No, the context was getting a handle on smoking, not some alternative goalpost. As lung cancer rates plummet from lack of second hand smoke nobody should ever lament that even if people are doing something else not great.
That’s a little like celebrating the reduction of heroin usage while ignoring that fentanyl addition has sky rocketed.
While I do agree that vaping is better than smoking. The real crux of the problem is the addition that needs treating. Celebrating the rise of vaping feels a little like celebrating an own goal. You’ve put all that time and effort into reducing the effects of smoking and yet you haven’t actually solved the underlying problem at all.
This isn’t “perfect is the enemy of good”, this is ensuring that tax money is spent on the right problem and not something more financially comfortable for companies producing these addictive substances.
But without the inordinately deleterious effects of smoking, why is it a bad thing? Nicotine is a powerful nootropic and enhances cognitive function. If there was a healthy way to get it into the body, it would be celebrated as a good thing. The comparison to look at is caffeine and coffee. Is a coffee addict someone we look down on, and hope they would quit?
I'm not arguing that vaping is healthy, just that, culturally, we should examine how much the argument against vaping is because of the history of smoking and the culture surrounding it, rather than an objective consideration of the benefits and consequences of the activity.
(Ftr, imo disposable vapes are absolutely the worst.)
I don’t really think it’s fair to compare vaping to drinking coffee. But there are plenty of people who have given up coffee for health reasons. And it’s much easier to cut down on drinking coffee than vaping (from a dependency standpoint)
Alcohol and alcoholism is probably a better comparison here.
But the thing that worries me the most about vaping is:
1. The frequency in which people vape. It’s almost never just a couple of puffs a day to help with concentration. It’s usually just as heavy as when people smoked. And it’s much easier to lose track of how much you vape compared with drinking coffee (I had a friend who, for months, didn’t even realise he was vaping the equivalent of 40 packs of cigarettes a day because he just bought the same solution each time without thinking about it’s concentration)
2. The fact that you’re pulling hot gas into your lungs. Yeah it’s significantly better than smoking but we don’t really know the long term effect this might cause. And by long term, I mean people who vape heavily for years.
We could all be walking ourselves into another health crisis in 20 or 40 years but “it’s ok because it isn’t as bad as smoking”.
I hear stories all the time about people trying to hack their diet, or brain, or whatever biological. And it so often ends up going wrong. From people adding caffeine to their protein drinks and accidentally ODing, to other people having serious side effects for “herbal remedies”. It’s all just nuts when we’ve already known for millennia what a healthy diet and exercise looks like.
And this is my complaint about vaping. When it’s used to help people from quitting smoking then I’m all for them vaping. But when it’s used as just another recreational drug but sold as a “healthy alternative”, well that’s when I’m going to take issue.
If fentanyl had 1/100th the death rate of heroin we absolutely would be celebrating it. That’s what we’re discussing here. I don’t think you understand how bad smoking is.
I understand it just well. And if people only used vaping as a substitute for smoking then I’d be in your camp too.
But that isn’t what’s happening. New people who never smoked are vaping too. And we don’t know what the long term (30+ year effects) of vaping is. So we could still be complacently walking ourselves into a major health crisis.
So we have to ask ourselves: should we really be encouraging people to vape? And by that, I don’t mean to smokers who are trying to quit. I mean to everyone including those who have never smoked.
People in this very thread have literally talked about vaping like it’s a healthy lifestyle choice. And that’s entirely the wrong messaging.
Basically, you’re saying “we can’t walk and chew gum at the same time.”
Vaping and smoking are two essentially separate health concerns. Why can’t we focus on both at the same time? Are we cognitively impaired as a society and public health apparatus?
The fact that the reduction in smoking usage and lung cancer rates is commendable is not mutually exclusive from having a desire not to grow a whole new form of nicotine addiction in a new generation.
If you look at usage graphs, smoking was already declining, and then vaping exploded in popularity in just the last 4 years or so. Smokers have largely not been replacing their smoking with vaping. The majority of picking up vapes are new users who have never smoked.
There are populations of people that have been exposed to fog machines daily for that duration of time as part of their jobs. This isn’t a complete unknown.
Also vaping isn’t even new at this point. We’re at probably 20 years now of the first vape pens hitting the US mainstream (the ones they made look like cigarettes).
Classic “perfect is the enemy of good”.