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Trade offs, trade offs

Vaping has grown exponentially over the past decade. Vaping shops have proliferated along British high streets, the global market for vapes has increased 8,000-fold since 2016 and vape manufacturers sponsor football and Formula One teams. But it divides opinion sharply.

On the one hand, the tobacco industry – and, to some extent, Public Health England – argues that vaping is a much safer alternative to smoking and that it helps smokers give up. On the other, public health experts, including the World Health Organization, point to its dangers, for children and young people in particular, and urge much more caution than the liberal approach that the UK has decided to take.

Absolutely everything is a trade off. Is vaping 100%, exactly and wholly safe?

Nope.

Is it less bad for any- or every- one than smoking?

Yep.

So, very loose restrictions then.

18 thoughts on “Trade offs, trade offs”

  1. We have loose restrictions because the Government hasn’t caught up yet. There’ll be higher taxes and greater and greater restrictions on vapes next year.

  2. The puritans will never be satisfied :

    Tobacco. Vaping, alcohol sugar, meat…

    There will always be something that they want to ban.

  3. When I think of good old Prohibition, or the Opium Wars, or of course present day drug trafficking, I lose all desire for excessive regulation.

  4. Vaping is a scourge. It appears that there is nowhere that I can’t walk or sit without breathing in the smell of some sickly saccharine fruit flavour second hand smoke courtesy of some moron with what looks like a scaled down 1960’s traction engine in their hand.

  5. Well Kaneda, you’ve got me there. I must admit I loathe being enveloped in cigarette or whatever smoke.

    So being a selfish type, the regulation I’d support is, ‘No smoking near me.’

  6. the smell of some sickly saccharine fruit flavour second hand smoke

    What smoke?

    Vaping only produces smoke if the vaper is on fire.

  7. Why would anyone, post-Covid, listen to ‘public health experts’ ever again?

    The majority of the population were either too scared by coronapanic or are too stupid to see what happened. They think we should have locked down further and faster, and it won’t take much nudging to put them back into lock down again.

  8. As usual, the great Douglas Adams got there first:
    A dreadful silence fell across the conference table as the commander of the Vl’hurgs, resplendent in his black jewelled battle shorts, gazed levelly at the G’Gugvuntt leader squatting opposite him in a cloud of green sweet-smelling steam, and, with a million sleek and horribly beweaponed star cruisers poised to unleash electric death at his single word of command, challenged the vile creature to take back what it had said about his mother.

  9. Does Australia include hookah lounges in caping rules, they seem to be remarkably restriction free locally,, it’s almost as if everyone was turning a blind eye to their existence

  10. It appears that there is nowhere that I can’t walk or sit without breathing in the smell of some sickly saccharine fruit flavour . . .

    Interesting. I’m hypersensitive to cigarette smoke (detection and suffering) and it has long struck me that vape output isn’t even in the same league, let alone division (of course, your truth may differ). Even the youngsters who like to billow ridiculous great clouds to mark their territory aren’t much bother once they’ve gone by. Some geezer walks past my house with a tab and the caustic shit is fucking everywhere for ages unless the wind blows sympathetically. I was very grateful when open heart surgery persuaded my neighbour to swap fags for vaping (he now complains about fag smoke).

    Yay for vapes. Though I think it’s early days to make claims about long term health consequences.

  11. So being a selfish type, the regulation I’d support is, ‘No smoking near me.’

    I think the “fist-swinging rights end at nose tips” branch of libertarianism should require smokers to restrict their externalities to themselves and their property. So reverse gas masks and giant tents, losers. The association of smoking with liberty has always amused me. Filthy, stinking bastard drug addicts (hi, Tim) have no idea how all fashisht they are.

    Agree that most regulation is societally worse than the problems.

  12. BniC
    October 16, 2022 at 5:04 pm

    A quick google shows plenty of hookah lounges in Brissy. Evidently it comes under the same laws as cigarette smokers.

  13. Substitute the word “smoker” for “Jew”, “gypsy”, “Black”, or “homosexual”. I see you. You’re no better than those you criticise in other threads.

  14. Substitute the word “smoker” for “Jew”, “gypsy”, “Black”, or “homosexual”.

    Not buying the victimhood angle. Smoking in public is more akin to the twats pouring milk everywhere. Self-entitled arseholes with no consideration. No doubt they feel sorry for themselves when taken to task, too.

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