Stay strong on your recovery friend 💪

Thank you for your comment, this is always my biggest beef with those defending nicotine (smoking/vaping).

It’s like, WHAT DO YOU EVEN GAIN FROM IT?

I switched to CBD only vape juice and it helped!

Far from a “Worthless chemical”, mainly because it literally isn’t, it’s a naturally occurring plant substance. That has a lot of benefits behind it when not abused, there are Altzheimers drugs being developed based on Nicotine because of it’s Nootropic ability and can keep people lucid.

You’re doing what most do and conflating Nicotine with Smoking. They’re not the same thing. Nicotine promotes alertness, relaxation, helps indirectly with weight loss from appetite suppression, athletic performance etc. The laundry list of negative from cigarettes don’t negate that.

I suspect your struggle comes mostly from the habits, rather than the chemicals involved? I’ve known a number of cigar addicts that managed to quit, they often said that the hardest part was avoiding it after an activity, like a cigar after a cup of coffe, a cigar after a meal, etc. Being allowed cigar breaks during work also encourages use, since it’s a “free pause”

There are different qualities of air of course, and microparticles in it that could cause harm, but on the whole it’s more or less all the same.

Absolutely, and that’s the problem. The same argument you just posed could also be used against intentionally smelling flowers, or sticking your nose over a pot of boiling broth to smell that chicken deliciousness.

We don’t know that vaped nicotine is more harmful than most things we breathe. In fact, I’d say there are non-drug things people do that we already know to be worse than vaping. Ever go camping? The smoke from that fire is worse than vaping, worse than almost any substance you might want to smoke.

So the question is how bad vaping (the action, not the drug) is. Is it as bad as sniffing a rose, as bad as lighting a scented candle? As bad as incense? As bad as a campfire? If, as many suspect, it’s near the beginning of that scale, then the only critique we can rightly have is towards the substance vaped. If it’s near the end of the scale, we kinda need some research to support that claim.

Its like dumping garbage into a sink vs. a paper bag

As of yet, the medical and scientific community have not found solid evidence that it’s “like…garbage” at all if you don’t like it on fire.

Which is where things get complicated. Because it MIGHT be terrible for you. Or it might not be bad at all.

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If it’s not too harmful - what’s the problem with being addicted? I’m addicted to coffee and drink at least two cups per day, as do most people around here.

The addicting part isnt the nicotine. Its everything atound it. The ritual, the friends the “doing something with your hands”.
The psychological addiction is way stronger than the nicotine addiction that you can just overcome in 2 weeks.

Oh sorry, I was thinking nicotine supplements like gum and patches. In my mind, smoking and vaping are the same thing. “Don’t inhale particulate matter of any kind” is an excellent rule of thumb for all humans in all situations

The full effects of vaping are not well understood, and while they’re almost certainly not as bad as cigarettes, they’re also almost certainly still bad for you

That used to say that about artificial sweeteners. The question shouldn’t be “is it bad for you” but “is it worse for you than 99 other things you do in a day”. And vaping nicotine is “almost certainly bad for you” because of the nicotine, and nicotine is a known quantity - we know how bad it is and isn’t. We don’t have evidence that the mechanism of vaping is bad for you, and there’s no “almost certainly” on that.

And the truth is, I have problems with people who lean on “poorly understood” for vaping. Evidence shows vaping as a mechanism (for THC as it were) going back over 2000 years to ancient Egypt. Widespread use of hookahs started in the 19th century and has tons mechanically in common with modern vaporization. There are some differences, but short of a few badly-designed vapes that let air reach the lungs while superheated, it looks a lot like people are saying “not well understood” because they cannot seem to “understand” bad things and they don’t want to say good things. We have TONS of research precedent around room-temperature air with vaporized herbs in it.

If I were going to imbibe nicotine (or CBD or THC for that matter), I would probably prefer to vape it. I think the stigma against vaping needs to step aside for the vaccine research considering using vapes as an alternative to needle injection.

Banning nicotine would be going too far. Nicotine in and of itself isn’t that bad, it’s the delivery methods that can be problematic. In particular the ones where you inhale things into your lungs. But there are smokeless tobacco and there are types of tobacco smoking where you don’t inhale the smoke.

The links from John Hopkins, the CDC and Harvard all focus on vaping, and so are irrelevant to the question of nicotine rather than the delivery methods.

The first link has nothing wrong in it. It’s correct nicotine is toxic. So is caffeine - the LD50 of caffeine in humans is reasonably high, many grams. To the issue of ingestion, the issue is toxicity at doses people are likely to deal with.

To the cancer links, again without looking at delivery methods, this is meaningless. To let me quote one small part:

Thus, the induced activation of nAChRs in lung and other tissues by nicotine can promote carcinogenesis by causing DNA mutations[26] Through its tumor promoter effects, it acts synergistically with other carcinogens from automobile exhausts or wood burning and potentially shorten the induction period of cancers[43] [Table 2].

This makes sense. Don’t inhale lots of particulates combined with nicotine in other words. There are also many other parts of the article that are useful. E.g. it’s perfectly reasonable to accept that e.g. if you are on chemo you should stay off nicotine, and if you breastfeed you should stay off nicotine.

What the article does not show is that nicotine, as opposed to delivery methods like inhalation, is much worse than other drugs we’re perfectly fine with.

I’ll note that the article also includes things in its conclusion that it has categorically not cites studies in support of. E.g. it just assumes the addiction potential is proven (it is, but putting that in the conclusion of a paper without citing sources is really poor form, especially in a paper claiming to set out the issues with nicotine in isolation rather than smoking).

It also tried to drive up the scare factor by pointing out its toxicity at doses irrelevant for human consumption (e.g. as an insecticide; if wildly irrelevant doses should be considered, then we could write the same paper about how apples should be banned because they contain cyanide).

The “Materials and methods” section also goes on to say “Studies that evaluated tobacco use and smoking were excluded” but then goes on to make multiple arguments on the basis of harm caused by smoking (e.g. “Nicotine plays a role in the development of emphysema in smokers, by decreasing elastin in the lung parenchyma and increasing the alveolar volume”) and cites a paper focused on smoking, in direct contradiction of the claim they made (“Endoh K, Leung FW. Effects of smoking and nicotine on the gastric mucosa: A review of clinical and experimental evidence. Gastroenterology. 1994;107:864–78.”)

So, yes, if you make claims about how you’re going to address nicotine rather than smoking, and then go on to address smoking and other means of inhalation intermingled with the rest, and if you leap to conclusions you’ve not cited works in support of, and if you throw out risks without linking them causally to nicotine, you can make nicotine look very bad.

They also end with subjective statements they’ve not even attempted to support properly. E.g. they’ve gone from “here is why it’s dangerous” to “it should be restricted”, but if that was valid logic, we should restrict sales of apples too, most cleaning agents, all caffeinated products, housepaint, paint thinners, and a host of other things, it’s a specious argument and fitting that such a badly argued paper ends with it. That this passed peer review is an incredible indictment of the journal which published it.

That doesn’t mean nicotine is risk-free, but compared to other things we’re happy to ingest, I stand by my statement. But don’t inhale it.

Well of course not. You weren’t getting the dopamine rush of a large acute dose rushing from your lungs directly to your brain in a matter of seconds.

So in other words, you’re saying I didn’t pick the right delivery method to get me addicted. Which was my point.

Regardless, the dangers – including ease of addiction – are well-known and are scientifically proven. Your anecdata of one does not change that.

Missing the point: 1) a large part of the addiction for most people is down to delivery, not nicotine itself - something you yourself used as an argument against my anecdote above -, and most of the research focuses on that. 2) the remaining addiction potential of nicotine is real, and proven, but it’s also nothing particularly special compared to other things we’re fine with seeing the addiction to as ranging from a nuisance (e.g. caffeine) to a problem that doesn’t justify prohibition (any more), like alcohol.

My point was not that it’s impossible to get addicted to nicotine, but that confusing nicotine vs. nicotine via a given delivery method is not helpful.

You can build your own coils and mix your own liquid. Me and my mate both do it it’s far cheaper and better for the environment, not too hard either once uve learnt the basics of materials and ohms n all.

At all or while making insane profit and producing a lot of waste? At all simple: just look how vapes looked like before Big Tabacco came and enshittified them.

But consumption isn’t being banned…

Your freedom ends where mine begins. You are free to kill yourself, but not to blow cancerous substances on top of me - and yes, that should include cars.

These are cigarettes. Engineered to be as addictive as possible. We aren’t talking about hand rolled stogies here

You can imagine it, it would be less than the amount that is currently being smoked.

By that logic we should continue slavery. Aren’t you worried someone’s going to purchase one of your children on the black market!?

Counterpoint: A lot of people that smoke want to stop smoking. A lot of people would more easily stop smoking if it was banned or not so easily available.

Also from the title of the article it seems that this would never apply to people that already smoke legally. The idea is that you set a minimum age and then you increase it every year. Meaning that in 100 years smoking is banned for everyone. But nobody was never banned from smoking when they were legal before. They were just never allowed to. So it prevents young people from picking up the habit.

Not if he wanted to pick up smoking one year before legal age. So he will be chasing that legal age forever and can’t smoke even if he’s 68

• ////Edit: it seems like I need to give an example to explain this apparently very difficult problem: Person A is 17 , smoking is allowed from 18 Next year Person A is 18, he could under normal circumstances smoke with 18, but now smoking is legal with 19. Continue to age 68 but smoking is now allowed from 69. It’s even implied in the article

The fact that I have no idea what her name is but still know exactly who you’re talking about when you say Lettuce Head is endlessly amusing to me.

For the same reason prohibition of alcohol didn’t work, for the same reason the drug war didn’t work, for the same reason prescription requirements for medically useful narcotics doesn’t work. It doesn’t matter what the law is, people will make their own choices, and if the things are available, legally or not, people that want to use them will use them.

Look at the US. For all it’s faults, it has handled smoking very very well. The younger generation basically doesn’t smoke cigarettes. They’re not banned from it for life, they just were informed about it and so they find it disgusting and don’t really do it. You can’t even really get a date anymore with someone if you smoke cigarettes and you’re under like 40.