20 year old Juul addict living with two others! AMA.
What is it like having a sub-100 IQ? How many times have you been arrested?
E-Cigarette Maker Juul Labs Is Raising $1.2B
111–120 of 133 posts
Re: E-Cigarette Maker Juul Labs Is Raising $1.2B
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
You misunderstand what is really bad about cigarettes. It isn’t the nicotine, but the tar (the burning of it). Heck, nicotine gum has long been used as a safe smoking cessation aide. Not to mention it is present in many new works vegetables. Getting rid of the burning tar is a HUGE win for smokers, healthwise.
I, in fact, possess no such misunderstanding. I can certainly appreciate that holding the tar up as the boogieman, to give coverfire to nicotene, makes good marketing material for up and coming businesses looking to disrupt established tobacco companies. However, there is a faulty assumption in your copy. And that's to defang addiction as a problem, and to anchor all of the negative effects of smoking to the respirat…
I tried to quit smoking with earlier vapes and failed because I wasn’t really addicted to the nicotine at all. I eventually figured out how to quit, but it was the burning plant matter that had me hooked more than what you can get in a bunch of tomatoes.
Re: E-Cigarette Maker Juul Labs Is Raising $1.2B
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
Using the phrase “virtue signaling” seems to be a sort of “virtue signal”. Does it make you uncomfortable that someone would make a decision from a place of values and ethics? Or that they’d discuss it?
Cigarettes are "generally accepted non-virtuous behavior". Virtue signaling might mean doing something that anyone expects to be baseline "good person" behavior, but inappropriately advertising this fact. People tend to prefer to see virtue and identify it, much like people can safely refer to others as a genius but referring to themselves in that light suggests a lack of genius. Heaping praise on others for their vi…
Generally I find policing the expression of others to be a function of some disowned or repressed part of the policer.
Re: E-Cigarette Maker Juul Labs Is Raising $1.2B
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be honest, nicotine has cognitive enhancing effects. Nicotine alone does not have detrimental effects (aside from vasoconstriction, but it’s a stimulant); the main risk comes from the unknown effects of long term exposure to inhaled chemicals like propelyne glycol/vegetable glycerin. These chemicals are approved as food additives, though.
> Nicotine alone does not have detrimental effects I think it’s normal to consider dependency and major withdrawals when stopping as pretty detrimental effects, whether or not any other symptoms are involved. Not that everyone is bothered by that, but folks needing to vape every 10 minutes have a severely lowered quality of life (or the risk of having one), in my opinion — if only because their habit gets in the way…
Not to mention the very questionable morality of selling a product engineered to hopelessly addict your customers.
Re: E-Cigarette Maker Juul Labs Is Raising $1.2B
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
And when I was in school half the kids smoked cigarrettes. I have no idea what the numbers are, but you have to consider that fewer kids are using tobacco, which is a good thing.
Well, it depends. As far as I remember, the vehicle is propylene glycol. It isn't biologically inert, and I'm not sure how much work has been done to study buildup within the lungs or combustion products. Combine that with dodgy sourcing allowing metal contamination. It seems more or less the definition of trading the devil you know for one you don't.
There are a lot of studies about inhaling PG in the context of smoke machines (in bars, generally). It reduces lung function, but not permanently. No more serious harm seems to be indicated.
Re: E-Cigarette Maker Juul Labs Is Raising $1.2B
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
e-cigs have been proclaimed as between 95 and 99% less harmful than smoking, by some health charities. If these figures are well grounded in evidence then... probably yes.
Oxycontin is likely a safer drug than heroin. That doesn't mean we should be working on growing the Oxycontin market on the assumption that every new user is someone who might have otherwise used heroin.
If being addicted to Oxy was 95-99% less harmful than being addicted to heroin, I think we'd be OK with a small rise in Oxy users as heroin use fell off.
But as these are not in any way analagous to the current situation, it seems silly to talk about them.
Re: E-Cigarette Maker Juul Labs Is Raising $1.2B
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
e-cigs have been proclaimed as between 95 and 99% less harmful than smoking, by some health charities. If these figures are well grounded in evidence then... probably yes.
Is it better to have 10 kids smoking traditional cigarettes, or 1000 using Juul? But perhaps that's a false dichotomy. My worry is that by creating new addictions, we will end up with 1000 using Juul AND 100 kids smoking traditional cigarettes. I don't see how anyone gains from this, other than Juul's investors.
Your worry is unfounded, apparently. So far there's no evidence of e-cigs being a gateway to regular ones.
Re: E-Cigarette Maker Juul Labs Is Raising $1.2B
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s a great article, and rather eye-opening. Juul may help cigarette smokers get away from tobacco, but wow — stories about teens and young adults taking Juul hits every 10-15 minutes are something else. That’s just plain addiction, taking them far beyond the threshold of diminishing returns, even for caffeine-like self-medication. There’s definitely a lot of money in creating addictions... this can’t be a long-te…
And when I was in school half the kids smoked cigarrettes. I have no idea what the numbers are, but you have to consider that fewer kids are using tobacco, which is a good thing.
False dichotomy. Tobacco smoking was on a downwards trend before vaping anyhow (it just plain stopped being “cool”) so clearly you don’t need vaping as alternative to reduce tobacco usage.
Re: E-Cigarette Maker Juul Labs Is Raising $1.2B
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
Methadone is safer than heroin and is widely used in substitution therapy. Either way, the bulk of health damage from smoking was from the complimentary products of burning. You ain't getting lung cancer from nicotine.
I am not aware of any doctors that would recommend using methadone permanently and and it is only legally available to be prescribed for ongoing substitution therapy by federally certified abuse recovery centers. So my analogy still stands. No one should be actively campaigning to grow the methadone market the way that people are for e-cigarettes.
AFAIK any MD can write a script for methadone.