My father has COPD from over 50 years of smoking. I convinced him to switch to vaping and he's been using a Juul for a few years now. Awhile after the switch his primary care physician listened to his lungs and said they sounded a lot better. She said she because the science isn't in "I can't tell you to vape but I can tell you to keep doing what you're doing".<p>Should non-smokers pick up vaping? Probably not. But in this one instance it was a good move for a smoker.<p>I'd like to see more studies in this area and some more regulations on the "juice" for vapes. The quality, and I assume health effects, vary widely between different juices. For example: I bought him a non-refillable vape by another company and he started coughing and complaining of soreness in his throat.<p>I also think the arguments against the flavored juices are hysterical/hypocritical given the variety of flavors of liquor one can find.<p>Disclaimer: I think all drugs should be legal.
We spent decades trying to get rid of cigarettes and it worked and now we let this fucking Juul through the front door. It’s as if we haven’t learned a fucking thing in decades, and the fact that this founder is celebrated in Silicon Valley sickens me. He just found another opportunity to hook kids on nicotine for another few generations and now he’s a fucking billionaire. Fuck that guy.
That's quite outrageous.<p>If this special issue was peer-reviewed, people donated their time for free to publish 11 studies with potentially severe conflicts of interest.<p>If the issue was <i>not</i> peer-reviewed, then the editors handed out free publication for money, which is what predatory journals do.<p>There is no way to spin this as remotely related to good scientific practice, which would mean:<p>- Funding is independent of results<p>- Double-blind peer review<p>- Pre-registration wherever possible
This study is pretty interesting:<p>> Smoking Trajectories of Adult Never Smokers 12 Months after First Purchase of a JUUL Starter Kit<p><a href="https://www.ingentaconnect.com/contentone/png/ajhb/2021/00000045/00000003/art00008#" rel="nofollow">https://www.ingentaconnect.com/contentone/png/ajhb/2021/0000...</a><p>The survey conveniently only asked about cigarette or "Juul" use, take note how it doesn't ask if users switched to a different vaping product.<p>Though the study was described as<p>> “JUUL customer online survey about JUUL vapor products, vaping and smoking.”<p>Makes me wonder if they conveniently left out some questions to get their p-value right.
Scientism has become the state religion and companies are paying for indulgences.<p>At least they made it open access. At first I thought they bought out the entire issue so that people couldn't read it.
I don't get why Americans target their own companies when it comes to vaping. A couple of years ago regulators banned all the popular flavors of Juul while other brands still have plenty of vaping flavors.<p>The flavor ban completely destroyed Juul as a company, and I would argue Juul is already dead, and more sinister products are taking its place.<p>Vaping (and Delta 8) markets are now ran by a bunch of Chinese companies now, and their safety standards are much lower than American companies.<p>With Delta 8 exploding in popularity, I would much rather prefer large and established American companies (such as Juul) making the product with American safety standards.<p>But after most of the Juul flavors have been banned, Juul is now an empty shell of a company compared to what it once used to be, while Chinese are still cracking out those flavorful vapes, but now they're also disposable (which is even more appealing to kids) so you throw out a battery and plastic shell when the cartridge runs out of vaping juice.<p>I miss the days of DYI vaping where you would have to build your own coil and cotton - maybe even mix your own fluid - and the whole thing was more akin to a hobby.
I have followed the story of e-cigarettes and can only say it's eye opening, its probably very symptomatic to how things are done. It went from innovators and communities to being large enough that the cigarette companies responded by a smear campaign, disinformation and panic, that was then used to regulate in a way that benefited only the cigarette companies. What a transparently corrupt world we live in.
I used to be a cigarette smoker who went to juuling and eventually "quit" (I still cave to a few puffs of e-cigs every month or so when I'm with someone that has one).<p>I agree if you have no intention to quit, juuling is much safer than continuing to inhale smoke.<p>But you might want to be careful using it as a smoking cessation tool. I smoked about 7 cigarettes a day but after I picked up juuling the sheer convenience of not having to go outside, being able to use it in bed, etc. got me up to 1-2 pods (equivalent to 1-2 packs of cigarettes) per day in nicotine consumption.<p>My lungs caught a break by vaping but my nicotine addiction was uncontrollable. I eventually used nicotine gum to quit and it was absolute hell. I suspect it would have been much easier if I wasn't so used to a constant stream of nicotine 24/7.
Before I start I note that I'm old enough to do what I want and I have no other habits/vices, but don't vape, kids ;-)<p>So I, a total non-smoker, started experimenting with nicotine a few weeks ago. First I tried gum which did nothing but give me an itchy throat. Then I bought a vaping device and some juices. Why? I think I'm low in dopamine (I am not depressed, though) and had read nicotine provides a temporary boost (until you get hooked) and I was intrigued to feel the difference.<p>I can't really tell what's happening. I like the taste and mouth feel of the smoke but the nicotine itself is a bust. Perhaps a very mild caffeine-esque feeling at a push. It hasn't proven addictive as it's been sat out in my car untouched for the past four days! Perhaps the nicest sensation is that of taking a truly deep breath.. but that feels just as good without the vape!<p>I remain intrigued what this means and hope to speak to someone medical about it one day. There's nicotine because it stings the throat if you hold it there (versus a zero nicotine juice) but whatever this amazing sensation people get has clearly passed my receptors by.
I quit to smoke after 13 years of smoking. And I was a heavy smoker. I am a non-smoker for 10y now and will never smoke again.
No need for vaping or such.
I think if you substitute you do not catch your addiction at the root. Vaping is really the wrong way.
You need to get rid of the addiction.
My main point why it was easy for me to quit finally, I hated to be controlled by an chemical.
A chemical that has control over my brain? No way anymore!
I've destroyed this beast.
I am a free man!
> But a Tuesday New York Times article on the subject contained a fascinating nugget midway through, which could be described as a buried lede (journalese for putting the most explosive part of a story in the middle of the piece).<p>I’m going to come down on the opposite side and say that a garbage journal that nobody reads publishing garbage research for money isn’t news. Though it is certainly a good example of why you shouldn’t believe something just because it is published.
This seems to be just standard procedure for any company operating in a health related sector. Maybe the scale is different, but any competent regulator would be aware of these types of relationships and should be adjusting for selection bias in their evaluation.
> Pretty much all the articles take the Juul party line that e-cigarettes help convert smokers away from combustible tobacco products, and thus aid public health. Pretty much none of the articles mention that Juul and other vaping companies make their money by attracting countless new people to nicotine addiction.<p>Well maybe it's because Juul bought the journal or maybe the researchers found no correlation between Juul's profits and public health.
Vaporizers are extremely useful as smoking cessation tools. Juul is not really configured correctly for this purpose. You have to give your customers control over the nicotine content, there need to low-nicotine and nicotine-free options.<p>But yes, the hysteria over flavors is uncalled for. Flavors are useful. If you don't prefer the taste of your vape to the cigarettes, you're not going to switch.
Well whatever they're doing is working.<p>The amount of juul pod junk under my feet in my city seems to be growing exponentially year over year.<p>At least cigarette butts are biodegradable!<p>They should be forced to make these things out of cellulose or a similarly biodegradable product as their consumers are going to treat them as butts and just chuck them on the ground when they're done.
The journal is: "American Journal of Health Behavior".<p>Why did they agree to this? Why aren't they afraid of damaging their reputation? I'm not an health researcher or medical professional, but I would think if I were one, I wouldn't want to publish in this journal afterward, take seriously articles written in it, or be associated with it. They lost three editorial board members at least. Maybe AJHB will be an example that $51,000 isn't worth trashing a reputation that took decades to build.
> Juul’s dominance dissipated around the time that over a thousand people contracted a mysterious vaping-related sickness in the fall of 2019, and state and federal regulators started to investigate the company’s blatantly obvious marketing to teenagers.<p>Surely as hell I support investigating marketing to teenagers but in this case it would seem to me more adequate if they would rather investigate the cases of the sickness and find out what exactly was causing it. I even doubt the sick were using Juul.
Wait, as someone overseas who hasn’t seen any of the Juul advertising what are some of the examples of them “blatantly advertising to children”? Is it just the fact that they are making flavoured nicotine products or has it been more nefarious than that. As an adult I kind of like some of the flavoured tobacco products from smoking shisha (argile, hookah etc) and they have had flavours forever and not been in the spotlight to marketing to children?
Juul has sabatoshed their product. I quit smoking using the Mango flavor (now banned in the USA). I moved onto Virgina Tabbaco flavor which did the trick. About 6 months ago, all the pods started tasting like laundry detergent (Batch codes JJ25SA20A and forward). I had a few of the old to compare with. Waited 6 months now and bought another pack and it's still horrible. Now I buy mango pods from Russia. I hope that option lasts.
A little more R&D into the ingredients of vape products could have eliminated or reduced so many of the health concerns.<p>I really wonder why industry didn't do that. No industry wants their own products to be banned or legislated about by regulators - and paying a few more scientists to find replacements for ingredients that cause lung cancer would seem like a no-brainer.
Juul was bought by big tobacco a few years back, and then like magic state representatives in a bunch of states all started to get lobbied for a vape tax that was very beneficial to pod based systems like Juul, and Vuse(also owned by big t) and that's how I went out of business.
I can’t read this stupid website on my phone. The content keeps shifting up and down for some weird reason, and like every other bloated website it asks me allow cookies as soon as I visit it. So frustrating......
The article tone itself indicates what it is just a continuation of Juul smearing campaign on Philip Morris grants. Not to be confused with Juul grants which are bad.
That photo of the Juul advertisement with the huge government-mandated warning<p>> „This product contains nicotine. Nicotine is addictive“<p>made me wonder…<p>Maybe social media needs the same?<p>> „This Facebook product contains dark patterns and is engineered by a team of psychologists to maximize time spent scrolling the news feed. It is highly addictive.“
Cigarette smoking is so harmful, in addition to the reasons cited by other comments, because you are <i>inhaling burnt matter</i>. Vaping doesn't involve this.<p>Big difference between inhaling a heated liquid vs combusted solid. And yes the nicotine is mostly harmless. I rather enjoy my nic addiction with good black coffee.