Be civil.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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.