People hooked on vapes try a new way to quit: cigarettes
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People hooked on vapes try a new way to quit: cigarettes
Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.
prohobo · · focus · HN ↗
With vaping that limit is completely gone. A vaping addiction can keep escalating until you want a puff every 30 seconds, especially once you start breaking down mental barriers like "no vaping indoors" or "no vaping while on the computer", etc.
So in terms of pure addiction I would 100% argue that cigarettes are better than vaping.
m-chrzan · · focus · HN ↗
>Most people [...] need about an hour break in between smokes.
I've never seen anything like that. When there's a group of social smokers standing around, it's very common for something like "Oh, I just finished mine and you're only half-way through yours, I'll light up another one to keep you company" to happen. I've seen plenty of people who aren't chain smokers (yet), but can easily go through 2-4 cigarettes in a row if they're suddenly in a stressful situation and smoking "to relax".
>So in terms of pure addiction I would 100% argue that cigarettes are better than vaping.
But that's not a metric that's in any way helpful for a health decision. Nicotine in and of itself is not particularly physically harmful - it's toxic at high doses and elevates heart rate for a bit, but that's about it. The delivery method is what causes most of the harm, and smoking is 100% known to cause a lot of harm in a lot of different ways. And "With vaping that limit is completely gone" is also not accurate. Unlike the Navier-Stokes equations, dopamine receptors don't experience infinite blowup in finite time. So choosing a delivery method based on the amount of nicotine taken daily is not going to change much in terms of addiction (if you're already heavily addicted, you'll remain heavily addicted), but can have a huge impact on physical health.
andoando · · focus · HN ↗
Second, its much easier to take a puff than it is to find a suitable place to light up a cigarette and smoke for 5-10 minutes. You can very easily end up becoming psychologically conditioned to taking a puff litteraly once every 20 seconds, all day long from waking up to going to bed.
I too have considered picking up smoking to quit vaping. I remember of the times I did, I could smoke 3-4 a day and be fine. I don't know the long term effects of vaping physically, but just mentally the amount of nicotine is absolutely draining and at this point I rather do some damage to my lungs than keep this going.
m-chrzan · · focus · HN ↗
Sure, and I'm not disagreeing with that. I disagree that "degree of addictiveness" is the metric that's wise to use when choosing a nicotine delivery method. Obviously the #1 choice should be NULL, not smoking at all, but if one is already addicted to nicotine and not ready to quit it at the moment, smoking cigarettes is, as far as we know, the worst option. Even intermittent smoking, or low-volume (like your 3-4 a day) causes non-linear harm. See this paper for example: <a href="https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.109.904235?doi=10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.109.904235" rel="nofollow">https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.109.9... .
andoando · · focus · HN ↗
Also nicotine itself is not without harm. I always thought these drugs only affect the brain, but they're metabolized by the whole body and have consequences on all your cells <a href="https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4363846/" rel="nofollow">https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4363846/ Trading the terrible effects of burning tobacco versus the insane amount of nicotine from vaping seems like an unknown tradeoff to me
m-chrzan · · focus · HN ↗
Not that I know of, and I grant that this is an unknown, and we could end up learning about extremely bad 20-/30-/40-year effects in the future. That said, there are very clear, very significant, and very well studied harms of cigarette smoking. Research is being done on vaping, and so far all harms identified are significantly lower than smoking.
>Also nicotine itself is not without harm.
Sure, and thanks for the paper. I'm not well versed in bio enough to tell the significance of everything in there, but, correct me if I'm wrong, for the most part this is showing there exist harms, but they're not particularly well quantified yet, especially in terms of human subjects? For this to really matter, you'd need to quantify the surplus of nicotine you get from vaping vs. smoking, and then compare the relative harms of those two doses. Could be that 5x the dose causes 5x the harm, or could be that the smoking dose passes some threshold, and 5x the dose from vaping is just marginal additional harm on top of that. And then still compare that to the other differences between smoking and vaping in terms of harm.
andoando · · focus · HN ↗
Then there is the negative effects of I dunno how many multiples of volume of vape in your throat and lungs, which I assume is non-zero even though I personally believe its 100x better than burning tobacco.
Then there is the question of what that much nicotine does to you mentally, which is equally, if not more important. To put it in perspective, I usually wake up feeling pretty good, with some hopes and dreams of what Ill be doing that day, and Ill take a puff and immediately want to go back to bed for another hour. I cant sit in meetings for more than 5 mins or have conversations with people if it means I cant be vaping. Its like basing your whole life based on whether you get your fix of nicotine or not. Work from office? I don't think so buddy...every ten minutes Id have to go to the bathroom/outside. I seriously wonder where my life would have been if I never picked up this habit.
We'll see in another 10-20 years I suppose.