I totally understand why many pro vaping posters stopped posting here. All this anti-vaping rhetoric is being shared by people that don't know what vaping is, at even the most basic level and this need to share opinion based on some twisted idea of what they have made it up to be in there mind. The lack of knowledge shines through when attempting to debate with anyone who is uneducated on this and they continue to be embarrassed and found wanting.
95%+ safer than smoking.
83 percent more effective than nicotine replacement products.
The continued injured feeling of 3 (all of which have sank to the level of person insult and call for my silence) are of little concern to me. More important is showing real evidence and how completely irrational the opposition has been for anyone else that may read this thread, this is the kind of illogical behavior of anti-vaping campaigners right across the board.
https://www.clivebates.com/the-great-american-youth-vaping-epidemic-really/
"Neither Dr Gottlieb or Dr Adams defines the term ‘nicotine addiction’. In real life, addiction terminology is highly contested. For example, some see addiction as a brain disease, while others reject the brain disease model as far too reductionist. But let’s look at the conventional definitions: Sussman and Sussman surveyed the literature and identified five characteristics of addiction"
"Nicotine is the primary psychoactive substance in tobacco smoke or e-cigarette aerosol. But the dependence-forming characteristic of nicotine is strengthened by interactions with other substances present in cigarette smoke, for example, monoamine oxidase inhibitors (MAOIs)."
"There is no evidence that vape aerosol contains MAOIs, such as ß-carboline alkaloids found in cigarette smoke."
"What then is the basis for treating all nicotine use as if it is equally reinforcing, dependence-forming and addictive?"
"There are plenty of reasons why senior public health officials would hear only the most extreme cases, and that those involved in relaying such cases would exaggerate or distort the cases – many of their interlocutors are engaged in a political campaign to use FDA regulation to apply a da facto ban to vaping. Selection bias and confirmation bias are everpresent dangers here."
"But if we look at what we do know, the picture is far from nightmare portrayed in the press and by public health officials. Let’s try to inject the facts we do have into the discussion."
"Most adolescent vapers are not regular or daily users"
"E-cigarette frequency of use matters. There are at least two different vaping behaviours in adolescents and the difference really matters:
experimentation and frivolous use (most users)
dependence-forming substance use (some users)"
" Applying this proportion to the 2018 data would suggest about 4% of high school students are daily users (this compares to the headline 20.8% use in the past 30-days)."
"But the analysis does not stop there. What would this group of regular or daily users be doing instead of vaping if e-cigarettes did not exist? Needless to say, that data has not been disclosed. The data we do have strongly suggest that many of these more regular users would be smoking."
"If these frequent-cig users are mostly already smokers or likely to become smokers, then this may be the start of them switching away from smoking – and therefore it could be beneficial for public health (and we have seen rapid declines in adolescent smoking as vaping has risen). From previous studies, we know that frequent vaping is almost entirely concentrated in young people who smoke or use other tobacco products. Less than one in one thousand young people had become frequent vapers having never used tobacco before. And even in these cases, we do not know what this tiny minority would have done in the absence of e-cigarettes – possibly gone on to smoke."
" Not all vaping is with nicotine"
"CDC/FDA approach vaping as if it is a tobacco use behaviour, but that is an invalid assumption: some vaping involves no nicotine, some involves other substances."
"Nicotine is not “uniquely harmful” to the developing brain"
"A unique danger? Uniquely harmful? Really? More harmful than cannabis, alcohol, crystal meth, fentanyl? More harmful than American football? Worse than a car crash? Obviously, it is inappropriate to make wild claims like that nicotine is uniquely harmful."
"But what of the more modest claim that young people’s brains are harmed by nicotine? Where would you look for evidence? How about all those young people who have been exposed to nicotine as smokers? There are millions of them happily pursuing adult life: but are they suffering any form of damage? In 1980, 30.5% of US 12th graders were past-30-day smokers, 21.3% daily smokers [Monitoring the Future]. This group would be in their 50s by now, and most would have quit smoking years ago. Where is the evidence of impairment in this population arising from youth nicotine use?"
"So an important rider on this claim is that: there are no human data that show nicotine causes material harms to the adolescent brain. The evidence that there exists is based on rat and mouse studies. Even the Surgeon General’s 2016 report recognises just how indirect and speculative the claims of harm are:"
"So 29.8% of high school students are using alcohol, and 13.5% “binge drinking” (according to CDC’s definition) but 20.8% vape. There are about as many marijuana users as vapers. What is the response to that?"
"If there are any material risks with vaping, they would arise from decades of use, and only if the vaping becomes a smoking habit that would not otherwise have happened. Alcohol use, in contrast, can end a life instantly, pulverised in a road traffic accident, or put young people into violent, abusive or vulnerable situations that can be acutely harmful."
"But where are the calls to limit adult access to alcohol?"
"Dr. Gottlieb is quick to attribute the youth vaping epidemic to ‘flavors’. And quick to determine that taking them off the market would roll back the epidemic. Far too quick."
"In doing so he misses much subtlety about how flavours and product appeal actually work in public health terms – for both adults and adolescents. Many of us have tried to explain it, but apparently without success. If it can be shown that certain flavours change behaviour, it is quite possible that change will be beneficial – an attraction away from smoking."
"The absurdity of this approach reached a peak in November 2018, when FDA decided to remove flavoured e-cigarettes from convenience stores and allow them only to be sold in age-restricted locations."
"So cigarettes were unaffected, and the only vapes allowed were those most like cigarettes. FDA has completely lost track of what it is doing and why.
AG Miller also highlighted the obvious absurdity of leaving only those products which most closely resemble cigarettes on the market.
Generations of young people have taken up cigarette smoking using
almost exclusively tobacco and menthol flavors. There is no obvious logic to restricting e-liquid flavors to only those that mimic the most dangerous tobacco products and have been the main basis for initiation in the past – and no justification of such a move has been provided.
Attorney General Tom Miller, Iowa. To Scott Gottlieb. Youth tobacco and nicotine use – proportionate and responsible reaction, 14 November 2018. [link]"
"But nowhere in the Act is a false equivalence created between, for example, dying in agony from cancer or the debilitating misery of COPD and adolescent vaping, which is, objectively, a low-risk behaviour with minimal health consequences. Quitting smoking by switching to vaping is a huge benefit to a smoker. Starting to vape causes negligible harm to an adolescent – and even those vaping regularly may be doing it as an alternative to smoking, in which case it is a benefit."
"My view in brief: we are a drug using society, and nicotine – delivered without smoke – is a relatively benign drug. Efforts to stop people using nicotine run counter to efforts to reduce their exposure to smoke. The government should not be intervening to obstruct much safer alternatives to smoking while allowing cigarettes to be ubiquitously available.
So when is this debate about rethinking nicotine actually going to happen? Or is it just a diversionary tactic to look serious without being serious? At the moment we have FDA and the Surgeon General taking to social media with slogans that appear to have been copied from the playbook of activist organisations. That is not the debate we need now."
"FDA, CDC and the Surgeon General have lost sight of the most important fact in tobacco policy. To paraphrase Bill Clinton: “it’s the smoke,stupid“. Yet all have become obsessed with the ‘threat’ from much safer alternatives to smoking, such as vaping. FDA is hardly doing anything to address the 2.3 million teens still using combustible tobacco products (CDC, 2017)."
