Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

NYU professors who defended vaping didn't disclose ties to Juul

statnews.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 267 posts

Re: NYU professors who defended vaping didn't disclose ties to Juul

#81

Post by uniqueuid »

fidotron wrote: post #53
uniqueuid wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a very interesting, but completely ad-hoc theory. The problem with these is that there are almost always equally plausible theories, and it's really hard to figure out which is correct. Especially given the huge amount of effort that has gone into research on tobacco and nicotine (I guess millions of hours, if not more), I would definitely NOT say we are too quick to dismiss the possibility. I'm sure you can f…

This has come up before here but unfortunately I'm right: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicotine#Performance

Thanks, I take the ad-hoc theory back!

Re: NYU professors who defended vaping didn't disclose ties to Juul

#82

Post by jcranmer »

lenerdenator wrote: post #9

It really is amazing. We were thiiiiiiis close to having a generation that wasn't addicted to nicotine for the first time in hundreds of years (like, since trade between North America and Europe really became a thing) and these guys pulled this thumb drive that tastes like cotton candy out of nowhere and every young person is just jonesing . And the regulatory/public opinion environment isn't what it was in the 80s a…

> Imagine a company being told today that they now have to stop advertising on billboards, can't advertise to kids, and have to pay a fifth of a trillion dollars over 25 years for the harms they caused to Medicaid. Can't, can you?

That's what's happening to Juul right now. Juul e-cigarettes came out in 2015; 2018 had the first consent decree to not advertise anywhere kids might see the advertisements; by 2021, we had the first attempt to ban Juul from selling products in the US, period (something which never happened with cigarettes!). The current crop of lawsuits isn't at $200 billion, though, only a few billion. But for a product segment that existed for less than a decade, that's a pretty steep penalty.

Re: NYU professors who defended vaping didn't disclose ties to Juul

#83

Post by rayiner »

kibwen wrote: post #72
rayiner wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We socialized people to realize smoking is dirty, then went ahead and legalized marijuana so now kids who would never have smoked cigarettes are filling their lungs with tar: https://www.cnn.com/2023/08/14/health/marijuana-smoke-wellne... . At least cigarettes made people skinny and hot.

> then went ahead and legalized marijuana so now kids who would never have smoked cigarettes ...Except marijuana absolutely isn't legalized, so this is completely incorrect. And in the minority of states that currently ignore the illegality of marijuana, they impose the same age restrictions as cigarettes.

Marijuana is legal for recreational use in the states where most people live. I'm in a Romney 2012 county and there's a giant dispensary on the main street that looks like an Apple store.

Re: NYU professors who defended vaping didn't disclose ties to Juul

#84

Post by VyseofArcadia »

2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #71
VyseofArcadia wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've thankfully never had to quit cigarettes or heroin, but in my experience quitting coffee is awful . 3-5 days of migraine-level headaches and nausea. And the whole time you're thinking, "all this could go away with just one little cup of coffee, which all the studies say has health benefits even. Just one little cup"

Why quit coffee if it has health benefits?

Great question! A couple of reasons.

The simplest is that I dislike being dependent on any substance.

A more nuanced reason is that I want to be able to use caffeine as a tool. A cup of coffee is the largest dose of caffeine that I am comfortable taking at any one time. If I already have caffeine tolerance at the level of a daily coffee habit, caffeine has lost much of its utility to me. However, if my tolerance is lower than that, I can really feel it when I do occasionally have use for a cup of coffee (e.g. the day before code freeze.)

Currently my caffeine intake is a cup of tea[0]. This is at the level where I don't hate myself if I miss it[1], and I can still use coffee as a tool on occasion. Also, you can pry my tea out of my cold dead hands.

[0] Note that how much caffeine a cup of tea has is much more nuanced than "black vs green". Cultivar, terroir, steep time are much more important to caffeine levels than how the tea is processed. In fact if anything, green tea cultivars have been shown to have, on average, very slightly more caffeine than black[2].

[1] I feel it, but it's not 3-5 days of migraines

[2] Y. Zuo et al, Simultaneous determination of catechins, caffeine and gallic acids in green, Oolong, black and pu-erh teas using HPLC with a photodiode array detector, Talanta 57 (2002) 307–316

Re: NYU professors who defended vaping didn't disclose ties to Juul

#85

Post by ajsnigrutin »

chelmzy wrote: post #10

I'm sure there are negative impacts of vaping and it should definitely be more heavily regulated. But the neutering of Juul only to allow dozens of Chinese clones to take their place was such a huge blunder.

Let's be fair, if you take an old smoker (eg. two packs a day), and switch him to a vape, it's (most probably) a lot better for him than staying with the classic cigarettes.

The problem here is/was the advertising... clouds of smokes, bubblegum flavour and targeting the kids... so you have people who never would have started smoking in the first place, staring to vape, sometimes inhaling even more harmful substances than the old-former-smoker.

Re: NYU professors who defended vaping didn't disclose ties to Juul

#86

Post by uniqueuid »

Beijinger wrote: post #80
uniqueuid wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are many studies on the effect of nicotine. I would look for several meta-analyses or umbrella (meta-meta) analyses. Ideally reporting all-cause mortality. Here is one like that: ~500k individuals, vaping has an odds ratio of 1.33 (95% CI = 1.14–1.56) for heart attacks compared to non-smoker/non-vapers. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01675... [edit] To compare that to caffeine, this stud…

"Here is one like that: ~500k individuals, vaping has an odds ratio of 1.33 (95% CI = 1.14–1.56) for heart attacks compared to non-smoker/non-vapers." Are vapers more likely to get a heart attack or are people with a stressful life with a higher risk of a heart attack more likely to be vapers? Sorry. Could not resist.

Fair question! We would need a RCT with controls for that, perhaps one exists :)

Re: NYU professors who defended vaping didn't disclose ties to Juul

#87

Post by jjice »

I'm blown away by how vaping took over. I was a senior in high school once Juul started to get popular. We'd joke about our peers that willingly took on an addiction when our generation was mostly in the clear from being addicted to cigarettes. Then some of my friends who'd joke about it started vaping. I don't even know how they started, but they did. Let me be clear - it's not nearly as annoying or destructive for passer-bys as cigarettes.

It's been eight-ish years and they still vape. They've tried to stop at points, but it never stuck. Juul is gone, but now there are these $15-25 disposable vapes. I'm not sure if there's a specific term for theses, but they don't even have pods of nicotine that you swap out. You just toss the entire thing.

So now an incredible amount of my peers are addicted to nicotine while also producing an incredible amount of e-waste. Juul really helped push this into the mainstream for Gen Z, but the torch is being carried more consistently than ever. I don't even know if some of them are technically legal to sell in my state.

The thing that gets me is that we were so close to not having any casual nicotine in my generation. Now there's also a company called "Zyn" that is essentially tobacco-less dip. Whatever. I'll go back to complaining about the sports betting phenomenon now.

Re: NYU professors who defended vaping didn't disclose ties to Juul

#88

Post by ZeroGravitas »

Beijinger wrote: post #80
uniqueuid wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are many studies on the effect of nicotine. I would look for several meta-analyses or umbrella (meta-meta) analyses. Ideally reporting all-cause mortality. Here is one like that: ~500k individuals, vaping has an odds ratio of 1.33 (95% CI = 1.14–1.56) for heart attacks compared to non-smoker/non-vapers. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01675... [edit] To compare that to caffeine, this stud…

"Here is one like that: ~500k individuals, vaping has an odds ratio of 1.33 (95% CI = 1.14–1.56) for heart attacks compared to non-smoker/non-vapers." Are vapers more likely to get a heart attack or are people with a stressful life with a higher risk of a heart attack more likely to be vapers? Sorry. Could not resist.

This feels similar to the thing where "non-drinkers" in studies were composed of "people who had never drank alcohol" and also "recovering alcoholics".

I would imagine a chunk of vapers are people trying to transition from smoking cigarettes and still suffering from some of the ill effects.

Re: NYU professors who defended vaping didn't disclose ties to Juul

#89

Post by moi2388 »

jogjayr wrote: post #75
nojvek wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious, what makes having cigarettes have low body fat? or in general they get undernourished?

I always assumed smoking made all food taste like shit.

pretty much. Once you stop smoking everything (including yourself) smells and tastes better

Re: NYU professors who defended vaping didn't disclose ties to Juul

#90

Post by mcphage »

alephnerd wrote: post #34
lenerdenator wrote: post #9

It really is amazing. We were thiiiiiiis close to having a generation that wasn't addicted to nicotine for the first time in hundreds of years (like, since trade between North America and Europe really became a thing) and these guys pulled this thumb drive that tastes like cotton candy out of nowhere and every young person is just jonesing . And the regulatory/public opinion environment isn't what it was in the 80s a…

Opium War 2.0 - we have too much inertia to stop the "good times", and while everyone had the right to ruin their bodies, they're doing it out of complete ignorance. The Western relationship to addictive substances is insane, and I hate to admit this, but to a certain extent Wang Huning's thesis about America is right.

> to a certain extent Wang Huning's thesis about America is right

What is that?

Post reply on HN