I think a lot of people outside Europe will see this as overreach by the state, but given waste cleanup is paid for by the tax payer and is an ever increasing cost/problem, banning products needlessly adding to rubbish when inexpensive reusable alternatives makes sense.
I think you mean "a lot of people in the USA" :) In most of the other parts of the world, people would either see the wisdom of this approach because they understand good government, or not bat an eyelid because they're used to bad government (and consequently overreach).
Far more serious is that these disposable vapes are easily accessible to kids as young as 12. Literally one third of the kids in my child's secondary school are vaping in the toilets between classes. It would be much harder to do this if they had to pay for and use a large permanent vape . It's an epidemic and that is not hyperbole. The environmental gains of this ban are just icing on the cake.
I am one of these people that think its overreach.
People find some value in this product. Enough so they're buying it even though its expensive and potentially hazardous to their health. All the problems associated with that problem should be managed. We should have technology to manage the waste. It's an engineering problem and I'd much rather prefer that we engineer technology to serve what people want than try to engineer humans to adapt to limitations of our technology.
The most absurd manifestation of this attitude is an image heating people vs heating spaces and tries to unironically argue that people should prefer to live in cold spaces and just adapt with things like cozy furniture, warm clothes, hot drinks and local heating. Real dystopian stuff to anyone who has lived like this.
Nowhere does that post or the image argue that people should prefer one over the other. Wearing warmer clothes instead of turning up the heater isn't a bad thing either, so I don't understand your hostility towards the idea?
Well, on the other hand, we as a society should be able to decide if we want to allow some people to make $billions selling purely addictive substances to other people in our society. And whether they get to mass produce a bunch of e-waste in their pursuit of those $billions that the rest of society has to deal with.
The personal choice aspect is actually the lesser consideration.
>but given waste cleanup is paid for by the tax payer and is an ever increasing cost/problem, banning products needlessly adding to rubbish when inexpensive reusable alternatives makes sense.
I buy disposable vapes because I convince myself it’s my last one. Once it runs out I’ll quit.
Buying a rig is accepting defeat.
Except this vape ran out faster than I expected. I have a big week at work coming up and I can’t afford the dip in energy level and productivity that comes with withdrawal. I’ll buy one more just this once and then I’ll quit for sure.
Amazing the hoops my mind jumps through for an addictive molecule.
I went from disposables to a refillable one as part of my cutting down.
Being able to mix my own liquid meant I could slowly reduce my nicotine levels, whilst maintaining the habit of smoking, making it easier to finally come off it at the end.
Switch to unflavored. The flavorings likely act as MAO inhibitors and synergistically boost the neurological effects of nicotine which by itself is not significantly addictive (but can be habit-forming for some people).
Exception to the rule is menthol flavoring. Menthol is a kappa opioid agonist. In the nervous system, it produces dysphoria — opposite of euphoria, i.e. feeling bleak, anxious, depressed. This effect lasts longer than nicotine’s effect, leading to redosing.
It might be better to accept what is right now and buy a rig but then play with the nicotine level to reduce it step by step. Once you reach 0 you won.
Financially it's ruinous to buy disposables when you can pick up a simple cigar sized vape with rechargeable battery and replaceable coil/pod for the same price, then refill it over and over again.
The amount of lithium ending up on the road and in bins is silly. The tax on vaping is putting the price of everything up, so now is the time to buy an Xross Pro or something that lasts all day.
For adults (who don't need to conceal their habit) it makes a lot of sense to buy coils/pods in quantity and keep a spare in the car/handbag.
Also ... Can we stop vilifying this life-saving habit? Smoking kills, we all know it. Vaping is MUCH safer and yes, just as addictive. Nicotine isn't the killer ingredient in smoking, so encourage people to vape, don't demonize them for it.
> Also ... Can we stop vilifying this life-saving habit?
As a former smoker I’ve recently started vaping because I love nicotine and I think the risk / reward is worth it.
Vaping has been around at this point for over a decade, yet the evidence of harm is minimal. Some inflammatory responses, oxidative stress and potentially pre cancerous changes in gene expression. But that’s pretty much it (for UK legal products at least).
I wouldn’t call it healthy but consider it more like alcohol or sugar rather than traditional tobacco.
One thing that makes my blood boil, and I've seen it in many countries I've lived in, is that people who vape tend to see it as being fine to vape e.g. on trains. Here in Germany people are vaping in the trains nonstop, and while it's not as bad as people dropping cigarette butts on the street (usually literally directly next to a bin!), it still makes it difficult to respect the group, given how shockingly common it is.
Honest question, asking for informed responses: How harmful is second-hand vape?
Littered cigarette butts don't biodegrade.
Second-hand smoke causes cancer and the smell lingers on material.
Does other people vaping near you in an enclosed space have a meaningful physiological effect or otherwise? Or is it just association with second-hand smoke that people decry?
Nicotine consumption causes the vascular system to constrict and a person's heart to start beating faster to push the blood through. Similar environment to a fetus in a over pressurized antibiotic sack, too much fluid. Doctors monitor for this and may remove fluid to depressurize so the heart and other major organs don't fail. Just like alcohol, nicotine does not have any health benefits.
People often over simplify complex systems. It is not just one, smoke, but multiple factors that cause health issues. Chewing tobacco proves toxicity is not just from carcinogens and tar build up in the lungs. Vaping may decrease the probability of dramatic health issues it does not drop it to 0.
It's actually not the nicotine that gives you cancer in chewing tobacco. And given all this harm with cigarettes isn't it sensible that we legalize a less harmful method that people have used quite successfully to wean off cigarettes when other efforts have failed them? Social smokers/vapers are always going to exist, the buzz goes together too well with booze, but there are people who do use this stuff to actually see substantially better health outcomes.
Calling vaping safer without there being any good evidence for that is quite a stretch. However I despise this pure resource waste. Can we just stop that instead while we investigate the effects of inhaling burning copper and plastic?
The ban hasn't really changed much on the crime side of things. Nicotine vapes were already illegal and they continue to import them through the same channels. The organised crime is primarily tobacco. It's low risk and poorly enforced, and probably very high margins where a pack of Chinese or counterfeit cigarettes is resold for $10 to $20 or so. Vapes and nicotine pouches are part of that too but I would wager tobacco is moved in significantly higher volumes.
For those not aware, they are most likely referring to an ongoing "tobacco war" among organised crime groups in Australia, with tobacconists becoming the targets of many arson attacks.
Obviously the illicit tobacco trade is a large/primary driver of this, but illicit vapes are also becoming a part of their business.
Reusable vapes are beyond commonplace in the US and there's still a huge problem with disposables.
For kids, they're expensive to purchase, expensive to replace when mom/dad take it away, and much harder to conceal from teachers and parents. It's harder to swap flavors and such, too.
Really, the issue is that public officials and police don't care. It took 3-4 years for NYC to start doing something about the thousands of illegal smoke shops.
> Here in Oz the banning of disposable nicotine vapes has led to an increase in organised crime activity.
That organized crime already existed and this is just one of a dozen or so income streams for them. Hard drugs, human trafficking, and money laundering are probably orders of magnitude more profitable.
Also: people get murdered all the time, despite it being illegal. Clearly the law isn't working, so let's make murder legal! /s
Oh, and legalizing weed didn't do jack shit about dealers selling weed; the dealers are much cheaper, provide better service, and often better product (well, except the illicit stuff is likely to have much higher pesticide content.)
Wouldn't it be better to tax all disposable objects in proportion to their impact on the environment or something like that? These single shot bans seem easy to go around.
But most people don't recycle them, just dump them on a street corner or in a normal waste bin. This is really the problem. So much lithium is wasted and this is very heavy on the environment to extract.
That's not going to get rid of trash, its just going to remove more money from people's wallets as the tax gets passed to them. Might even open up a black market like we see with nyc cigarette taxes. Maybe if the tax went to local street cleanup initiatives or something it might do a sliver of good, but that's just one sort of litter out of the rest.
It would do a lot to reduce the amount of single use plastic packaging.
Sure, the plastic Coke bottle costs 1-2 cents less than the glass one, but the ecological problems it creates are at least an order of magnitude higher than that.
If Coke can either increase their prices by $0.01 or $0.10, and the $0.01 option is preferred by consumers, their choice will be clear.
Meanwhile our governement has said it's not allowed to do this because it would need to be done at the EU level due to "market harmonisation rules" or some nonsense like that. Looks like they're full of shit, given that Belgium managed to do it...
This is (almost) always an excuse. The almost being if legislation is being prepared. There are so much examples of these kind of differences in neighboring countries, mainly alcohol and firework rules come to mind.
Readit News
Dead Comment
People find some value in this product. Enough so they're buying it even though its expensive and potentially hazardous to their health. All the problems associated with that problem should be managed. We should have technology to manage the waste. It's an engineering problem and I'd much rather prefer that we engineer technology to serve what people want than try to engineer humans to adapt to limitations of our technology.
The most absurd manifestation of this attitude is an image heating people vs heating spaces and tries to unironically argue that people should prefer to live in cold spaces and just adapt with things like cozy furniture, warm clothes, hot drinks and local heating. Real dystopian stuff to anyone who has lived like this.
https://sketchplanations.com/heating-people-heating-spaces
The personal choice aspect is actually the lesser consideration.
Why not tax it instead?
Buying a rig is accepting defeat.
Except this vape ran out faster than I expected. I have a big week at work coming up and I can’t afford the dip in energy level and productivity that comes with withdrawal. I’ll buy one more just this once and then I’ll quit for sure.
Amazing the hoops my mind jumps through for an addictive molecule.
Being able to mix my own liquid meant I could slowly reduce my nicotine levels, whilst maintaining the habit of smoking, making it easier to finally come off it at the end.
Good luck!
Exception to the rule is menthol flavoring. Menthol is a kappa opioid agonist. In the nervous system, it produces dysphoria — opposite of euphoria, i.e. feeling bleak, anxious, depressed. This effect lasts longer than nicotine’s effect, leading to redosing.
>do drugs because they're fun
>be you
>do drugs because they make you more pRoDuCtIvE
We're not the same.
Financially it's ruinous to buy disposables when you can pick up a simple cigar sized vape with rechargeable battery and replaceable coil/pod for the same price, then refill it over and over again.
The amount of lithium ending up on the road and in bins is silly. The tax on vaping is putting the price of everything up, so now is the time to buy an Xross Pro or something that lasts all day.
For adults (who don't need to conceal their habit) it makes a lot of sense to buy coils/pods in quantity and keep a spare in the car/handbag.
Also ... Can we stop vilifying this life-saving habit? Smoking kills, we all know it. Vaping is MUCH safer and yes, just as addictive. Nicotine isn't the killer ingredient in smoking, so encourage people to vape, don't demonize them for it.
As a former smoker I’ve recently started vaping because I love nicotine and I think the risk / reward is worth it.
Vaping has been around at this point for over a decade, yet the evidence of harm is minimal. Some inflammatory responses, oxidative stress and potentially pre cancerous changes in gene expression. But that’s pretty much it (for UK legal products at least).
I wouldn’t call it healthy but consider it more like alcohol or sugar rather than traditional tobacco.
Littered cigarette butts don't biodegrade.
Second-hand smoke causes cancer and the smell lingers on material.
Does other people vaping near you in an enclosed space have a meaningful physiological effect or otherwise? Or is it just association with second-hand smoke that people decry?
People are spitting on the streets here in the UK and it's disgusting.
But I've noticed it on transport here in the UK. They take a puff "cheeky-vape" then exhale it under in to their coat or in to some bag.
Your logic is the same as "picking up a rattlesnake is OK because it's not as deadly as a taipan".
People often over simplify complex systems. It is not just one, smoke, but multiple factors that cause health issues. Chewing tobacco proves toxicity is not just from carcinogens and tar build up in the lungs. Vaping may decrease the probability of dramatic health issues it does not drop it to 0.
If you're genuinely interested, I recommend starting with this report: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/e-cigarettes-an-e...
Also, we would need sufficient evidence to conclude that they all have the user inhale burning copper or plastic, which I'm not sure we have.
Schoolkids are getting the vapes without any problems.
Great idea, but poorly implemented. I'll be interested to see Belgium avoids the issues we're having here in Australia.
Obviously the illicit tobacco trade is a large/primary driver of this, but illicit vapes are also becoming a part of their business.
Are you saying that legitimate tobacco stores are being burned down by illicit tobacco traffickers? To eliminate competition?
For kids, they're expensive to purchase, expensive to replace when mom/dad take it away, and much harder to conceal from teachers and parents. It's harder to swap flavors and such, too.
Really, the issue is that public officials and police don't care. It took 3-4 years for NYC to start doing something about the thousands of illegal smoke shops.
If they cared about health you'd be able to get Snus too
Dead Comment
That organized crime already existed and this is just one of a dozen or so income streams for them. Hard drugs, human trafficking, and money laundering are probably orders of magnitude more profitable.
Also: people get murdered all the time, despite it being illegal. Clearly the law isn't working, so let's make murder legal! /s
Oh, and legalizing weed didn't do jack shit about dealers selling weed; the dealers are much cheaper, provide better service, and often better product (well, except the illicit stuff is likely to have much higher pesticide content.)
This isn’t universal. Oregon estimates roughly 80% of marijuana purchases are through legal sources nowadays.
The real issue the state sees now is apparently illegal grow farms to supply other states that haven’t legalized or where the taxes are too high.
Source: https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/01/14/oregon-mar...
Sure, the plastic Coke bottle costs 1-2 cents less than the glass one, but the ecological problems it creates are at least an order of magnitude higher than that.
If Coke can either increase their prices by $0.01 or $0.10, and the $0.01 option is preferred by consumers, their choice will be clear.
I don't really see the problem enforcing the same with disposable capes at the least. As others have commented they're almost reusable as it is.
I don't mind people vaping at all but there's no point in destroying the environment at the same time.