Get em hooked then when they become dependent you take it away.
It's interesting they chose flavored cigarettes and not flavored alcohol. The attack specifically on menthol is meant to target the major users of the product. Its not about the kids. And its not about righting some wrong by cigarettes advertisers. This is meant to target the people who use the product.
I tend to agree. This strikes me as incredibly and clearly racist as well. They openly acknowledge which community this will target. It's astounding that a white senator (and mostly white FDA I would assume) imposing his/their will on a group of people primarily of color is perfectly acceptable to people.
I don't see any evidence that people perceive them to be less bad. That article fakes a reference to that claim but it goes to a link that is irrelevant to the claim.
I have known many menthol smokers and have spent most of my life around smokers. I have literally never once heard the opinion menthol was somehow safer. In fact, I have often heard the opposite; with claims that the menthols have "fiber glass" in them.
“Menthol makes it seem less harsh, and also makes the body absorb more nicotine,” she said. “That means it’s easier to start smoking and harder to quit.”
So not more dangerous per se, but it mitigates barriers to its consumption.
What's weird is that taking in more nicotine is an argument for menthol, because fewer puffs means fewer cancer causing chemicals. That's also the argument against filters and light cigarettes.
Not sure why you're being downvoted. "Menthol cigarettes [...] are particularly popular among black smokers — about four out of five report smoking them, according to federal surveys." [1]
In fact, when Obama's FDA banned fruit- and candy-flavored cigarettes there was a group of black doctors who called on him to also ban menthol cigarettes. [2]
I genuinely believe there’s a group of people out there who’s goal is to make us all live long miserable lives. I’d far rather optimize enjoyment/time to just time.
it's a lot worse than that imo. these people genuinely believe that they possess the roadmap for living The Good Life. once they realize how much better their way is than the one we freely choose, it becomes immoral not to bend us toward their way of life.
Not sure if there is a conspiracy at play. But if we were to use our imagination we can probabaly come up with some pretty good ones. But I suspect it's to provoke and antagonize. If people in my community "one of the worst in the country" were to wake up to find out their favorite type of cigarette had been banned. I don't think people would be happy to find their liberty being encroached upon so egregiously.
It's intresting they chose flavored cigarettes and not alcohol. One is a greater public safety issue than the other. The fact that they chose something so innocuous is the dead giveaway, that there is ulterior motive.
For those of us without a NYT account, one part I found interesting from the WSJ report on the topic was their carefulness regarding pulling the trigger prematurely. While the FDA is trying to decrease the attractiveness of menthol, they’re strategically playing a sympathetic long term game with smokers.
As they and everyone knows, quiting smoking is a difficult task and suddenly prohibiting many peoples go-to fix would be cruel and possibly cause more harm than good.
>FDA officials—who want to curb use among youth while still encouraging adult cigarette smokers to switch to less harmful products like e-cigarettes—decided not to restrict sales of mint and menthol e-cigarettes because they didn’t want to create a situation in which cigarettes were more attractive to smokers who prefer menthol, senior agency officials said. [1]
Nothing strategic there. It would be bizarre and unprecedented to ban any e-cigarette flavour. There are thousands, and there’s nothing special about menthol.
Quitting smoking is pretty easy, all you need to do is whatever you were doing already, except smoking cigarettes. Not allowing people to smoke is not cruel and not harmful. In fact, allowing people to smoke is cruel and harmful. The only debatable part is if people should be allowed to harm themselves by smoking.
Hesitant to reply because your comment seems borderline trolling to me. But as someone who quit smoking after a many years habbit Ive personally never done anything harder.
So do you think you would have been harmed if actions had been taken to prevent you from starting in the first place? Do you think you’re harming yourself or being cruel to yourself now by not smoking anymore?
Perhaps not but that point of view is a dramatic over simplification of the situation. I used nicotine as a cruch while dealing with mental health issues. Part of the time I was smoking I really did _need_ it. Taking it away from me then would have been cruel.
I quit tobacco and moved to vaping, and it still took me about six months to totally quit. Once I did, my body decided to punish me.
It started with crazy canker sores all over my tongue and a few pimples. The timelines I read were fairly accurate (e.g. tastebuds coming back, etc), but the biggest struggle was breaking the pattern.
Vaping just wasn't the same from the ritual side, but I'm glad I quit tobacco itself. Unlike many, I have no plans to quit nicotine. For me it takes the edge off -- and I think a lot of people with depression and anxiety are in the same boat.
People who haven't quit smoking will never understand what its like to quit smoking -- but the same goes for any addiction.
Well, many addictions have withdrawal effects that are serious or even life threatening. Nicotine withdrawal effects are mild discomforts that go away after a few days.
I've known people who quit heroin and struggled to quit cigs. Which one is "harder" to quit is probably subjective and depends on the person, but there is a lot more going on than physical withdrawal symptoms.
I commented earlier in this thread, but I think one of the toughest aspects of quitting smoking is breaking the ritual.
I had so many friends who smoked, and our independent desires to quit were definitely not in sync. I don't doubt that this was one of the major factors in me drawing out my quitting process.
I've never personally had a problem with smoking, but I am a food addict so I know what addiction feels like. It seems easy to deal with in concept only because you've vastly oversimplified the mechanisms involved.
As with most things, saying is significantly easier than doing.
This is scarily prohibitionist. This is not a health-related choice, only an enjoyment preference one. Whether you find the war on smoking justified or not, outright banning of flavored tobacco this way has parallels in other illegalization approaches. And when you grow your own tobacco and flavor it? Criminal.
On a general note, I find it upsetting how many people cheer these things on due to misplaced righteousness. You can disagree with smoking and even recognize its societal harms that affect you without supporting making it illegal. If only the human lifecycle were twice as long, we'd have many remembering political victories built on prohibition platforms followed by state after state banning breweries on the way to the 18th amendment.
It's absolutely health-related. Menthol is a mild anaesthetic (remember menthol sports cream?) and permits the inexperienced smoker to inhale fully. Same with the eugenol in kretek cigarettes.
While the heath related differences exist, they exist in several different forms of tobacco consumption. The proposed ban is coming at the same time as the proposal for banning all flavored-except-menthol ecigs. By your logic, menthol flavored ecigs would also encourage more inhalation which is also worse and should be banned with the other flavors, but it's not. Why? Because it's, admittedly, more about the type of consumer and it's a government-mandated step down program. It's more about what's politically acceptable to ban than health related. While it may have benefits (prohibition cut drinking in half), if anything, it's a trial balloon.
I believe the general war on tobacco to be rooted in health concerns, but I believe this action to be a test to confirm the societal acceptance of this approach.
You don't need anything to numb your lungs to inhale deeply from a vape. And I think that Juul & similar should be banned because of the addiction potential, the way they deliver nicotine is designed to resemble cigarettes.
Elastin is an important protein in tissues that need to be elastic to function well, such as alveoli. For example, the breakdown of elastin is a major mechanism for the breathing difficulties suffered by people with emphysema.
Which isn't to say that lozenges are likely to cause it - it's still primarily caused by inhaling irritants - just using it to illustrate how something that interferes with elastin production might affect your breathing, even if you aren't inhaling it.
It's the same mechanism that smoking damages your skin. Nicotine in your blood gets everywhere. It affects elastin production throughout your body.
Smoking is a multi-stage attack on alveoli. You're both physically damaging them with the smoke and inhibiting their ability to regenerate. But they're a high-use tissue. Even without the additional damage, you're harming their ability to regrow.
Nicotine and caffeine are very different biologically. Caffeine addiction is not nearly as powerful. There are upper bounds to the biological effect of caffeine.
Addiction in itself is not harmful at all. It just means you have to keep using the substance, not that it's harmful in itself, as long as you take it.
Why should it be banned? Just because something is addictive doesn't mean it's bad outright. Caffeine is addictive. Should we ban that too? Nicotine itself isn't much more harmful than caffeine.
For a second I thought you were saying the UK was going full mormon for kids but then I clicked the articles and realized it was just energy drinks specifically (which imo isn't a terrible idea).
I was gonna say, tho, if they were gonna ban ALL caffeine for kids under 18, oh boy Coca Cola would have a shit fit I'm sure.
When my father quit for periods of time, he would always start up again on menthols because the volume he smoked hurt too much with his Marlboro reds, and he said the menthols made it easier.
Yes, it is that addictive that he would knowingly switch to menthols to help him ramp back up again.
To be frank, his anecdote conflicts with my own. It is pure speculation that inhaling menthol actually creates an analgesic effect which works towards the sensation of smoke in the lungs. I find mentholated cigarettes harsher, because menthol has a certain heat to it not unlike peppermint.
I understand the rationale behind this prohibitionist, paternalistic approach (maintain a healthy work/consumption force, reduce burden on socialised healthcare, improve GDP), but the additional cost to the economy is already built in to these goods - smoke tax (it’s not just tobacco, it’s anything you could burn and inhale) in the uk more than covers the cost of smoking related illness.
Menthols are still available in the UK today, I believe they are slated for removal from the market in 2020. What has been removed from the UK market is "10 decks", we can only buy 20s now.
Smoking related illnesses in the UK cost the NHS (taxpayers) around £5Bn year, and taxes on tobacco raise around £9Bn. So it's pretty close, but that £4Bn gap will need to be made up from somewhere. Personally I'd legalise the wacky tobaccy and tax that, but there really ought to be equivalent taxes on vaping too.
Also if life expectancy goes up, there will be an even greater shortfall in pensions too.
Some taxes are on “sins” and some are on “luxuries”. But the money’s still got to come from somewhere. Who wins if we ban smoking and cut that money from the NHS? No one.
So, the numbers you're talking about are conservative esitmates.
They only include smokers. They don't include, for example, the children of smokers, who have many much more respiratory illness than other children.
The hospital admission costs only include this list, and only include them when these are the primary diagnosis of the admission episode.
Importantly, the cost used is the payment by results cost, not the actual cost to the treating trusts or GP surgeries.
> Smoking attributable admissions are defined as spells where the primary diagnosis of the admission episode is attributable to the following ICD-10 codes:
> cardiovascular diseases: ischaemic heart disease (I20 to I25), other heart disease (I00 to I09, I26 to I51), cerebrovascular disease (I60 to I69), atherosclerosis (I70), aortic aneurysm (I71), other arterial disease (I72 to I78)
> respiratory diseases: pneumonia, influenza (J10 to J18), bronchitis, emphysema (J40 to J43), chronic airway obstruction (J44)
> diseases of the digestive system: stomach ulcer, duodenal ulcer (K25 to K27), Crohn’s disease (K50), periodontal disease (K05)
> other diseases: age related cataract (H25), hip fracture (S72.0 to S72.2), spontaneous abortion (O03)
The sugar tax has already resulted in many different beverage companies to reduce the amount of sugar in their drinks in the UK. Personally I think stopping government corn subsidies (that are used to make a dirt cheap sugar substitute in the form of high fructose corn syrup) would be a much better way of doing it, but obesity is such a severe issue that we need to do something about it.
It’s actually really annoying. I hardly ever drink sugary drinks, but sometimes on a long drive I’d get one specifically for the sugar content (sans caffeine and taurine). Now diet versions of everything seem to be default.
Also, whilst I understand many/most people can't taste the difference, the swap to using sweeteners has had the same level of disgust to my taste as stirring in a teaspoon of salt into almost every soft drink.
I'd actually prefer salt in my soft drink, making it a little isotonic!
I literally only have Coca-Cola for an occasional treat these days - My Beloved Irn-Bru, 7up & San Pellegrino have all been adulterated with awful-tasting artificial sweeteners and are simply unenjoyable for me now.
It's a weird future I find myself in, where I will never drink any of these things again, punished because of some third party entity's paternalism where other third parties are concerned (I'm not personally fat nor enjoy a diet that would ever make me so).
You absolutely wouldn't make the case that sugar is being added to foods in order to add additional calories, or that salt is being added to foods in order to preserve them. The fact that you can come up with a spurious purpose for an additive doesn't make pointing out the additive's primary purpose nonsensical.
The purpose of adding to an alcoholic beverage isn’t to increase caloric content, it is solely to make it more palatable. Restaurants don’t salt their steaks to preserve them, they do it to improve the flavor.
Same with sugar in cigarettes, even. Sugar is a major ingredient, and makes them easier to inhale compared to cigars, which partly accounts for their global popularity.
This is completely true. I started smoking at 17 with menthols because they tasted good to me and were easier to inhale. Switched to regular after I got used to them.
Why a broad prohibition on flavoured tobacco products instead of mentholated cigarettes and clove cigarettes? As far as the cancer potential and addiction goes, dip and chew are a different league from menthol cigarettes and vapes, especially Juul, with a psychopharmacology comparable to cigarettes.
Utter rubbish. Are flavoured boxes of chocolates and flavoured coffee syrups targeting highschoolers too just because they're flavoured?
Every vaper and ex-vaper I know or have ever met has used flavoured ecigs, including myself while I was quitting. A whiff of the vapour as they pass is enough to establish if they're using a fruity flavour etc. As I'm in my mid 50s and my friends are mostly 30s-60s I think it's safe to say we're not highschoolers.
The one and only time I tried a tobacco flavoured ecig I almost vomited it was so terrible. I think it's a flavour everyone tries as they switch. Tries just the once mostly - they are utterly unlike any cigarette.
That article makes no reference to age groups, and suggests that a sweet taste increases desirability across the board. It seems like a stretch to then say they are targeting a particular age group, especially when the participants in the study were well outside of the alleged age group:
> We enrolled 16 occasional/intermittent to light smokers (4 female; M = 27 years, range 19–45;
The paper _does_ link to a more to a more targeted study[1], but there is a fairly major limitation ("does not allow direct estimation of flavoring’s role in initiation of tobacco use among youth") and it does not necessarily suggest that flavouring is targeting the young per se and not merely being what users in general are looking for.
I know a number of people who have used flavored vapes for nicotine replacement therapy and haven’t had a cigarette in years. But I’ve also met some young people who’ve never smoked who started vaping because it’s “cool” and are now quite addicted to nicotine.
Juuls in particular are quite accessible for a non smoker (no getting through the body’s natural reaction to inhaling an irritant combined with being very discreet).
Kids smoked cigarettes because it was cool. Now they sometimes vape. I suspect all the cool is from the vaping not because there's a strawberry flavour. When I was in school smoking was cool, but menthol cigs were for wimps. There was often a corner shop near schools that would sell one cig with two matches. Now that was targeting youngsters. I'm sure flavours do make vaping more palatable for everyone, but that's a very long way from those flavours existing to target youngsters.
Bizarre things like aerosol and glue sniffing had their phase of being a niche cool thing amongst kids. Seems like the few who must will always find something regardless of flavour or ease.
I still occasionally see school kids smoking regular cigarettes. How the hell they afford to beats me at over £10 for a 20 pack. But whether vaping or cigarettes there's far fewer kids bothering at all than say 20 or 40 years ago when it seemed like almost every school kid smoked. Besides I'd far rather a few kids were using a vape pen than those same kids on tobacco with all the additives and vastly worse health outcomes. Vapes are far easier to quit too as tobacco seems to have other more addictive components. Well, that was my feeling from having quit both.
I keep hearing of Juul as being something extra, more accessible, worse, more addictive, you name it! How are they different to the dozens of other brands of vapes and ecigs? I've yet to see one in the UK, if they're even sold here.
They definitely inadvertently do, because they target marginal users. The weird thing is that ecigs are targeted by prohibitionists at all, because they completely lack everything that is notably bad for your health about cigarettes, and every smoker who switches to them significantly improves their outcomes.
I don't think that people who needed their nicotine with candy flavor to tolerate it are switching to smoking in the numbers that smokers are moving in the other direction.
> You can disagree with smoking and even recognize its societal harms that affect you without supporting making it illegal.
Disagree. Smoking products have addictive attributes that suck the user in and make it extremely difficult to quit. I support the banning of smoking in a similar fashion as tightly controlling the supply of opioids.
We'll have to disagree. My concern is more about the direction (banning more and more at the federal level) and the righteousness that drives it. Given such justification, there are many vices, addictive ones at that, we can feel good about banning. It's not that precedent doesn't exist, it's more about whether it's the role of the government at the national level to make this type of decision.
I was just reading about Wayne Wheeler [0]. He had a negative personal anecdotal experience with alcohol which he successfully used to justify its banning. (edit: sorry, last part was meant to address the anecdote you previously had there, and which many of us have experienced with the harms of smoking by loved ones)
While not AS addictive (to some) as nicotine, you really could argue the same for alcohol, couldn't you? In the US in 2018, what do you think is more directly and indirectly responsible for more societal harm: tobacco or alcohol?
The building I work in downtown always has half a dozen smokers on the sidewalk. Wish they would reserve a balcony or something for them because as an ex smoker smelling it is especially painful to me.
> Smoking in the center of cities on the street should be illegal (like it is in most of Australia), because it causes harm to complete strangers.
I understand that secondhand smoke indoors is dangerous to others, but is there any real data on outdoor secondhand smoke?
How does it compare to the liters of exhaust per minute from diesel engines in trucks passing by on those same streets?
Perhaps more generally, at what ppm does second hand smoke start to have long term effects on unwitting participants, particularly compared to other major sources of toxins and their concentrations in an urban environment?
[edit: to be clear I’m genuinely curious, not trying to dismiss it or whatabout it. I’ve always thought most second hand smoke issues could be solved with good ventilation (aimed at properly exhausting the smoke) and it seems to me that trace amounts from smokers you pass by on the street are a completely different situation from sitting next to someone smoking indoors]
It's a neurotic fear of pollution and poisoning that is constantly reinforced instead of dismissed. Once you've convinced people that smoking is the most dangerous thing in the world, and they know that people smoke in order to get nicotine, it follows that any inadvertent inhalation of cigarette smoke is extremely dangerous, and that nicotine is the most deadly poison.
The data on close-quarters constant second-hand smoke (working in bars, having a partner that smokes) is sketchy, the idea that passing someone while walking outside and momentarily catching a whiff of smoke a couple of dozen times a day is a public health crisis that requires immediate worldwide prohibition is absurd, but common.
It's also a convenient piece of do-nothing legislation for local politicians to campaign on.
> The data on close-quarters constant second-hand smoke (working in bars, having a partner that smokes) is sketchy
Okay, but the data on smoking is not sketchy at all, so it’s not a stretch to suggest that constant exposure to second hand smoke in a poorly ventilated environment is comparable to smoking. Unfortunately there’s no way to set up a classical controlled experiment to test that hypothesis ethically, so we have to make do with other experimental setups and data analysis.
We do have studies that assess the affects of air pollution in cities, so surely we can come up with some way of extrapolating, no?
> It's also a convenient piece of do-nothing legislation for local politicians to campaign on
Sure - cigarette smoke does not smell good to non-smokers so it’s an easy win these days since most people don’t smoke.
I’m just trying to come up with a way of legislating these things based on our best abilities to make conclusions based on data rather than feelings, but I feel as though the onslaught of information brought about by the internet is making it harder to disseminate the wheat while more disseminate the chaff. Not to mention all the ways one can make feelings look like data.
There is a lot of evidence that second-hand smoking is harmful. [1] is a summary on this topic from 2006 and cites 194 papers.
To describe the science on second-hand smoking to be anything other than solid is to simply lie about our knowledge on the health effects of smoking. To add to this, there is also significant evidence that SIDS is strongly correlated with parents who are smokers (and thus appears to be likely caused by smoking while pregnant, and second-hand smoke during infancy).
> it follows that any inadvertent inhalation of cigarette smoke is extremely dangerous, and that nicotine is the most deadly poison.
Nicotine isn't what most people are worried about, and presenting it this way is simply disingenuous. Tobacco smoke contains many other components than nicotine such as cyanide, benzene, arsenic, as well as 50 other known carcinogens. Literally nobody cares about your nicotine addiction, it's all of the other toxic components that are the problem.
The studies on second-hand smoking are very solid, and your calling them sketchy is very close to being an outright lie. Here is a summary of the many studies (dating back to the 80s) that all show the various impacts of second-hand smoking[1] -- it cites 194 papers. The WHO, CDC, American Cancer Society, American Lung Association, and many other groups (from other countries too) all concur that second-hand smoke is a very significant threat to the public's health.
Second-hand smoke is very likely one of the causes of SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome) for fucks' sake.
There is a specific law (I'm not sure if it's just in NSW or if it's nation-wide) about not being allowed to smoke within 4 meters of an exit to a building (because smokers tended to smoke right outside a building -- presumably because it's more convenient -- when indoor smoking became illegal). A large cluster of people smoking in front of a doorway is not much better than those same people just smoking in the lobby (and people who need to enter the building can't really avoid it).
There are other laws about smoke-free areas (my university campus is one of them). As a non-smoker I do appreciate this quite a bit (having lived in a country where smoking in public areas and indoors was very common), but I'm not sure about whether it is actually a significant improvement for non-smokers. The city's image is probably just as significant a motivator for such rules.
Regarding data, I did a quick Google search and found some articles[1,2,3] ranging in dates to 2007. I've only skimmed them, but one of them[1] specifically mentions doing comparison to pollution from cars.
I’m saying that they are equivalent bad policy, and support tight controls on both. If you research, you’ll see the opioid crisis was kicked off by doctors freely prescribing like it was candy.
I see - it seems like you're saying something more nuanced than I initially thought. It seemed like you wanted to treat nicotine similarly to opioids, despite the abysmal, historic failure of opioid prohibition and all the death, disease, misery, and international crime that has directly been caused by it.
> If you research, you’ll see the opioid crisis was kicked off by doctors freely prescribing like it was candy.
I don't agree, nor do most serious drug policy researchers. Horrible problems with opioids have been waxing and waning for about 100 years in the United States, but were largely unknown prior to the Harrison Narcotics Act.
Your point is very sound that distributing highly concentrated forms of a drug in the midst of prohibition of more benign forms of that drug is likely to cause bad health outcomes. This is exactly what happened during alcohol prohibition, when consumption of beer dropped to nearly zero while consumption of whiskey soared.
Sorry if I was unclear, the part you quoted was meant as a future example based on slippery slope, the direction being taken, and similar substance outlawings. I am not saying this particular ban is criminalizing it.
> was meant as a future example based on slippery slope, the direction being taken, and similar substance outlawings.
The next logical step would be to ban cigarettes, but allow people to continue to purchase loose leaf tobacco. But if that happened then smoking rates would likely fall enough that it'd no longer be a major health issue, so even if we are in a slippery slope situation it doesn't seem likely to me that criminalization is the logical conclusion.
Already most smoking deaths are in long term smokers. The 14% of Americans who still smoke are for the most part only smoking a few cigarettes per day (except the couple percent in the severely mentally ill population), so they're going to have nowhere near the same level of health outcomes as the folks who spent decades smoking multiple packs per day. I wouldn't personally ever use tobacco products because I place a high value on not being dead, but from a statistical perspective just looking at the number of current deaths would lead one to vastly overestimate the risks of tobacco use practices. I guess my point is that from a personal level you should definitely not smoke, but at a public policy level we'd hit the point of diminishing returns far before instating a complete ban.
>at a public policy level we'd hit the point of diminishing returns far before instating a complete ban.
I think there was a study that showed chain smokers are actually less of a burden on the public because they die relatively quickly, reducing their consumption of medical resources.
>smoking a few cigarettes per day (except the couple percent in the severely mentally ill population)
Smokers are mentally ill? Really? I’d say that people who see smokers as mentally ill are neurotic and have an authority complex, and probably have far greater issues than smokers.
You're jumping the gun here. A number of mental illnesses are highly correlated with heavy smoking. It's a legal coping mechanism that people can easily obtain entirely on their own.
HN, a website purportedly about tech entrepreneurship generally favors the 'government knows best' model.
Whether it is a health related choice or not is immaterial. 30 minutes of cardio per day is generally regarded as a healthy choice. Yet for obvious reasons we are not taking a collective vote on making mild exercise compulsory for all individuals.
HN, a website purportedly about tech entrepreneurship generally favors the 'government knows best' model.
We use terms like hindsight bias and selection bias all the time here; is there a name for the perception that the 'other side' of a wide ideological divide is more prevalent? Because I've read the same complaints about the libertarian attitudes here.
There are plenty of folks on both sides of the fence (or it'd be boring).
Perhaps I observe this bias based upon the articles I have chosen to comment on. Or maybe it is an accurate assessment. I can only speak from my own experience.
However, I would expect that entrepreneurs would generally have a free market bias. I create online businesses because I have an affinity for tech, and because the Internet has largely been an unregulated space.
I think that viewing any argument that some government regulation can lead to the greater betterment of society as being a "government knows best" view is very close to being a strawman.
I definitely see quite a few folks from both sides of the libertarian/authoritarian spectrum. I originally wrote a much longer comment talking about how free markets need at least government regulation in order to function (so people have faith in them) while too much regulation leads to high barrier of entry, but I'm sure you get the gist.
I think there is still room to say: "if the government knows what is best for me to consume, then why not test that logic by taking it to its logical conclusion"
If we can't have that discussion without acrimonious downvotes and complaints to the moderator, then what are we doing here? I am inclined to go back to my original point about bias.
The US Federal Government is prohibitionist when it comes to cocaine, marijuana and nuclear weapons. But when you start proposing bans on products that earn billions for multinational conglomerates, out come the little guys pointing at their Constitution.
Are you in favor of banning selling poison to children on store shelves? Because that's exactly what this is. If cigarettes were invented today they'd never make it to market.
Each cigarette has 2000 toxins. Over 85% of smokers start at under 18. It's a life long addiction picked up by children that kills so companies can turn a profit. Not to mention the health care burden on society.
In no way or form should such a deadly substance be sold for consumption.
I understand that menthol cigarettes are more attractive because they make smoking more pleasant. I also understand they can be more dangerous, because part of being more pleasant is inhaling being more comfortable[0], so one might take bigger drags and/or hold them longer.
As someone trying to quit (menthols particularly), I can see this move helping some (and I also see it incredibly frustrating for anyone not looking to quit, though they should be!). Part of my difficulty in quitting is how widely available smokes are - in my day to day life, they're only ever 5 minutes away, and that ease of access is a huge barrier in staying smoke-free. I've tried the non-menthols in my brand and I can't stand them. Banning menthols solves the availability problem (for me), and while I disagree with it ideologically, it's hard to argue with it practicality.
Which is more practical? Tackling your lack of self discipline and perhaps growing as a person, or appealing for the government to punish the sellers of the product you enjoy?
Maybe we should force them to exercise too? Or perhaps we should take a vote on what is definitively healthy and restrict the public's diet to pre-approved items? If China has social credits, maybe the west needs government enforced health credits?
As it is, FDA bureaucrats are appointed, not elected.
What are the costs of deferring individuals' choices to a mob's vote or to the whims of appointed bureaucrats?
Advocates of centrally planned societies will always point to the purported benefits of their authoritarian models.
At what point is the individual responsible for his own health? If we absolve the individual of all personal responsibility and replace it with a set of all encompassing dictates - What does it mean to be a free human being in such a society? How would this differ from being property of the state?
Imagine you're a farmer with a bunch of free-range chickens.
Your responsibility is to make sure they all live long, healthy, happy, and free.
There's a poisonous plant that sticks through the fence in a corner of the range. You tell all the chickens to stay away, that it will make them sick and kill them, but every year about 10-15% of them eat it anyway, and you're constantly dealing with the illness and death it causes. And you can't tear out the plant, because it's not growing on your property, it's just coming through the fence.
The problem, is that the plant didn't get there on it's own. A pack of wolves planted it, and at night they plaster the side of the coop with flyers saying how smooth and cool the plant is. But when you try to tear down the posters, or cut back the plant, all the libertarian chickens come out and yell about individual freedoms.
Humans aren't rational actors. We're emotional creatures of habit who are highly susceptible to advertising. If anything, we shouldn't ban the item in question, we should just make it really expensive, and disallow any forms of advertising. That means besides no TV, no magazines, no billboards, no visible smoking anywhere in media, not visible on shelves on any store anywhere, etc.
If we take away tobacco companies' power to emotionally manipulate humans, maybe not as many people will choose to throw their health away.
You're joined by Akerlof & Shiller when you claim:
>Humans aren't rational actors. We're emotional creatures of habit who are highly susceptible to advertising
Adbusters would agree with your claim that:
>we should just make it really expensive, and disallow any forms of advertising. That means besides no TV, no magazines, no billboards, no visible smoking anywhere in media, not visible on shelves on any store anywhere, etc.
Your comparison of a farmer owning chickens for profit/consumption to a government benevolently lording over citizens is illustrative. For the sake of being explicit, I don't think humans should be regarded as chattel. If you find this an apt comparison, we may have to agree to disagree. Thanks.
Reducto ad absurdum only works if the next steps are inevitable and follow logically (an example would be something like a mathematical proof using proof-by-contradiction). The slippery slope fallacy is a case where you use some theoretically possible extreme end-point to justify why the current proposal is unacceptable.
Are you arguing that having health credits in the USA and legally mandated exercise is the only logical next step after banning menthol cigarettes? If you aren't, then you aren't using reducto ad absurdum. If you are, then it's trivial to disprove (in Australia, snuff has been illegal to sell since the late 1980s and we don't have "health credits" today -- many other substances bad for your health were made illegal in the US and you don't have "health credits" today).
I have not suggested that health credits are the inevitable conclusion of banning any tobacco product.
I have posed a specific set of questions about the logic of prohibiting products for heath purposes. You have chosen to tilt by snark & technicality instead of answering these questions.
If we accept that the government (or a group of bureaucrats) knows what is best for the health of divers individuals, then why not?
If we accept that 30 minutes of exercise is good for health and that it is appropriate to compel individuals into healthy choices, then why not?
If we accept that two parallel lines will never intersect, then why should air traffic controllers worry?
It is plain and obvious where this logic leads. Claiming a slippery slope is a dodge imho.
First of all, you didn't originally pose a specific set of questions. You just outlined a nightmare scenario with rhetorical questions.
To your point here, "then why not" isn't an example of a logical deduction.
You're also intentionally ignoring that the discussion here is the banning of a subset of products that we know for certain cause many incredibly serious health problems and is one of the leading causes of premature death in many countries around the world. Smoking is bad for everyone, so making decisions on a "divers[sic] set of individuals" is completely reasonable -- unless you're arguing that smoking is good for some peoples' health?
I agree that if the government (for instance) started banning high-fat foods that there would be reason to say that this is overstepping the mark. But that's not what's happening.
> and that it is appropriate to compel individuals into healthy choices
That's not what's happening.
> If we accept that two parallel lines will never intersect, then why should air traffic controllers worry?
Not only is this a non-sequitur, it's also an awful example of a logical deduction and actually undermines your other examples of "reasonable" questions.
Many would say drinking is bad for everyone. Extreme sports can be dangerous as well. Individuals make their own choices and trade-offs in regards to their quality of life. We have no more right to collectively compel individuals not to smoke, than we do to make them walk 30 minutes a day, stop drinking, never perform bicycle stunts above 5m, abstain from free climbing, or moderate their bacon intake. In my view, this is the strictly logical interpretation.
A little levity in the form of a non-sequitur never hurt anyone.
If you endeavored to answer the questions I posed in good faith, you would have found that I am not predicting some nightmare 1984 scenario at the ski chalet. The answers are obvious and pedestrian. Principles are inevitably dismissed in the name of practicality and pragmatism. This is the reality of governance. This is "why not".
You admit as much when you speak of high fat foods. From where I stand, it is nothing more than an arbitrary hand wave. It is especially ironic after so many nitpicks (which I do not accept :P ) about the nature of argumentative logic.
From this point forward it is strictly subjective sausage making.
The US has found prohibition to be an untenable policy. As I understand, taxes on cigarettes in Australia make the price something like $20-$25 a pack. So how much for a truck load? How much does it cost to counterfeit? It is already happening in the US.
The US has had black markets for cigarettes for 50+ years. Increasing taxes and prohibiting products does not work. It only serves to dilute what little regulatory power the state does have. Eventually people stop caring and say: "Everything fun is illegal anyways", "Returning to prison is inevitable", "My lawyer knows how to fix this", or "What could be more righteous than shirking authority while profiting from my oppression?".
Personal attacks are not allowed here. We ban accounts that do this, so please review the rules at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and don't do it again, regardless of how right you are or superior you feel.
Edit: it looks like you've been posting a lot of unsubstantive comments to HN, as well as a lot of ideological comments. Both of those things are against the guidelines as well. If you'd please use the site as intended instead, we'd be grateful.
Have you tried cytisine (Tabex brand in Europe)? On the contrary to some other nicotine replacements, it seems to take the enjoyment of nicotine away, so you only get the bad taste from a smoke, which made a lot easier to quit for me.
I quit by using swedish snus; it gave me my nicotine fix, broke all of the habits that had accumulated over 20 years, and was not cool or fun. Quitting snus cold turkey was an order of magnitude easier than quitting cigarettes cold turkey had ever been; it was the same week and a half of frustration with the world, but none of the not knowing what to do with my hands or how to concentrate or how to have a stressful conversation.
> The products, which include such flavors as chicken-and-waffles and mango, would be mainly relegated to sales online, at sites where the agency hopes to impose strict age verification to ensure that minors could not buy them.
"Strict age verification with online sales". I would very much like to see how this is supposed to work.
In Canada, that means signature (and ID if you appear under 30) on delivery. So far in the US, it's meant photo ID verification on placing an order if an algorithm decides your CC isn't doing what it would normally do.
Menthol cigarettes are also favored overwhelmingly by African Americans...as pointed out in the SF debate on menthol cigarettes, this is another bit of astounding racism masquerading as benevolence
Planet Money did an episode (#842) where one item was on flavoured tobacco products. A particular law targeting tobacco products expressly exempts menthol cigarettes. The episode pointed out that this was a result of intense industry lobbying, who were facing competition from non-US producers, mostly supplying products flavoured with all kinds of other things.
Given the free choice, some people will drink, eat, smoke and otherwise drug themselves into oblivion. We can't solve this issue by simply banning the problematic substances, prohibition and other bans have shown this.
Consumption taxes are also implemented in many countries, but these have issues as well. Namely in regards to lobbying and how the taxes are chosen, and how they disproportionately affect low-income segments.
Personally I am torn on this subject. I highly appreciate the public smoking ban that has been implemented in restaurants, bars and other public venues, as well as on public transit and related facilities. I do respect smoking as a personal choice, just as I expect teetotalers to respect that I enjoy the consumption of alcohol, or vegetarians/vegans to respect that I enjoy consuming foods with meat in them. All of these have proven generally negative health effects, but I choose to partake in some of them, as an informed choice.
I also recognize that all of these activities have some negative effect on the world and society, in one way or another, yet it would be counterproductive to ban them outright.
What I don't like about smoking in particular is the stench and effects of passive smoking, and especially not being able to escape it. At least the public smoking ban did alleviate this, which certainly can be spun as a net societal gain.
I think they just make it illegal to sell any tobacco.* The black market would not be an issue because smokers can get the same drug from e-cigarettes, which are almost certainly much safer.
*Possession would still be legal, because punishing people for using drugs is dumb.
i wouldn't be too sure; the people who support this measure seem to overlap with the people who also want to ban flavored ejuices.
in my view, this is an inevitable consequence of the shift towards socialized medicine. when every human body is a financial liability for the government, you can expect it to get a lot more interested in how you treat your body. good alignment of incentives for public health, but terrible for individual liberty.
As a 20 year smoker who's only been free for about 5 years, ban all of forms of nicotine for sale. For about a week or 2 people will freak out and try to find ways around it and then everyone will realize that it's not that hard. The reason smokers perpetually have problems quitting is other smokers are constantly around and it's ultra available. Sure, there's a few out there who will protest and scream about their right to kill themselves, but we don't need to allow companies to profit from selling addictive poison that has ZERO up side. At least alcohol is fun (for most people) to use. Cigarettes taste like trash, you have to force yourself to get addicted to them, they smell, and they kill. The only reason we won't outright ban them has nothing to do with liberty or freedoms, it's purely because the industry is incredibly profitable, and that's how our laws actually get made.
Illegal to manufacture just means the people who can legally possess it will have to deal with and buy it from people illegally manufacturing it under poor conditions with zero regulatory accountability.
And some of them will get sick or die because of the prohibition on regulated manufacturing.
We know that because there isn't an epidemic of people going blind and dying after drinking alcohol contaminated with fermentation and distillation byproducts, but there is an epidemic of people dying from using "heroin" tainted by fentanyl analogs.
The only thing that has ever worked is legal regulated sale, which keeps the market sane with respect to quality control and safety, while making it easy for people to access health and addiction services.
Over 30 million adults smoke in the US, according to CDC. Banning all forms of nicotine will not just “freak out” those people for 2 weeks and then they’ll forget about it.
Do you want a black market? Because that’s how you get a black market.
Tobacco is a public health crisis. Encouraging safer alternatives (eg e-cigarettes) and slowly making nicotine consumption socially unacceptable is how you make progress. You don’t solve it by just banning the substance entirely (see how that worked out with alcohol).
To add a finer point: nicotine, while an extremely addictive substance, seems to be fairly inoffensive. The delivery mechanism (eg smoking) is what gives you cancer etc. A bunch of people addicted to nicotine does not seem to be much of a public health problem if they’re all using inoffensive delivery mechanisms.
nicotine is harmful, though it is not the primary harmful agent in cigarettes. that said, it is an immunosuppresant and there have been studies linking nicotine with cancer.
Nicotine is a poison. It’s the active agent in deadly nightshade. In horticultural circles it’s used in raw form as a highly effective pesticide. It’s highly concentrated in tomatoes vines and potato plants, and if you eat these, or even the edible parts when they’re green you’ll be sick!
That’s not to say it’s the most toxic aspect of tobacco, but it can’t be good.
These plants are all related by the way. The Simpson’s ”Tomacco” episode isn’t so far fetched!
As a man who has lost half his body weight, I don't think it is my place to suggest that the force of law be used to remove sugar from everything and force nutritional standards on other people. I feel like your call for a ban on nicotine is roughly equivalent. I enjoy about half a dozen cigars a year, and I don't see any reason I shouldn't have the right to do that.
I disagree, because more people eating sugar means that type of food becomes cheaper due to economy of scale. At the same time I second hand suffer because most of my preferred, apparently healthier diet eventually becomes exotic and costs more.
"Sugar" (read: high fructose corn syrup) isn't cheaper purely because of economies of scale. It's largely cheaper because the government subsidises corn farmers, whose corn is then used to produce a cheaper form of sweetener that is used to replace traditional cane sugar (which I believe is subject to tariffs in the US) in soft drinks.
Also former smoker here (15 years of smoking, 6 years smoke free).
> ban all of forms of nicotine for sale.
you can't do that as it would create a thriving black market. Look at the edges of the European Union, where EU taxes drove the prices of cigarettes sky high and people are illegally importing cigarettes from Ukraine, Moldova, Russia, etc..
You need to boil the frog. Slowly but surely, make consuming nicotine socially unacceptable (already is almost everywhere in the West wrt to smoking), expensive (but again, slowly, don't shock the market) and shitty (ban tobacco additives, flavors, make the product packaging look like a horror show). 1-3 generations tops and you'll not see anymore smokers.
No it absolutely isn't. Underground brothels are horrific, exploitative and inhumane. Prohibition leads to drug wars, do you really want a new El Chapo of Tobacco?
I paid over USD 20/pack for cigarettes while I was working in Sydney. That alone forced me to cut my intake substantially. vs the ~5.75 I spent per pack in NH.
I think your analogy does you no favors. Nicotine as a stimulant does provide some benefits, and studies have shown increased smoking rates among those with ADHD and schizophrenia, psbly bc of some therapeutic effect from nicotine. The nicotine path can alleviate depression, and regular people do enjoy smoking. Second hand smoke is bad, but probably nowhere near as bad as the harm drunk drivers cause.
I like nicotine and smoking on occasion, but I have never been addicted. Maybe it's personality, behavioral, or some physical difference, I couldn't say. There have been about 30 cigarettes a year for more than a decade. I have no desire to "quit" or have the government tell me I have to.
Walking outside yesterday in Santa Clara was worse for my lifespan than anything I've smoked in the last 6 months.
When I think about the purpose of government, banning addictive substances does not fit the bill.
> from selling addictive poison that has ZERO up side.
I can't remember where, but I saw a study that showed banning cigarettes would only make healthcare costs go up as people would me living much longer lives....
Well, yeah. But we’re actually trying to optimize for some combination of quality of life, length of life, spending on death prevention. You can trivially optimize any one of those individually, but that would be ... bad.
But yes, in a sense, smoking bans are making an implicit assumption that the gain in quality of life is far outweighed by the shortening of it.
As someone who has never touched a cigarette in their life and cannot stand the stink of cigarettes I couldn't support this more. If someone wants to kill themselves slowly with cigarettes, that's their decision but don't stink up places for others. The strong prohibitions on public smoking at this point is one of the things I appreciate the most about living in the US. The smoke in certain types of establishments is a huge problem for me when visiting parts of Europe or Asia. I'd rather have people snort cocaine or shoot heroin then stink up otherwise amazing bars and render then unusable.
I was in the Prague Airport, and once you got past security, everyone was smoking!! It was horrible!! I couldn't escape it, every restaurant, bar, and rest area had people smoking. I was feeling sick so it was extra nightmarish.
As someone who uses nicotine a couple times a year, largely flavored cigars, as a self prescribed mood stabilizer rather than a daily addiction I would like to say there are drastically life improving upsides.
When I have had an abysmal day, it can make everything seem ok and even stave off a panic attack.
When I am flying off the handle in anger it can calm me right down.
It can do this without dulling my abilities - actually improving them - unlike other legal and less than legal alternatives.
Is it prone to abuse, particularly in certain people? Absolutely. Is nicotine, particularly in conjunction with tobacco a carcinogen? Absolutely.
It's banned in the EU, not just Germany. In fact, I'm surprised Germany doesn't have an exemption like it does with many other EU smoking laws. Germany is way behind with smoking. Smoking is cool in Germany. Smoking bars exist. Cigarette vending machines exist on every street corner in many parts of the country (and yes I mean every corner, meaning in suburbs, not just in town centres).
Reasoning backwards, if menthol cigarettes were illegal, would anyone support making them legal? I’m libertarian-ish esp with respect to drugs but I think this makes sense. At some point this harm reduction strategies will go too far but it hasn’t reached that point for me yet.
people don't tend to think harm reduction strategies have gone too far until the government starts targeting their vices.
i don't smoke anymore, but it still makes me very uncomfortable to see the government take another step forward in regulating how people treat their own bodies. the government rarely takes a step back.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 232 ms ] threadOh, sorry; I’m just a doctor. Maybe I should stay in my lane?
It's interesting they chose flavored cigarettes and not flavored alcohol. The attack specifically on menthol is meant to target the major users of the product. Its not about the kids. And its not about righting some wrong by cigarettes advertisers. This is meant to target the people who use the product.
Whether there’s data to show that these effects are significant enough to justify a ban specifically on menthols, however, I don’t know.
They are just as bad as regular cigarettes, possibly worse, and yet people perceive them as less bad, causing overconsumption.
I have known many menthol smokers and have spent most of my life around smokers. I have literally never once heard the opinion menthol was somehow safer. In fact, I have often heard the opposite; with claims that the menthols have "fiber glass" in them.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3720998/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3720998/
“Menthol makes it seem less harsh, and also makes the body absorb more nicotine,” she said. “That means it’s easier to start smoking and harder to quit.”
So not more dangerous per se, but it mitigates barriers to its consumption.
At the time, people argued not including menthol in the ban was racist.
In fact, when Obama's FDA banned fruit- and candy-flavored cigarettes there was a group of black doctors who called on him to also ban menthol cigarettes. [2]
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/14/health/menthol-cigarettes... [2] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/black-doctors-call-obam...
It's intresting they chose flavored cigarettes and not alcohol. One is a greater public safety issue than the other. The fact that they chose something so innocuous is the dead giveaway, that there is ulterior motive.
As they and everyone knows, quiting smoking is a difficult task and suddenly prohibiting many peoples go-to fix would be cruel and possibly cause more harm than good.
>FDA officials—who want to curb use among youth while still encouraging adult cigarette smokers to switch to less harmful products like e-cigarettes—decided not to restrict sales of mint and menthol e-cigarettes because they didn’t want to create a situation in which cigarettes were more attractive to smokers who prefer menthol, senior agency officials said. [1]
[1]: https://www.wsj.com/articles/fda-to-propose-ban-of-menthol-c...
FTA: Menthol has local anesthetic and counterirritant qualities, and it is widely used to relieve minor throat irritation.
This makes it easier to get new smokers going without the coughing / throat irritation.
It started with crazy canker sores all over my tongue and a few pimples. The timelines I read were fairly accurate (e.g. tastebuds coming back, etc), but the biggest struggle was breaking the pattern.
Vaping just wasn't the same from the ritual side, but I'm glad I quit tobacco itself. Unlike many, I have no plans to quit nicotine. For me it takes the edge off -- and I think a lot of people with depression and anxiety are in the same boat.
People who haven't quit smoking will never understand what its like to quit smoking -- but the same goes for any addiction.
I had so many friends who smoked, and our independent desires to quit were definitely not in sync. I don't doubt that this was one of the major factors in me drawing out my quitting process.
As with most things, saying is significantly easier than doing.
https://outline.com/Ka6xJx
On a general note, I find it upsetting how many people cheer these things on due to misplaced righteousness. You can disagree with smoking and even recognize its societal harms that affect you without supporting making it illegal. If only the human lifecycle were twice as long, we'd have many remembering political victories built on prohibition platforms followed by state after state banning breweries on the way to the 18th amendment.
I believe the general war on tobacco to be rooted in health concerns, but I believe this action to be a test to confirm the societal acceptance of this approach.
What makes cigarettes so lethal is all the other toxins.
https://examine.com/supplements/nicotine/
Which isn't to say that lozenges are likely to cause it - it's still primarily caused by inhaling irritants - just using it to illustrate how something that interferes with elastin production might affect your breathing, even if you aren't inhaling it.
It's the same mechanism that smoking damages your skin. Nicotine in your blood gets everywhere. It affects elastin production throughout your body.
Smoking is a multi-stage attack on alveoli. You're both physically damaging them with the smoke and inhibiting their ability to regenerate. But they're a high-use tissue. Even without the additional damage, you're harming their ability to regrow.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-45342682
.....aaaaand this is why I wont give up my guns, ever, ever.
I was gonna say, tho, if they were gonna ban ALL caffeine for kids under 18, oh boy Coca Cola would have a shit fit I'm sure.
Yes, it is that addictive that he would knowingly switch to menthols to help him ramp back up again.
Also, salt in meat and vege stews ~ if you have nothing else in terms of flavour, salt makes it infinitely more appetizing.
I understand the rationale behind this prohibitionist, paternalistic approach (maintain a healthy work/consumption force, reduce burden on socialised healthcare, improve GDP), but the additional cost to the economy is already built in to these goods - smoke tax (it’s not just tobacco, it’s anything you could burn and inhale) in the uk more than covers the cost of smoking related illness.
...according to the people who sell cigarettes.
Smoking related illnesses in the UK cost the NHS (taxpayers) around £5Bn year, and taxes on tobacco raise around £9Bn. So it's pretty close, but that £4Bn gap will need to be made up from somewhere. Personally I'd legalise the wacky tobaccy and tax that, but there really ought to be equivalent taxes on vaping too.
Also if life expectancy goes up, there will be an even greater shortfall in pensions too.
No need to demonstrate health risks first?
They only include smokers. They don't include, for example, the children of smokers, who have many much more respiratory illness than other children.
The hospital admission costs only include this list, and only include them when these are the primary diagnosis of the admission episode.
Importantly, the cost used is the payment by results cost, not the actual cost to the treating trusts or GP surgeries.
> Smoking attributable admissions are defined as spells where the primary diagnosis of the admission episode is attributable to the following ICD-10 codes:
> malignant neoplasms: lip, oral cavity, pharynx (C00 to C14), oesophagus (C15), stomach (C16), pancreas (C25), larynx (C32), trachea, lung, bronchus (C33-C34), cervix uteri (C53), kidney and renal pelvis (C64 to C66, C68), urinary bladder (C67), acute myeloid leukaemia (C92), unspecified site (C80)
> cardiovascular diseases: ischaemic heart disease (I20 to I25), other heart disease (I00 to I09, I26 to I51), cerebrovascular disease (I60 to I69), atherosclerosis (I70), aortic aneurysm (I71), other arterial disease (I72 to I78)
> respiratory diseases: pneumonia, influenza (J10 to J18), bronchitis, emphysema (J40 to J43), chronic airway obstruction (J44)
> diseases of the digestive system: stomach ulcer, duodenal ulcer (K25 to K27), Crohn’s disease (K50), periodontal disease (K05)
> other diseases: age related cataract (H25), hip fracture (S72.0 to S72.2), spontaneous abortion (O03)
I literally only have Coca-Cola for an occasional treat these days - My Beloved Irn-Bru, 7up & San Pellegrino have all been adulterated with awful-tasting artificial sweeteners and are simply unenjoyable for me now.
It's a weird future I find myself in, where I will never drink any of these things again, punished because of some third party entity's paternalism where other third parties are concerned (I'm not personally fat nor enjoy a diet that would ever make me so).
The only problem is what they replace sale, sugar fat with can be worse.
Obviously sugar provides some calories, but no one is getting fat from the sugar in cigarettes. The caloric value is negligible.
Yup, ammonia will totally improve the taste.
https://ballotpedia.org/San_Francisco,_California,_Propositi...
Every vaper and ex-vaper I know or have ever met has used flavoured ecigs, including myself while I was quitting. A whiff of the vapour as they pass is enough to establish if they're using a fruity flavour etc. As I'm in my mid 50s and my friends are mostly 30s-60s I think it's safe to say we're not highschoolers.
The one and only time I tried a tobacco flavoured ecig I almost vomited it was so terrible. I think it's a flavour everyone tries as they switch. Tries just the once mostly - they are utterly unlike any cigarette.
1: https://www.europeanneuropsychopharmacology.com/article/S092...
People who vape know that flavors make it more attractive, and it's orders of magnitude better than smoking
> We enrolled 16 occasional/intermittent to light smokers (4 female; M = 27 years, range 19–45;
The paper _does_ link to a more to a more targeted study[1], but there is a fairly major limitation ("does not allow direct estimation of flavoring’s role in initiation of tobacco use among youth") and it does not necessarily suggest that flavouring is targeting the young per se and not merely being what users in general are looking for.
[1] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2464690
I know a number of people who have used flavored vapes for nicotine replacement therapy and haven’t had a cigarette in years. But I’ve also met some young people who’ve never smoked who started vaping because it’s “cool” and are now quite addicted to nicotine.
Juuls in particular are quite accessible for a non smoker (no getting through the body’s natural reaction to inhaling an irritant combined with being very discreet).
I guess I’m saying “why can’t it be both?”
Bizarre things like aerosol and glue sniffing had their phase of being a niche cool thing amongst kids. Seems like the few who must will always find something regardless of flavour or ease.
I still occasionally see school kids smoking regular cigarettes. How the hell they afford to beats me at over £10 for a 20 pack. But whether vaping or cigarettes there's far fewer kids bothering at all than say 20 or 40 years ago when it seemed like almost every school kid smoked. Besides I'd far rather a few kids were using a vape pen than those same kids on tobacco with all the additives and vastly worse health outcomes. Vapes are far easier to quit too as tobacco seems to have other more addictive components. Well, that was my feeling from having quit both.
I keep hearing of Juul as being something extra, more accessible, worse, more addictive, you name it! How are they different to the dozens of other brands of vapes and ecigs? I've yet to see one in the UK, if they're even sold here.
I don't think that people who needed their nicotine with candy flavor to tolerate it are switching to smoking in the numbers that smokers are moving in the other direction.
Disagree. Smoking products have addictive attributes that suck the user in and make it extremely difficult to quit. I support the banning of smoking in a similar fashion as tightly controlling the supply of opioids.
I was just reading about Wayne Wheeler [0]. He had a negative personal anecdotal experience with alcohol which he successfully used to justify its banning. (edit: sorry, last part was meant to address the anecdote you previously had there, and which many of us have experienced with the harms of smoking by loved ones)
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayne_Wheeler
Discouraging use and offering treatment is far more effective.
Smoking in the center of cities on the street should be illegal (like it is in most of Australia), because it causes harm to complete strangers.
I understand that secondhand smoke indoors is dangerous to others, but is there any real data on outdoor secondhand smoke?
How does it compare to the liters of exhaust per minute from diesel engines in trucks passing by on those same streets?
Perhaps more generally, at what ppm does second hand smoke start to have long term effects on unwitting participants, particularly compared to other major sources of toxins and their concentrations in an urban environment?
[edit: to be clear I’m genuinely curious, not trying to dismiss it or whatabout it. I’ve always thought most second hand smoke issues could be solved with good ventilation (aimed at properly exhausting the smoke) and it seems to me that trace amounts from smokers you pass by on the street are a completely different situation from sitting next to someone smoking indoors]
The data on close-quarters constant second-hand smoke (working in bars, having a partner that smokes) is sketchy, the idea that passing someone while walking outside and momentarily catching a whiff of smoke a couple of dozen times a day is a public health crisis that requires immediate worldwide prohibition is absurd, but common.
It's also a convenient piece of do-nothing legislation for local politicians to campaign on.
Okay, but the data on smoking is not sketchy at all, so it’s not a stretch to suggest that constant exposure to second hand smoke in a poorly ventilated environment is comparable to smoking. Unfortunately there’s no way to set up a classical controlled experiment to test that hypothesis ethically, so we have to make do with other experimental setups and data analysis.
We do have studies that assess the affects of air pollution in cities, so surely we can come up with some way of extrapolating, no?
> It's also a convenient piece of do-nothing legislation for local politicians to campaign on
Sure - cigarette smoke does not smell good to non-smokers so it’s an easy win these days since most people don’t smoke.
I’m just trying to come up with a way of legislating these things based on our best abilities to make conclusions based on data rather than feelings, but I feel as though the onslaught of information brought about by the internet is making it harder to disseminate the wheat while more disseminate the chaff. Not to mention all the ways one can make feelings look like data.
To describe the science on second-hand smoking to be anything other than solid is to simply lie about our knowledge on the health effects of smoking. To add to this, there is also significant evidence that SIDS is strongly correlated with parents who are smokers (and thus appears to be likely caused by smoking while pregnant, and second-hand smoke during infancy).
[1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK44330/
Nicotine isn't what most people are worried about, and presenting it this way is simply disingenuous. Tobacco smoke contains many other components than nicotine such as cyanide, benzene, arsenic, as well as 50 other known carcinogens. Literally nobody cares about your nicotine addiction, it's all of the other toxic components that are the problem.
The studies on second-hand smoking are very solid, and your calling them sketchy is very close to being an outright lie. Here is a summary of the many studies (dating back to the 80s) that all show the various impacts of second-hand smoking[1] -- it cites 194 papers. The WHO, CDC, American Cancer Society, American Lung Association, and many other groups (from other countries too) all concur that second-hand smoke is a very significant threat to the public's health.
Second-hand smoke is very likely one of the causes of SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome) for fucks' sake.
[1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK44330/
There is a specific law (I'm not sure if it's just in NSW or if it's nation-wide) about not being allowed to smoke within 4 meters of an exit to a building (because smokers tended to smoke right outside a building -- presumably because it's more convenient -- when indoor smoking became illegal). A large cluster of people smoking in front of a doorway is not much better than those same people just smoking in the lobby (and people who need to enter the building can't really avoid it).
There are other laws about smoke-free areas (my university campus is one of them). As a non-smoker I do appreciate this quite a bit (having lived in a country where smoking in public areas and indoors was very common), but I'm not sure about whether it is actually a significant improvement for non-smokers. The city's image is probably just as significant a motivator for such rules.
Regarding data, I did a quick Google search and found some articles[1,2,3] ranging in dates to 2007. I've only skimmed them, but one of them[1] specifically mentions doing comparison to pollution from cars.
[1]: http://erj.ersjournals.com/content/early/2016/05/26/13993003... [2]: https://news.stanford.edu/news/2007/may9/smoking-050907.html [3]: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/11/091118154619.h...
Are you saying that you want to model tobacco policy on the most unsuccessful public health policy of all time?
> If you research, you’ll see the opioid crisis was kicked off by doctors freely prescribing like it was candy.
I don't agree, nor do most serious drug policy researchers. Horrible problems with opioids have been waxing and waning for about 100 years in the United States, but were largely unknown prior to the Harrison Narcotics Act.
Your point is very sound that distributing highly concentrated forms of a drug in the midst of prohibition of more benign forms of that drug is likely to cause bad health outcomes. This is exactly what happened during alcohol prohibition, when consumption of beer dropped to nearly zero while consumption of whiskey soared.
Source? The FDA only regulates product marketing, not drug legality.
The next logical step would be to ban cigarettes, but allow people to continue to purchase loose leaf tobacco. But if that happened then smoking rates would likely fall enough that it'd no longer be a major health issue, so even if we are in a slippery slope situation it doesn't seem likely to me that criminalization is the logical conclusion.
Already most smoking deaths are in long term smokers. The 14% of Americans who still smoke are for the most part only smoking a few cigarettes per day (except the couple percent in the severely mentally ill population), so they're going to have nowhere near the same level of health outcomes as the folks who spent decades smoking multiple packs per day. I wouldn't personally ever use tobacco products because I place a high value on not being dead, but from a statistical perspective just looking at the number of current deaths would lead one to vastly overestimate the risks of tobacco use practices. I guess my point is that from a personal level you should definitely not smoke, but at a public policy level we'd hit the point of diminishing returns far before instating a complete ban.
I think there was a study that showed chain smokers are actually less of a burden on the public because they die relatively quickly, reducing their consumption of medical resources.
or search "smoking early death czech" for much more coverage of the Philip Morris study.
Smokers are mentally ill? Really? I’d say that people who see smokers as mentally ill are neurotic and have an authority complex, and probably have far greater issues than smokers.
Whether it is a health related choice or not is immaterial. 30 minutes of cardio per day is generally regarded as a healthy choice. Yet for obvious reasons we are not taking a collective vote on making mild exercise compulsory for all individuals.
We use terms like hindsight bias and selection bias all the time here; is there a name for the perception that the 'other side' of a wide ideological divide is more prevalent? Because I've read the same complaints about the libertarian attitudes here.
There are plenty of folks on both sides of the fence (or it'd be boring).
However, I would expect that entrepreneurs would generally have a free market bias. I create online businesses because I have an affinity for tech, and because the Internet has largely been an unregulated space.
I definitely see quite a few folks from both sides of the libertarian/authoritarian spectrum. I originally wrote a much longer comment talking about how free markets need at least government regulation in order to function (so people have faith in them) while too much regulation leads to high barrier of entry, but I'm sure you get the gist.
If we can't have that discussion without acrimonious downvotes and complaints to the moderator, then what are we doing here? I am inclined to go back to my original point about bias.
The US Federal Government is prohibitionist when it comes to cocaine, marijuana and nuclear weapons. But when you start proposing bans on products that earn billions for multinational conglomerates, out come the little guys pointing at their Constitution.
Each cigarette has 2000 toxins. Over 85% of smokers start at under 18. It's a life long addiction picked up by children that kills so companies can turn a profit. Not to mention the health care burden on society.
In no way or form should such a deadly substance be sold for consumption.
As someone trying to quit (menthols particularly), I can see this move helping some (and I also see it incredibly frustrating for anyone not looking to quit, though they should be!). Part of my difficulty in quitting is how widely available smokes are - in my day to day life, they're only ever 5 minutes away, and that ease of access is a huge barrier in staying smoke-free. I've tried the non-menthols in my brand and I can't stand them. Banning menthols solves the availability problem (for me), and while I disagree with it ideologically, it's hard to argue with it practicality.
[0] https://tonic.vice.com/en_us/article/8xdx7k/are-menthol-ciga...
Since we share finite resources like insurance pools and the medical system, there's a case for society to restrict the actions of others.
As it is, FDA bureaucrats are appointed, not elected.
What are the costs of deferring individuals' choices to a mob's vote or to the whims of appointed bureaucrats?
Advocates of centrally planned societies will always point to the purported benefits of their authoritarian models.
At what point is the individual responsible for his own health? If we absolve the individual of all personal responsibility and replace it with a set of all encompassing dictates - What does it mean to be a free human being in such a society? How would this differ from being property of the state?
Your responsibility is to make sure they all live long, healthy, happy, and free.
There's a poisonous plant that sticks through the fence in a corner of the range. You tell all the chickens to stay away, that it will make them sick and kill them, but every year about 10-15% of them eat it anyway, and you're constantly dealing with the illness and death it causes. And you can't tear out the plant, because it's not growing on your property, it's just coming through the fence.
The problem, is that the plant didn't get there on it's own. A pack of wolves planted it, and at night they plaster the side of the coop with flyers saying how smooth and cool the plant is. But when you try to tear down the posters, or cut back the plant, all the libertarian chickens come out and yell about individual freedoms.
Humans aren't rational actors. We're emotional creatures of habit who are highly susceptible to advertising. If anything, we shouldn't ban the item in question, we should just make it really expensive, and disallow any forms of advertising. That means besides no TV, no magazines, no billboards, no visible smoking anywhere in media, not visible on shelves on any store anywhere, etc.
If we take away tobacco companies' power to emotionally manipulate humans, maybe not as many people will choose to throw their health away.
>Humans aren't rational actors. We're emotional creatures of habit who are highly susceptible to advertising
Adbusters would agree with your claim that:
>we should just make it really expensive, and disallow any forms of advertising. That means besides no TV, no magazines, no billboards, no visible smoking anywhere in media, not visible on shelves on any store anywhere, etc.
https://www.amazon.com/Phishing-Phools-Economics-Manipulatio...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adbusters
https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Athedailybell.com+adbu...
https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Amises.org+shiller
https://www.google.com/search?q=nobel+prize+in+economics+fak...
Your comparison of a farmer owning chickens for profit/consumption to a government benevolently lording over citizens is illustrative. For the sake of being explicit, I don't think humans should be regarded as chattel. If you find this an apt comparison, we may have to agree to disagree. Thanks.
Are you arguing that having health credits in the USA and legally mandated exercise is the only logical next step after banning menthol cigarettes? If you aren't, then you aren't using reducto ad absurdum. If you are, then it's trivial to disprove (in Australia, snuff has been illegal to sell since the late 1980s and we don't have "health credits" today -- many other substances bad for your health were made illegal in the US and you don't have "health credits" today).
I have posed a specific set of questions about the logic of prohibiting products for heath purposes. You have chosen to tilt by snark & technicality instead of answering these questions.
If we accept that the government (or a group of bureaucrats) knows what is best for the health of divers individuals, then why not?
If we accept that 30 minutes of exercise is good for health and that it is appropriate to compel individuals into healthy choices, then why not?
If we accept that two parallel lines will never intersect, then why should air traffic controllers worry?
It is plain and obvious where this logic leads. Claiming a slippery slope is a dodge imho.
To your point here, "then why not" isn't an example of a logical deduction.
You're also intentionally ignoring that the discussion here is the banning of a subset of products that we know for certain cause many incredibly serious health problems and is one of the leading causes of premature death in many countries around the world. Smoking is bad for everyone, so making decisions on a "divers[sic] set of individuals" is completely reasonable -- unless you're arguing that smoking is good for some peoples' health?
I agree that if the government (for instance) started banning high-fat foods that there would be reason to say that this is overstepping the mark. But that's not what's happening.
> and that it is appropriate to compel individuals into healthy choices
That's not what's happening.
> If we accept that two parallel lines will never intersect, then why should air traffic controllers worry?
Not only is this a non-sequitur, it's also an awful example of a logical deduction and actually undermines your other examples of "reasonable" questions.
A little levity in the form of a non-sequitur never hurt anyone.
If you endeavored to answer the questions I posed in good faith, you would have found that I am not predicting some nightmare 1984 scenario at the ski chalet. The answers are obvious and pedestrian. Principles are inevitably dismissed in the name of practicality and pragmatism. This is the reality of governance. This is "why not".
You admit as much when you speak of high fat foods. From where I stand, it is nothing more than an arbitrary hand wave. It is especially ironic after so many nitpicks (which I do not accept :P ) about the nature of argumentative logic.
From this point forward it is strictly subjective sausage making.
The US has found prohibition to be an untenable policy. As I understand, taxes on cigarettes in Australia make the price something like $20-$25 a pack. So how much for a truck load? How much does it cost to counterfeit? It is already happening in the US.
The US has had black markets for cigarettes for 50+ years. Increasing taxes and prohibiting products does not work. It only serves to dilute what little regulatory power the state does have. Eventually people stop caring and say: "Everything fun is illegal anyways", "Returning to prison is inevitable", "My lawyer knows how to fix this", or "What could be more righteous than shirking authority while profiting from my oppression?".
https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/divers
There is a lot of downside to smoking, but the shared burden is not it.
Edit: it looks like you've been posting a lot of unsubstantive comments to HN, as well as a lot of ideological comments. Both of those things are against the guidelines as well. If you'd please use the site as intended instead, we'd be grateful.
"Strict age verification with online sales". I would very much like to see how this is supposed to work.
And yes, menthol == mint.
Consumption taxes are also implemented in many countries, but these have issues as well. Namely in regards to lobbying and how the taxes are chosen, and how they disproportionately affect low-income segments.
Personally I am torn on this subject. I highly appreciate the public smoking ban that has been implemented in restaurants, bars and other public venues, as well as on public transit and related facilities. I do respect smoking as a personal choice, just as I expect teetotalers to respect that I enjoy the consumption of alcohol, or vegetarians/vegans to respect that I enjoy consuming foods with meat in them. All of these have proven generally negative health effects, but I choose to partake in some of them, as an informed choice.
I also recognize that all of these activities have some negative effect on the world and society, in one way or another, yet it would be counterproductive to ban them outright.
What I don't like about smoking in particular is the stench and effects of passive smoking, and especially not being able to escape it. At least the public smoking ban did alleviate this, which certainly can be spun as a net societal gain.
At the rate things are going, it’s only a matter of time.
No good do-gooders on a rampage to take away everything enjoyable in life.
*Possession would still be legal, because punishing people for using drugs is dumb.
in my view, this is an inevitable consequence of the shift towards socialized medicine. when every human body is a financial liability for the government, you can expect it to get a lot more interested in how you treat your body. good alignment of incentives for public health, but terrible for individual liberty.
And some of them will get sick or die because of the prohibition on regulated manufacturing.
We know that because there isn't an epidemic of people going blind and dying after drinking alcohol contaminated with fermentation and distillation byproducts, but there is an epidemic of people dying from using "heroin" tainted by fentanyl analogs.
The only thing that has ever worked is legal regulated sale, which keeps the market sane with respect to quality control and safety, while making it easy for people to access health and addiction services.
Do you want a black market? Because that’s how you get a black market.
Tobacco is a public health crisis. Encouraging safer alternatives (eg e-cigarettes) and slowly making nicotine consumption socially unacceptable is how you make progress. You don’t solve it by just banning the substance entirely (see how that worked out with alcohol).
To add a finer point: nicotine, while an extremely addictive substance, seems to be fairly inoffensive. The delivery mechanism (eg smoking) is what gives you cancer etc. A bunch of people addicted to nicotine does not seem to be much of a public health problem if they’re all using inoffensive delivery mechanisms.
Known carcinogens present in cigarettes: https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/t...
https://tobacco.ucsf.edu/cellular-evidence-how-nicotine-and-...
That’s not to say it’s the most toxic aspect of tobacco, but it can’t be good.
These plants are all related by the way. The Simpson’s ”Tomacco” episode isn’t so far fetched!
Not to mention its working principle is perfectly well understood.
> ban all of forms of nicotine for sale.
you can't do that as it would create a thriving black market. Look at the edges of the European Union, where EU taxes drove the prices of cigarettes sky high and people are illegally importing cigarettes from Ukraine, Moldova, Russia, etc..
You need to boil the frog. Slowly but surely, make consuming nicotine socially unacceptable (already is almost everywhere in the West wrt to smoking), expensive (but again, slowly, don't shock the market) and shitty (ban tobacco additives, flavors, make the product packaging look like a horror show). 1-3 generations tops and you'll not see anymore smokers.
The ban is to reduce consumption Black market is fine Just like prostitution
I like nicotine and smoking on occasion, but I have never been addicted. Maybe it's personality, behavioral, or some physical difference, I couldn't say. There have been about 30 cigarettes a year for more than a decade. I have no desire to "quit" or have the government tell me I have to.
Walking outside yesterday in Santa Clara was worse for my lifespan than anything I've smoked in the last 6 months.
When I think about the purpose of government, banning addictive substances does not fit the bill.
I can't remember where, but I saw a study that showed banning cigarettes would only make healthcare costs go up as people would me living much longer lives....
But yes, in a sense, smoking bans are making an implicit assumption that the gain in quality of life is far outweighed by the shortening of it.
More non-dead people also means more workers, more taxes revenue, more consumption, more growth.
When I have had an abysmal day, it can make everything seem ok and even stave off a panic attack.
When I am flying off the handle in anger it can calm me right down.
It can do this without dulling my abilities - actually improving them - unlike other legal and less than legal alternatives.
Is it prone to abuse, particularly in certain people? Absolutely. Is nicotine, particularly in conjunction with tobacco a carcinogen? Absolutely.
But to say there is no upside is dishonest.
https://www.thefix.com/content/former-german-chancellor-hoar...
i don't smoke anymore, but it still makes me very uncomfortable to see the government take another step forward in regulating how people treat their own bodies. the government rarely takes a step back.
Please ban food for everyone so that I can finally be my best self again.