No evidence is provided for the safety of THC vaping products. An NYT article that was clearly biased against THC was picked apart instead. The clear implication is that THC vapes were unjustly targeted and readers should assume the contrary of the dishonest NYT article. i.e. That THC vapes are safe. Yet, no direct evidence of that is provided. A possibly fatal lie is told purely with true facts.
Here's why that matters: THC is a recreational product. It's relatively recent legalization in only some jurisdictions is why we're just starting to get good data on it. Vaping is even newer and less well studied.
Okay, so let's say there's no clear evidence that THC vapes are harmful. I'm being a dishonest fear-monger. Or am I?
What should be the default position on recreational drugs? Specifically, ones that are inhaled? Ask a respirologist. Lungs are delicate and, if you screw yours up, you're really fubar'd. They'll tell you that, if you do want to use a relatively unstudied recreational drug, eat it or shove it up your ass. (Seriously, THC enemas are a thing.) Don't put it in your lungs.
The default position for inhaling drugs should be, "Don't" until they're proven safe. This is my opinion/bias/dishonest-agenda.
Does that make more sense to you now?
That's not the point - gwerns article dismantled the NYT article. If one read (or heard about) the NYT article and used it as "proof" of "vaping is bad", gwern is saying: "not so fast". That's not to say "vaping is healthy", nor even "vaping is not unhealthy" - just that this article isn't the proof you're looking for. Vaping (legal flavoured nicotine (which is what's on trial)) could be horrible - simply citing instances of why this is so isn't actually done in the article.
If it matters, I'm not condoning vaping or smoking at all.
The NYT article was suppose to be about nicotine vapes and in it, they used an example that only appears related because it's a vape. The harm caused by the illegally marketed/unapproved incidence doesn't prove the new york times summary: nicotine vapes are harmful.
The fact presented about the THC vape incidences arn't categorically related to the use and marketing of nicotine vapes.
The point of the article is to showcase how examples can be technically correct (vaping superset) but not actually provide relevance (THC vapes w/vitamin E acetate caused lung damage).
Unlike the author I’m not claiming that they did it deliberately, but that’s what their article ends up doing.
Wanna jump out of an airplane with no parachute and see if one of your buddies can strap one on you before you hit the ground? Totally fine with me.
Wanna base-jump off a skyscraper in NYC with a wing-suit ? Fuck off. You’ll probably hurt someone else who didn’t sign up for that.
That said, I’d also like the CPSC to look into whether products like this are safe and hold manufacturers accountable for their consequences.
I’d also very much appreciate it if the FTC and FDA actually did thorough random testing of drugs and supplements (recreational or therapeutic) to ensure that the actual ingredients and doses match the label. The FDA requires drug manufacturers to be in compliance, but doesn’t actually test drugs themselves, they mostly just look over paperwork to see if the processes followed would probably produce the correct product and assume the paperwork isn’t manipulated.
In fact, the FDA actively works to prevent people, even the Pentagon, from doing independent 3rd party drug testing of common pharmaceuticals [0]
0: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-12-05/pentagon-... / https://archive.is/eyWSn
>Wanna base-jump off a skyscraper in NYC with a wing-suit ? Fuck off. You’ll probably hurt someone else who didn’t sign up for that.
Are they not the same?
Also the aeroplane itself is a highly regulated piece of this system
> An NYT article that was clearly biased against THC
This was an NYT article clearly biased against nicotine. One of us is confused here. Maybe I can't follow your particular idiom.
Ideally don't inhale anything that's not fairly clean air.
The critique is: "This article uses a rhetorical device (THC vapes with vitamin E acetate are harmful) to suggest that nicotine vapes are harmful, when there's nothing in common other than being a vape product"
It's goal isn't to refute the evidence, but to suggest the editors and writers of the articles did not provide a sufficient connection between the THC-vape incidents and the harm caused by nicotine vapes, yet spent the entire article convolution any distinctions between the two, to implicate nicotine vaping as equally harmful as the THC infused vitamin-e lung damage incidents.
Had the writers & editors at the NYT had any nicotine vape related direct harm, that would have connected the THC-vape incidences. But just writing this sentence, you can see how continually repeating THC-vape incidences biases you to understanding that there's a difference.
And that's the point, NYT article went out of it's way to convolute direct harm incidences to a broader vaping category when there's no evidence to suggest nicotine vaping is susceptable to the same direct harm. It's like saying bob drove his car drunk & crashed, therefore, driving cars is dangerous. We know it's dangerous but the "driving drunk" doesn't prove they're dangerous. You can do lots of dangerous things while drunk.
Similarly, THC-infused vitamin E acetate in vapes caused lung damage. Is the operable cause the Vape or the THC-infused vitamin E acetate; no evidence is presented that it's anything other than the vape liquid by all other sources. That is to say, no evidence by NYT is presented that some other substance in a vape is equally harmful.
If you want to get into the science, go ahead, a vape is vaporizing things. So it matters what those things it's vaporizing is. And if it's incomplete vaporization, then it's possible harmful chemicals are being generated. So perhaps the article needed to present the basic facts about vapes.
> So perhaps the article needed to present the basic facts about vapes.
The whole last third of the NYT article is about how we don't (or did not at the time) know what substances may be at play, with several specific agents called out.
I grew up reading NYTimes on the weekend with my parents. I held them in extreme high regard when it came to their news and journalistic integrity. Over the years, I've shifted to think of them as another data point. For the industries that I'm most familiar with (Tech, Finance, and Pharma), I find their reporting often shallow, lacking in nuance, or intentional/unintentional misreporting. And I often wonder if their reporting of other areas is similarly lacking.
Now, they are just another data point, which is sad.
also, the first reader comment literally says:
“Vaping hasn’t been shown to be unsafe scientifically“
It shows us that we are strong, and others are weak, and that we need to attack the weak before they become strong and destroy us.
This sort of shit sells like hotcakes.
On a deeper level you have several interested parties (vaping companies, tobacco companies, public health interests that get funding for whatever reasons) that stand to lose or gain alot of money depending on how it's regulated.
Or you you might even have politicians looking for donations from the people that are selling vapes or more likely, politicians that are seeing a potential new tax revenue source and our feeling out the level of opposition or support for it.
I don't think the NYTs goes for scare stories for the most part.
I've been trying to find a place where people write down these tricks so that I can at least name and classify them for myself. There's one that particularly gets me, a kind of false aggregation. Say breast cancer is 99% treatable and costs $1m and prostate cancer is 1% treatable and the most you'd spend is $1k. Suppose someone said "cancers can be as bad as 1% treatable while attempts can be up to $1m to do". Well, that makes it sound like there's a cancer where you spend a mil and it's 1%. This kind of false aggregation obscures the truth.
It would be useful to me so I can concisely name this kind of thing and then work with it to preserve epistemic hygiene.
0: The distinctively beautiful website is brand enough haha
i would much rather read this collation directly, give me bullet points. in such a structured format it would also be easier to analyze if a given statement is too specific or has too many qualifiers. it would also be easier to notice what's missing.
This concern is addressed in the article.
> it would be possible to write this story without bringing in irrelevant THC-contaminated anecdotes or EVALI, by focusing on legitimate criticisms of nicotine vaping. (You could discuss teen access, flavor marketing, age checks, FDA jurisdiction, statutory drafting, the economics of disposable devices, and the adult harm-reduction case without ever mentioning EVALI which you know is not related to teen access to legal anything.)
If you need nic, snus is by far the best for you.
gwern’s writing (including on nicotine) was formative for me; it showed me how and why the internet the was important: it let me read good, well written thinking I had never seen from the NYTs or my parents.
I first saw a link to gwern.net on HN. And I trusted the NYTs as an institution then, and do to this day… and I’m sure I clicked through, and took the gwern post seriously in part because comments weren’t universally negative.
You can point to bounded trust problems, or talk more about how “The Media Very Rarely Lies”…
But please don’t take up the first comment on a gwern post to cheap shot the NYTs
It boils down to an obvious disparity in the standard of proof they demand for "pet" topics versus what they need for everything else. You can do this kind of ultra-nitpicky "rational inquiry" to undermine anything you don't like. You can use it to argue against seatbelts. Or against the ban on lead paint. Was lead paint really all that bad?... and I mean, really? Are there studies? Are they high quality enough?... Double-blind? Confounding factors? Correlation or causation? Even if they look solid, I bet they contain enough errors to cast doubt. Cui bono? What was the role of the titanium dioxide lobby in all this?
For nicotine specifically, I've been around enough people seriously addicted to nicotine to just roll my eyes at this stuff. I had things thrown at me by a visibly jittery relative when I refused to smuggle cigarettes into a hospital. Do I have a published double-blind study showing that it's worse than coffee? No. But again, neither do rationalists for 99% of the stuff they believe in.
Do I think that vapes are a noteworthy problem to be focusing on? Maybe not, but public policy is always to some extent vibe-based. And the harm of being too heavy-handed on vapes is really not something that keeps me up at night.
Public health officials are throwing their credibility into a bonfire when they land on a fixation and use heavy handed strategies to pursue their goals, without a sense of proportionality or efficacy.
On the flip side I can literally type "vape shop" into Google and get a handful of options in walking distance that I could stroll into legally and purchase whatever I wanted, as long as it was not flavored. That too is something Google is happy to share with me.
Meth, with varying levels of fentanyl adulteration, you can get delivered or buy from the street corner, depending on your neighborhood. From where I am, I'd estimate about 10 minutes to get a hold of the meth; 20 minutes to get a hold of any vape; and Juul probably an hour (place in Daly City sells them; I'd have to drive).
Here, the crux is whether we assume that Gwern's uncited Vitamin E Acetate reference is true (i.e., nicotine vapes are fine since they don't have this compound) without any evidence outside a link to wikipedia. I do not [see for example ref 1, with the caveat that we can't really tell if VEA is in use illegally]. We also are four years out from the NYT article and comfortably looking back with knowledge unavailable at the time (to wit, Gwern's assertion that EVALI has fallen with the reduction in VEA use).
I accept the point that the NYT article in question[2] may be wrong in equating damage linked to THC vapes and nicotine vapes. However, what should we do when a new recreational drug category is associated with disease? Accept manufacturer-provided explanations ("Well, this opioid is actually less addictive than others and shouldn't be regulated the same!")? Or take categorical action while awaiting new information? Medicine takes the latter approach. I accept that we should all be able to do what we wish to our bodies, but reject that the State should abet us in these efforts.
As an aside, teens falling ill (the subject of the original article) leads to a lot more social impact than would occur if an adult takes up a recreational drug. There's the actual illness, lost education, potential developmental delay, impacts on the teen's friend group, moral injury to the medical team, and likely more. This would be a separate reason to be more strident in regulating new recreational drugs targeted at minors.
1. https://www.trillianthealth.com/market-research/studies/eval...
2. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/08/health/vaping-fda-nicotin...
Weed is bad.
End of.
Yay for how cheap clawd bots are and how frequently they are used to divide society.
In the rare event that you are not actually a bot, then I sincerely hope you have a long and painful disease leading to an end of life.
I'm not exactly going to get outraged at the NYT's rhetorical tactics against vaping.
In this way, the harms of lying compound while the benefits do not. For this reason I believe it highly unwise to allow it to be normalized.
Gwern's evidence that NYT succeeded in their deception campaign is... riled-up internet commentators in the comments section who think vaping is evil. Which doesn't mean much because [pardon my cheekiness here] a) every comments section on every article everywhere on the internet is full of riled-up people, and b) we all know no one reads the article before commenting, therefore these outraged commentators must have developed their opinions without the aid of the NYT.
Michael Crichton said it best:
“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”
Very respectfully, as pre-teen at the time, I recognized that there was no real reason for going from 9/11 to Afghanistan or Iraq... based on my then daily reading of NYT. And I am sure there were opinion articles in that same paper that said we were rushing towards something that demanded deeper reflection.
Fundamentally, I don't think the job of a newspaper is to think for us.
All the absurdities of that time were, in fact, news. What wasn't present at the time was a link to justify the inane war we began. And that link is still absent, which we are all collectively realizing.
Probably not much more healthy but I don’t really see how you would be ingesting much more metal from that compared to your metal frying pan for example.
The coil becomes brittle from interacting with the liquid and usually breaks contact when refilling or if dropped. what actually happens is the wick goes bad or burns, and won't "wet" the coil anymore; or you use an e-liquid/e-juice with a lot of sweeteners and the coil gets caked with burnt sweetener and can't fire anymore.
But that's if you're negligent with a DIY or "hand wound" or "drip" vape, where you're using the same coil for a very long time (weeks, depending), and it depends on the liquid, the liquids that taste/smell like bakery/confections absolutely cover coils with gunk that you have to remove the wadding (usually cotton or silicone wicking material, unbleached), and do a dry-fire to burn all the junk off. This smells awful and i usually did it by hanging the thing out a car window and firing it just so i didn't have to smell it. I personally used specialty "wire" that's real thin wire that's twisted to make it thicker, both to make it handle more heat (lower resistance means more voltage can be put in) and last longer, due to less heat stress. 90% of the time when a coil broke for me, it broke where the coil connects to the leg that goes to the terminal block, and rarely the leg would snap at the terminal block instead of the coil, and maybe 2 times the coil broke somewhere along the length. in a little over a decade of use of "rebuildable drip atomizers."
The disposable and pod-based vapes don't have any of these issues because say 9000-18000 "puffs" of 0.5s or longer and you're supposed to dispose of it. With one of the RJR or PMJ vape brands, they're not refillable, so you just throw the pod away; with the "bar" vapes, you throw the whole bar, battery and all, in the trash.
I really advocate for the "refillable pod" and "drip" or "drip tank" vapes, just from an ecological standpoint. Uwell, VodPod(stylized and possibly spelled 'voopoo') make decent pod-based ones, where the device, a pack of 2 pods, and a bottle of e-liquid to fill it with cost about the same as a Vuze device and a 6-pack of pods for the Vuze. And if you're a "heavy user" a 6 pack is < 1 week of vaping; so hands down doing it with your own device and liquid is cheaper, for sure. additionally there's a difference between "mouth to lung" and "Direct to lung" vape devices/pods. MTL is like a cigarette, you draw into your mouth, then inhale into your lungs. DTL is like a hookah or bong, you "breathe" in through the device. I used to prefer DTL but i use MTL now. the vuze and other tiny pod disposable vapes are Mouth to Lung devices.
TL;dr: No. Generally the disposable ones from the two big tobacco companies are "safe" given the GP and your queries. the "bar" ones, like "elf bar" or whatever, i am not sure. There's been QC issues and other reported problems with that type, but they're generally <18000 "puffs" and that, in my opinion that borders on being "dumb". The big vapes you see people using? those are probably safer than even the RJR/PMJ ones, unless the tank is metal. Then you can't be sure, that's up to the user!
Note: the closest thing to vaping prior to vaping was a hookah vis-à-vis nicotine, and a nebulizer, vis-à-vis vaporizing "drugs." They even make things that vaporize marijuana, straight from a grinder, these days. But heating something to create a vapor to inhale isn't "new"!
In fact, the first "e-cig" i ever saw was used by a friend in 2009 or so, and he said it was sold as an "Portable Electronic Hookah". It was a DTL device, with a tank and replaceable wick/coil "cartridge". Most DTL are "replaceable cartridge coil/wick" tanks, and most MTL are "pods"
Vaping is (compared to actually smoking tabacco) definitely harm reduction and significantly less harmful (which doesn't mean its healthy and you should do it). Yet it is treated like smoking cigarettes by law. For example in Germany you have to pay tabacco tax on the base liquid (which doesn't even contain nicotine) if it is intended to be used in a vape (17 cents per milliliter) which increased the price of the base liquid from around 10€ to 170€. But the base liquid only consists of two things (propylene glycol and glycerol) and both those substances you can by cheaply in a vet doctors online shop for maybe 5€ each liter. It's ridiculous.
anyhow, as other people and myself said already, the metal never gets hot enough to incandesce, not even remotely close!
You are not heating up the atomizer anywhere near that temperature with (2) 18650 cells. Coils are replaced when the cotton that surrounds them gets dirty and the vapor starts tasting bad.
Also the first example (jumping out of plane with no parachute at all) is perfectly legal.
anyhow, i buy juice now, too, but mine was better. I never used sweeteners. My current go-to is Naked Euro Gold 12mg, but i am on the hunt for a 25ml nicotine salt version of a similar flavor. (nicotine salt vs freebase nicotine, salt is more "mellow" and lets you put a higher concentration in, which translates directly to less use, as you're satiated much faster.)
Could you point out to some examples? Is there any "rational inquiry" that shows a worldview bias from the rationalists, in your opinion?
I agree that the broader smarty-pants community may have this issue, just curious to read your examples.
I think this nicely pointed out in "The Big Bang Theory", where Sheldon Cooper says something like "If I would be wrong, don't you think I would know about it?" That sounds like something Elmo M would say with a serious face.
In this case, for example, I doubt that Gwern is seeking to mislead, but I have heard (hearsay, I know) that there are people who read this, start vaping, and legitimately end up with nicotine additions from much worse stuff. Sure, there's nothing false said here, but you can definitely say only true things about vapes and neglect to mention that your readers of this have ended up more likely to die of lung cancer than they might have had you not published this. I think someone who was truly rationalist would find that in itself an interesting topic of conversation but it seems to rarely come up that being super pedantic often leads to negative outcomes because presumably this would make them shine a mirror at themselves in a way that they are almost intentionally incapable of discussing.
In other words, uninitialized intellectuals are just plebs with a degree or browse HN or worse reddit. They become nice "mouth pieces" for the businesses to mobilize the masses in the name of "science" or "social justice".
"7 countries in 5 years; Iraq Syria Lebanon Libya Somalia Sudan and finishing off with Iran"
well here we are 25 years later finally getting around to that last one...
and if you’d only read the first headlines on the frontpage during that time?
or…less?
Like the majority of voters?
I wasn't voting as a 12 year-old!
> and if you’d only read the first headlines on the frontpage during that time?
But I was reading the entirety of the articles :-)
My point was: that’s how they get away with manufactured consent.
Technically they reported on every nuance: but on page G8 lol