If nicotine addiction is relatively harmless without conventional cigarettes, who cares? A lot of teens also have mild coffee addictions.
Is this as harmful as, say, Pringles? Or trampolines? I think the reason this stirs up outrage is because it's 'smoking' which is seen as an adult activity that children must be shielded from, whereas many other harmful behaviors are associated with children and thus 'okay'.
Every day in the US 2000 children under the age of 18 smoke their first cigarette.
It's important to switch those children to vaping or not smoking.
But all those other children who aren't smoking? There's almost no benefit to them from vaping, and there are disadvantages and risks. Vaping costs money, it's potentially addictive, some of the flavours can be harmful, the devices can be low quality and catch fire etc. These might be small quantities of risk, but across a population of 350m people it adds up to a bunch of people harmed for no benefit.
The problem is we don't know if it is harmless. We don't know what the short and long term effects of this is going to be. We don't know if these teens are going to be more likely to smoke cigarettes later in life. And when you are dealing with an industry that has a long history of lying about the health effects of its products I think it is correct to be concerned. We shouldn't assume that Juul is safe.
There's a fairly recent Nature article out of Belgium that did a pretty good job of showing vaping nicotine screws up the cardiovascular system just like conventional cigarettes. It can get a bit technical at times but overall should be somewhat understandable to most people. If nothing else, please skim the discussion section. To quote: "Nicotine exerts pharmacologic effects that could contribute to acute cardiovascular events and accelerated atherogenesis experienced by cigarette smokers." Atherogenesis = plaque formation in the arteries = lots and lots of bad stuff.
> If nicotine addiction is relatively harmless without conventional cigarettes, who cares?
Because we aren't doing anybody any favors when we permit the industry to give teenagers a chemical addiction to their commercial product, even if their product were harmful in no ways other than financial.
(Yes, I also object in strong terms to other addictive substances in consumer products, don't even bother replying with whataboutism.)
If they’re directly advertising to kids, that’s a problem and already illegal. If they’re making universally enjoyed flavors, like apple, I don’t see a problem with that specifically, if we are going to continue to allow the ingestion of nicotine for any adult.
Again, if they are advertising to children, that is a very, very serious problem and should be dealt with immediately. Selling apple or caramel or chocolate or mint flavor is not sufficient, in my opinion.
Arguably, advertising flavor at all is sufficient, but don’t we already have laws for advertising, period?
Were nicotine harmless I'd be ok with teenagers getting hooked on it. After all many of them are hooked on excessive sugar consumption and that is not harmless. Better to care about where the harm really lies than where it doesn't (again, if nicotine is harmless).
Please don't say "aargh, drugs!" and lose your cool. We need a rational not emotional response or things will be made worse.
Is this as harmful as, say, Pringles? Or trampolines? I think the reason this stirs up outrage is because it's 'smoking' which is seen as an adult activity that children must be shielded from, whereas many other harmful behaviors are associated with children and thus 'okay'.