FDA Authorizes Juul E-Cigarettes(wsj.com) |
FDA Authorizes Juul E-Cigarettes(wsj.com) |
I'll never understand why adults partaking in a particular vice can't enjoy different flavours (unless the vice is alcohol).
https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/e-cigarettes/why-youth-vape.html
https://www.fda.gov/tobacco-products/ctp-newsroom/misleading...
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6663555/
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2018/05/...
https://www.drugs.com/news/study-finds-powerful-sweetener-va...
In other words: Our government utterly decimated an American company just to make room in the market for Chinese competitors to dominate.
Because what happened there was that 'strawberry kiwi', 'banana ice', and 'miami mint', and whatever fruity flavour in a colourful package you can come up with, turned vaping from something adults did to quit smoking tobacco into the biggest hype amongst teenagers since fidget spinners. Only they get addicted to nicotine as a bonus, and switch to 'proper' tobacco in their senior years.
Even with a complete ban on those the damage is done, and all across the globe society is now dealing with a huge profitable underground Snapchat-enabled market geared solely at selling the equivalent of a pack-a-day habit in nicotine to kids. (The ban helps to gradually denormalise vaping again, so it is good to have in place.)
I don't think vape kids are ever switching to tobacco - that doesn't fit the model that they want at all: its an electronic device that delivers a stimulant.
Why is alcohol something that's okay to market to kids? (The new supergirl is a drunk party girl). Isn't alcohol much more harmful?
About 85% of African Americans who smoke use menthol cigarettes, compared to a rate of less than 30% menthol use among white Americans. [1] They're disproportionately advertised and were (in the past) literally given away in poor Black communities to get people addicted.
Basically, policy makers can target their regulations to a specific group by specifying flavor. Sure, an individual white adult might like fruity flavors or menthols, a black adult might like originals, and some kids might prefer original or menthols, but there's a strong statistical bias.
When health departments are trying to address a particular health concern - say, young children smoking - they can do so by targeting fruity flavors. Conversely, when tobacco company marketing departments are trying to advertise their products to Black users without drawing unwanted attention from disproportionately white regulators, they can achieve their goals by promoting menthols. An individual from any population might have any flavor preference, but the dice are shockingly heavily weighted when you're looking at large groups.
[1]: https://datatools.samhsa.gov/das/nsduh/2019/nsduh-2019-ds000...
there is no exception to alcohol for this. Anybody who was a teenager or older in the aughts remembers "alcopops" (might have had a different name depending on where you're from). Lots of countries regulated or raised taxes on mixed drinks because they were seen (probably justifiably so) as targeting teenagers. In Germany it resulted in Smirnoff Ice and some Bacardi mix drink largely going off the shelves.
https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/wellness-and-preventi...
On the rare occasions of exposure by a user exhaling in public next to me I found it worse than passively inhaling cigarette smoke.
Nicotine is highly addictive and bad for you health. You pretty much have a customer for life ... which is the point. So next to having something which is bad for you, inhaling glycerol, combined with a substance which is addictive and bad for your health, you also are at a financial loss for life.
And it's targeted at teens ...
(I think vaping should be legal, fwiw.)
One kid has asthma and uses an albuterol inhaler. The inhaler requires a doctor's prescription and is expensive.
The other kid vapes e-cigarettes. Vaping solution is cheaper and readily available.
Perhaps albuterol is a dangerous, addictive substance?????
By the same token the degree to which vapes help people quit is up in the air, some studies show strong effects in favor of quitting, others show strong effects that it's inferior to other quitting aids. (i.e. studies like https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7867832/)
"These are a way for people to reduce harm" is primarily an industry narrative at this point, divorced from reality.
UK is seeing a wave of people who never smoked cigarettes but went straight to vapes. It's less bad for sure but not harmless. IIRC a bump in lung cancer cases in young people was ascribed to this.
How many children, enticed by the fruit flavors, pick up a life time habit of tobacco use?
That said, tons of other vapes are allowed on the market, so why should Juul specifically be banned?
Tobacco products are insanely harmful.
Alcohol kills hundreds of thousands a year in the US.
But heaven forbid you flavor your nicotine.
What is the actual criteria for FDA approval?
Why do you think we have tariffs?
In most US states the sale of alcohol is already much more restricted than the sale of tobacco.
You can walk into any 7-11, convenience store, or gas station and buy tobacco. In most states, this is not true for alcohol.
Also, tobacco vape use is much more addictive and somewhat more concealable than alcohol. People can generally tell or at least suspect you've been drinking; people generally cannot tell if you just vaped 10 seconds ago in the bathroom.
It's far from ideal and you and I would certainly not design a country from scratch this way, but legislation (at least, ideally) deals with things as they are and not with an imagined tabula rasa state of affairs.
It's not in many places. Where is it OK? There is a reason abstinence from alcohol is getting normalised for under 18s.
> I don't think vape kids are ever switching to tobacco […]
Demographic research polling suggests otherwise. Besides, it is gradually becoming more apparent that vaping is very much not a healthy thing to do¹.
1: Just one example of reporting on this issue: https://www.theguardian.com/society/article/2024/sep/08/vapi...
It's a new phenomenon that they might (might) be able to tell TikTok or Youtube to estimate the age of individual viewers and limit which topics can appear in advertisements to different age groups.
The existence of the candy flavors and any public marketing of those flavors (even on the label in the store aisle) is implicitly marketing to children.
Also the cultural aspect is just different. It is generally harder for kids to get alcohol in my experience and also you (usually) don’t carry a bottle of 99 bananas and swig it every few minutes out in public.
Perhaps most importantly is that alcohol doesn’t contain nicotine. People get addicted to alcohol but not in the same way people get addicted to nicotine.
E-cigarettes are much easier to obtain and so any product features particularly attractive to kids are much more likely to have a significant affect.
I'll stop you right there, because I know what you're thinking, and nope: Zyn containers already have a child safety lock on them. Its the bane of existence for the adults who buy them, you can ask any of them, but they already have that.
Regardless of the purported child safety lock on Zyn, child nicotine poisonings are up dramatically according to recent research:
Many of the candy and fruit-flavored vapes are legitimately delicious tasting, through and through. The same is not as correct for nicotine pouches. These flavors only barely cover up what is best described as a highly-chemical, astringent, punch to the mouth, vomit inducing taste much akin to chlorinated pool water. They are not candy. They don't taste like candy. They are not sold in containers that look like candy.
Why are rates up? Because these products have become significantly more popular! Zyn sales have gone up by bonkers numbers basically every year for the past decade [1]. Any report that suggests accidental consumption is up should be met with a "great job sherlock, really putting that government pork funding to work", because even intentional consumption is up. In fact, statements like the following from your link should raise even further questions about the efficacy of their findings:
> Nicotine pouches were also more likely to be associated with serious medical outcomes or hospital admissions than other nicotine products like gum/lozenges, e-liquids, powder/granules, and tablets/capsules/caplets.
What is "nicotine powder, granules, tablets, capsules, caplets"? That's nothing. There is no such thing as population-level consumption of "nicotine powder". No one buys that. No one uses it. They're clearly just making stuff up to scare people. Even an assertion that medical outcomes from the consumption of nicotine pouches are worse than e.g. lozenges or e-liquids is extremely suspect, from a first principals perspective. Many popular e-liquids, such as Juul, contains as much as 5mg of nicotine per milliliter; and because its a liquid, its extremely bio-available, it gets absorbed through every mucousal membrane that liquid touches, and anyone who has touched vape eliquid can attest that the smell takes days to wash off once it touches your skin.
Bad article, bad research, I don't believe a word it purports to be true.
[1] https://fortune.com/article/philip-morris-economic-volatilit...
Kids were using nicotine before vaping, they were smoking cigarettes. And these companies absolutely are investing in a growing market for adults who either want to quit smoking entirely or want a healthier option to cigarettes. As cigarettes prices have continued to soar and laws have become more and strict on where someone can and cannot smoke, vaping offers an alternative to get nicotine and an oral fixation. So it's not surprising that more and more adults have switched to it.
That's not a study that's a meta-analysis. You seem to have seen the one ad Juul put out to minors and assumed that is the entire industry and its purpose. This is objectively divorced from reality.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10741819/
Here's the statistical breakdown from that: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10741819/table/t1/
Between 1991 and 2021 tobacco use among young people dropped precipitously. Again, this shows up again and again in the data comparing ALL products containing nicotine.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...
So with all due respect this isn't really up for debate, it isn't a subtle signal in the data. Nicotine use (especially smoking) has been on the decline across ALL age groups, especially children, for decades, and vaping starkly reversed that trend.
We are far past the apex of teen vaping in 2019.
I am not of the opinion that govt should not be placing restrictions. That is literally the definition of laws. I am of the opinion that govt should not regulate how someone can do something.
Loosening a ban on menthol, not because it was harmful, but because it was causing addictions, was an overreach. It should have banned the Tobacco and nicotine instead.
"Let me control my own health" up until abortion is mentioned.
"We need better surveillance measures" up until that surveillance is used against them.
"Law enforcement needs more privileges" until they harass your daughter with the bodycam turned off.
"Don't regulate Apple/Google" up until they become politicized and collude with the government for warrantless surveillance.
"Foreign policy is too globalist!" up until Israel insists Iran has a nuke. And so on. There isn't a single neocon value that can't be forsaken by ideologues, I challenge you to name just one.
The whole issue around abortion for conservatives is that it's not considered felony manslaughter by the Supreme Court. Hasn't been for close to 50 years now.
You are the one who proposed that this product is to be used as a medical device, so why wouldn't we treat it like one?
Because it's hard. There's implications of autonomy here. If an unborn baby is a life and has rights, which rights does it have? Is it an American Citizen? It must, at least, have personhood - what are the guardrails around that? Can I, for example, say that the unborn fetus is a person and is inside me, and is therefore bound by "stand your ground" laws, meaning I am free to kill it for self-defense, much like I would a grown person?
See, the Supreme Court never actually asked that question. As it stands, unborn babies are not people, they are not citizens. We, instead, said "fuck it this is hard to argue" and made exactly 1 exception for unborn fetuses - abortion.
If you want to argue an unborn fetus is alive, there are implications and consequences of that. Evidently, conservatives are too cowardly to address any of them. Ever. So, here we are, with our broken laws that make no sense.
It's almost like saying we should stop vaccinating because the rate of disease has dropped after decades of vaccination
Are you seriously making the argument that any flavor outside of tobacco and menthol is targeted at kids? That no adult likes the flavor of funnel cake and fruit? Because I can show you the massive amount of vape shops across the country that sell through flavors quickly and it's not to kids. The mentality of making something taste worse to prevent people from consuming it because you think it's bad is based in prohibition era puritanical thinking. Not to mention it's directly benefitting tobacco companies by keeping people smoking cigarettes.
I switched to vaping, IDK, 10 or so years ago from an off and (mostly) on cigarette habit and haven't looked back. There was a point where I was spending more on 'cheap' Chinese vape gear than I was on cigarettes but, other than that, no regrets.
And, yes, I'm a middle-aged adult who likes to vape flavors a well.
Perhaps the only downside, if you can even call it that, is I never tried to quit vaping as I enjoy it and it (probably) won't kill me before the lingering effects of a couple decades of smoking, environmental hazards of invading Iraq twice, the skin cancer and whatever else comes up due to my general lack of concern over living a healthy lifestyle.
That said, I do think that vapes as a replacement for an existing tobacco habit is a nice idea and it makes sense that it would be much safer. The issue is just that I have not known people to stick with them.
This is from a Dutch newspaper article interviewing one of the researchers from the Trimbos Institute:
> De overstap naar sigaretten met tabak is vervolgens snel gemaakt, zegt Croes. „We horen ook dat de jonkies op het schoolplein vapen, maar dat in de bovenbouw niet meer stoer vinden. Dan gaan ze roken, wat in hun ogen nu weer een positief imago heeft gekregen.” Zo vormen e-sigaretten volgens haar een „enorme tegenkracht” voor campagnes die jongeren van roken moeten weerhouden.¹
(Tobacco) smoking is cool again. The young kids vape, so to be really cool and adult…
1: https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2024/10/01/beginnen-met-een-sigare...