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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   33461 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 24, 2023

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Anecdotally, 2 out of about 7-8 people I know in their twenties who vape have gone on to smoke cigarettes. I also thought the gateway drug idea was ridiculous until I saw it happen.

Alternative: If the ban on vapes had not happened, those people would not have gone on to smoke cigarettes.

Neither of them live somewhere where vapes are banned.

Counter point - of about 10 people I know who have smoked for decades - 6 of them now vape because it tastes better, smells better, feels better on their lungs, limits the chance they'll set their bed on fire and most importantly is shitloads cheaper.

Of the twentysomethings I know that use nicotine (myself included, see username), almost all of them follow the same pattern that I do: vaping regularly throughout the day, and infrequently indulging in smoked tobacco only in social/ritual settings. I get through a pack of actual cigarettes every month and a half or so. This results in drastically less physical smoking than we'd engage in if cigarettes etc were our only option, holding nicotine dependence constant.

Another possible explanation is that 6 out of those 8 likely smokers didn’t pick it up because they got into vaping.

I don't think so, not on a statistical level. At least in the US, cigarette use has been declining very steadily since about 1980. Vape use was negligible before about 2010, and the decline of cigarette use doesn't seem to show any change.

(On an individual level, to everyone who is using vapes to quit or avoid cigarettes: good for you! I worry that we might not yet know all the long-term health consequences, but I'd bet that they're a hell of a lot less severe than the consequences of smoking.)

I know people who started out smoking cigarettes and switched to vaping, at great relief to their lungs, so I don't think it's nearly as cut and dry.

This makes sense, but you’d need to do some randomization to check for causation. If, for example, there are people who are “prone to get addicted to nicotine”, it is possible that they would have taken up smoking anyway, even without vaping first. Indeed, that’s what people did when vapes didn’t exist.

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