Posted on 04/22/2015 6:41:06 PM PDT by TurboZamboni
They sure know how to "bury the lead" at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. On Thursday, the CDC issued its annual National Youth Tobacco Survey; the headline in the accompanying news release read: "E-cigarette use triples among middle and high school students in just one year." This was, indeed, true. In 2014, according to the survey results, 13.4 percent of high school students had used an electronic cigarette at least once during the month the survey was taken. That was up from 4.5 percent in 2013. In a conference call with reporters, Tom Frieden, the director of the CDC, couldn't stop talking about how awful this was. "It's important that everyone, parents and kids, understand that nicotine is dangerous for kids at any age, whether it's an e-cigarette, hookah, cigarette or a cigar," he said. In addition to being addictive, nicotine was thought to affect the still-maturing adolescent brain -- although Frieden also acknowledged that this had mainly been shown in animal studies, rather than studies of adolescents.
(Excerpt) Read more at twincities.com ...
Breathing is a gateway drug.
It’s a drug delivery device. And the drug is addictive.
“I want a new drug
One that won’t make me sick
One that won’t make me crash my car
Or make me feel three feet thick”
I don’t see e-cigs increasing tobacco use, but certainly see them increasing nicotine addiction.
I fail to see how removing the tar from a toxic, highly addictive substance is a necessarily good thing.
Many people avoided the addiction in the past because they could not hack the smoke.
Now, if used as a step in the direction of getting rid of the habit altogether, I can see that. And I appreciate the fact that it has saved a lot of people a lot of money over the traditional route.
But I am amazed that no one seems concerned that we are making it easier for people to remain or become addicts.
One wonders if it really the drug, or just that people like to stick something in their mouth and suck on it.
A friend of mine had a meth addiction. She got treated by social services. Now she is on prescription meth.
The real problem is that e-cigs are part of a commerce flow that is not matched by a corresponding government revenue stream. Once they are taxed enough they will be safer. In the mean time we get a flood of articles about how unsafe they are, especially for the children!
Any newspaperman (nowadays: newspaperperson?) knows that the expression is “bury the lede,” not “bury the lead.”
Maybe it’s because nicotine addiction is a personal choice—just like caffeine or stuffing your face with too much pizza. What give you the right to decide what is alright for me? There is a difference between a vice (or sin) and a crime-Jesus didn’t seem to have a good impression of Pharisaical legalism. I have a new name for all you overbearing, zero-risk “conservatives:” NeoNannies.
Removing tar (and other carcinogens) is not a good thing? You would rather see more people with cancer? Are you as sadist or an out of work oncologist?
Huey Lewis!
I know quite a few people who used e-cigs to quit the real thing and eventually quit e-cigs as well.
So you are saying that cigarettes, not nicotine, or cigarettes in conjunction with nicotine are what is addictive. That would be a new one on me, I will research that further for my own understanding.
Since nicotine poisoning is not uncommon, I will not try to parse the wording. Not enjoying smoking may be another way of saying can’t hack it, perhaps a more inclusive way of putting it. Keeping in mind your assertion that it is not the nicotine alone that is addictive, I have known many people who tried and did not enjoy it, many who worked through the initial discomfort of smoking and became addicted (whether chemically or habitually is debatable and perhaps irrelevant), and some who were addicted with their first cigarette. As I have told my children, you don’t know which type you will be until you try...
Yes, I have seen good in it from people who have been lifetime smokers who used it to quit. I am not sure I see any good in high school age kids using it for kicks.
antidisestablishment - note I did not state “there ought to be a law” anywhere in my posting. I maintain my position that “vaping” seems to have become a craze that does not seem to have been fully examined beyond its money saving and tar saving aspects. To my way of thinking, anything that reaches such as state of faddishness requires closer examination, with the default position being that someone is marketing something to us, which may not be all good.
You have a point, especially if the information in the above post stands up, regarding nicotine vs caffeine, sugar, or whatever one may choose as a vice (if they are even that - not sure where you get the “crime” inference out of my post). Any or all of those things can be used in moderation, or can control you and rob you of your status as a man exercising dominion over creation. (aside, the individual for many reasons can be the last person to notice when that line has been crossed - I don’t know you, and therefore can only make the charitable assumption that you have a enjoyable activity which does not hinder your personal walk or life - your friends and family may give you a different take, or may affirm that).
It seems that our culture has completely done away with even the hint of an idea of moderation versus life controlling addictions of many kinds. So when I see a popular delivery system for a drug which has removed he icky smell, social stigma, and many more obvious health concerns for perhaps only hidden ones, I want to say “what’s going on here?”
Nicotine is one of the most addictive substances known and vaping lowers the threshold, so I understand your concern. I do have a issue with more regulation, but there are ways to address problems without some overbearing regulatory system.
My concern is the lack of quality control and the fact that a lot of the vaping liquids are made in China—which doesn’t exactly have a strong health and safety record. I don’t like to see people suffer or die even when they make poor choices.
It is very difficult to research nicotine, in a way, since there are very few studies on nicotine users who are not tobacco users, and anybody studying the effects of nicotine on people who have never used tobacco runs the risk of some pretty serious accusations (even if those accusations probably wouldn’t be warranted). It does appear that a relatively minor addiction to nicotine can form over time, but there is no evidence that it can form without the use of the other chemicals in tobacco. One way to look at it is this: if nicotine dependency was the problem, NRTs would work. Smokers attempting to quit tend to be extremely determined, and often desperate, to quit. Despite that, augmenting nicotine does little to nothing to assist them. Something else has to be going on here.
As far as nicotine toxicity is concerned, it is important to note that the current cited level of toxicity is based on what was essentially a wag (wild guess, of sorts) made about 100 years ago (based, IIRC, on some rough calculations based on how a “researcher” felt after consuming cigarettes or cigars). It was never proven, or even tested. Just cited (everywhere). Attempts to commit suicide via nicotine ingestion have generally failed, even though the amount consumed was well in excess of the cited toxicity level. Excesses of nicotine are rapidly cleared out of the body, making nicotine poisoning impractical unless a concentrated solution is ingested. This isn’t to say that nicotine isn’t potentially toxic — rather, it takes exceptional circumstances to both ingest the necessary amount, and to bypass the bodies’ natural response to vomit.
As far as why people smoke, the “people smoke because it is addictive” crowd have done a great disservice by pushing what amounts to propaganda at the expense of truth. While it is undoubtedly true that cigarettes are addictive for most people, they don’t necessarily smoke because it is addictive. Some people just enjoy it. While most pleasurable things have similarities to other things, smoking is unique, and doesn’t really have any strong parallels. If a person enjoys avocados, they can understand anothers’ enjoyment of steak. If a person uses a drug like cocaine, they can relate to anothers’ desire for heroin. And so on. But cigarettes, as I said, really have no such parallel.
I go back to a study on mice, done a long time ago, which showed that when exposed to cigarette smoke, there were 3 distinct, and roughly equally-sized, groups of mice. The first group hated the smoke, and did everything they could to avoid it. The second, was ambivalent, and neither went out of there way to get access to smoke, but also didn’t avoid it. The third went out of their way to gain access to the smoke, even after only one exposure. All 3 groups became addicted after enough exposure.
Based on my experience, I think this is roughly what happens with people. I was definitely in the last group, but I knew plenty of smokers in the first two groups, who smoked quite a lot before they ever got over their dislike of it. By contrast, I liked the first cigarette I ever had, the last cigarette I ever had, and pretty much every single one in between. Whether I was addicted was rather irrelevant — I generally smoked because I enjoyed it (but I understand that for many smokers, this isn’t true, and they stop enjoying it over time).
This is a long way of saying that I don’t think people are addicted early (I know there are studies showing that there are changes in the brain after a person’s first cigarette, but these kinds of studies can be very misleading). The danger for teens isn’t that they will get addicted. It is that they are going to find that they really like cigarettes, and smoking, even though everyone around them tells them it is a foolish decision, and even when they themselves know that.
This is why I personally believe that e-cigs should not be age regulated. Teens are going to try smoking regardless. But my experience, which is reasonably typical, if I had had access to e-cigs, there is no way that I would have smoked for decades. In fact, when I was still a teenager, I was looking for alternatives to smoking (little did I know that such a device could have been around, had it not been for the alphabet soup of “health organizations” and their greedy obstinence when it came to low risk alternatives to smoking, but I digress). Had e-cigs been around, that would have been the end of my smoking. I have little doubt that age restrictions will be ineffective, thankfully, because the alternative is an unnecessarily larger number of life-long smokers.
Control freaks never, EVER stop. Vaping gets rid of the smoke, the smell, the ashes, the butts - and they STILL b*tch. It’s cleaner than it’s ever been, less offensive than it’s ever been. Vaping is so much better than smoking. I know people who are cutting the nicotine level down over weeks with the intention of quitting altogether.
Vaping doesn’t affect you as much as smoking. It’s cleaner. It’s vapor. I work with a guy who is gaping to lose weight! He has a puff of sweet flavored ejuice instead of candy. You can adjust the nicotine level down as you like - something you never could really do with cigarettes. Lay off the control freak stuff and be glad technology has provided an improvement over stinky ol’ cigarettes. Just my two cents.
VAPING to lose weight - sheeez. Not gaping. Argh.
I don't know - I used to buy candy cigarettes as a child and ended up smoking for years - gateways are alive and well......
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