Vaping Can Be Addictive and May Lure Teenagers to Smoking, Science Panel Concludes (nytimes.com)

A national panel of public health experts concluded in a report released on Tuesday that vaping with e-cigarettes that contain nicotine can be addictive and that teenagers who use the devices may be put at higher risk of switching to traditional smoking. From a report: Whether teenage use of e-cigarettes may lead to conventional smoking has been intensely debated in the United States and elsewhere. While the industry argues that vaping is not a steppingstone to conventional cigarettes or addiction, some antismoking advocates contend that young people become hooked on nicotine, and are enticed to cancer-causing tobacco-based cigarettes over time. The new report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine is the most comprehensive analysis of existing research on e-cigarettes. It concluded the devices are safer than traditional smoking products and that they do help smokers quit, citing conclusive proof that switching can reduce smokers' exposure to deadly tar, numerous dangerous chemicals and other carcinogens.

Comments

Re:Unbiased data hard to find

[Linux_ho]

As someone who struggled with nicotine addiction for decades, I can testify to its addictive nature. There is also pretty compelling evidence that nicotine is bad for your heart, just like cocaine which has a similar addictive mechanism.

Re:The gateway drug theory doesn't make sense

[Attila Dimedici]

You are overlooking an important part of this:

• various levels of government entered into an agreement with the tobacco companies for those companies to pay them a certain percentage of their revenue each year.
• Many of those governments issued bonds with a repayment schedule based on what those payments were projected to be.
• Partly as a result of vaping, the tobacco company revenues are not as large as projected
• As a result of lower than projected tobacco company revenues, payments to those government bodies is less than projected.
• • This set of facts leaves those governmental bodies with insufficient revenue to pay the bonds they issued without dipping into tax revenues. Therefore, the NYT is shilling for the tobacco companies to prop up their revenue.

Re:The gateway drug theory doesn't make sense

[BlueStrat]

It's nonsensical to think that people would seek alternatives to the cheaper method that they're already using.

What the real concerns over vaping by the politicians are, are a loss of tax/licensing revenue from lost tobacco product sales, loss of government control over an aspect of people's lives, and the loss of those sweet, sweet, tobacco and healthcare industry political donations.

The point of these sorts of "studies" and "reports" is to spread FUD around vaping in the public's mind and to try to bring public opinion around such that enacting bans or heavy regulation on vaping won't lose the politicians too much in public support.

The government stands to lose money and control, the healthcare industry has all the profit from treating smoking-related diseases at risk, and of course the tobacco companies themselves stand to lose huge amounts. None of those people actually care about smokers having an effective way of quitting tobacco and avoiding the negative health effects nor do they have any financial/political motives to do so. Just the opposite in fact, if you follow the money.

Strat

Re:The gateway drug theory doesn't make sense

[Orgasmatron]

Tobacco contains a variety of psychoactive chemicals, mostly alkaloids and nitrosamines. Nicotine is the most well known, and tobacco plants produce a large amount of it. Several of the alkaloids would be called "antidepressants", if they were being sold by a pharmaceutical company.

Traditional electronic cigarette juice contains none of these other chemicals. They contain nicotine has has been extracted from tobacco leaves, and then purified. Which is important, because...

Different people react to the different chemicals in different ways. Some people develop an addiction to nicotine only, while other people also develop addiction to the other alkaloids. The people who do not get addicted to the lesser chemicals generally stop smoking permanently within a day or two after getting an electronic cigarette. It really is almost like flipping a switch in them.

I know at least a dozen people in real life like that, and I've read hundreds of their stories online since like 2009 or 2010 (whenever I first started looking into electronic cigarettes). I've never heard of anyone in this group ever having gone back to smoking, ever, for any reason. Quite a few of them have reduced their nicotine intake to zero and a several have stopped using their electronic cigarettes entirely, but most don't see any point because nicotine isn't very harmful by itself.

Other people, if their brains get more involved with the other alkaloids, fit on a spectrum. Some of them took months to quit smoking, others haven't quit entirely and maybe never will. For those people, things like snus can be used to fill in the missing chemicals, and work is underway to develop liquids that contain the full spectrum of tobacco-derived alkaloids.

These other chemicals were poorly understood 10 years ago, at least by laymen. Possibly researchers in some specific fields were well aware of them, but pretty much no one else was. Today, they are fairly well understood by (at least) the enthusiast portion of the electronic cigarette community. But I haven't seen any reason to think that they've entered the general consciousness.

No offense intended towards you, but your knowledge of the subject appears to be about on the level that a high school student would learn in health class in the 1990s. Thinking in terms of "nicotine addiction" is a dead giveaway! I encourage you to educate yourself on the subject matter if you find it likely that you will be offering your opinion to others in the future.