General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: pilot study on nicotine residues in houses of electronic cigarette users, tobacco smokers, and non s [View all]Liberal Veteran
(22,239 posts)Smoking is more expensive, more messy, and honestly, tobacco tastes like crap compared to vaping.
I just can't see someone deciding that blueberry or vanilla or coffee and butterscotch flavored vaping would just be so boring compared to burning leaves and burning leaves with menthol. That would be like kids deciding Snickers and Milky Way candy bars are awful and moving on to the obviously more harmful clove or licorice candy or that chewing on dirt is the new thing.
Vaping has been around for the better part of a decade now and yet tobacco use is still on the decline.
The only way I could see that trend reversing is by well-intentioned legislation that somehow makes vaping costlier than tobacco cigarettes.
It wouldn't surprise me if a lot of ideas to treat vaping as equivalent to smoking weren't either promoted by Big Tobacco intentionally in order to reverse the current trends that are harming their bottom line or by legislators who make a killing (literally and figuratively) in tax revenues from every pack of cigarettes sold, but I have no proof of either. That is idle speculation on my part.
What seems clear to me is that without any evidence of harm, the very last thing anyone should be doing is placing tobacco and vaping on equal ground. Why put barriers in the way of harm reduction for those folks who are trying to move away from cigarettes to something less harmful, since we are talking about PG and VG which are GRAS (generally recognized as safe), nicotine (which is optional and not really that much more of a stimulant than caffeine), and food grade flavors as opposed to smoke, tar, carbon monoxide, cyanide, and about 7000 chemicals in total, 70 of which are known carcinogens?