Philip Morris lobbying to stop WHO ‘attack’ on vapes and similar products

Forgot how Pro-drug the fediverse is as well; vapes should be regulated as heavily as cigarettes and other tobacco products. Just because it's less harmful doesn't mean it's not harmful.

The laws around vapes are nonsense and pseudoscience. That's what really pisses people off.
Flat prohibitions aren't saving any lives or ending any health crisis. Meanwhile cigarettes are widely available with a dozen flavors.
- The laws around vapes are nonsense and pseudoscience.
  Recognising that there are health issues, without fully understanding them yet due to there having not been enough time to form complete and solid conclusions, doesn't make it pseudoscience. It means we should be cautious and continue to study, and certainly not widely adopt their use in the mean time assuming everything will be fine. Especially as it directly interacts with such a sensitive part of our inner bodies, and especially as the largest group taking up their use are teenagers.
  Flat prohibitions aren't saving any lives or ending any health crisis. Meanwhile cigarettes are widely available with a dozen flavors.
  I disagree, to blanket suggest prohibitions don't save lives is not based in fact. Even the misguided alcohol prohibition over in the USA saved lives, reducing the number of deaths that would have otherwise been caused by intoxication (dangerous driving being an obvious example, domestic abuse, etc).
  And take this example from literally only yesterday, where a child almost died due to electronic cigarettes and the complications therein (often when people discuss the danger of X and Y, they assume a completely healthy person to begin with, and ignore that a large percentage of the population has at least one illness or environmental factor that it can complicate).
  https://www.bbc.com/news/health-67081855
  Also, yes cigarettes are available, but their use in public is heavily restricted, and they aren't attractive to young people any more thanks to decades of hard work in education. Electronic cigarettes however are targeted directly at teenagers in a very predatory way, suggested to be safe and clean, and thus we have these new issues.
  In the end, I suspect electronic cigarettes are less dangerous than breathing in smoke from tobacco, which is insanely dangerous, but that will not make them safe, either, and the cumulative effects of electronic cigarette use over decades simply isn't fully known yet.
  We're working on it, and where our health is concerned, especially that of our impressionable youth, an abundance of caution is always the best course of action.
- Well they are bad for you so it's not exactly pseudo science, and the problem is that kids are using them.
  Vapes come in candy flavour which is ridiculous, not because it exists, but because is sold to children.
  At the very least I think we should say that you have to be at least what 18 to buy them. I don't think that's too bad.
- Maybe both should have restrictions?
Vaping should be limited to 18+ consumers just like "standard" nicotine products. But we shouldn't pretend, like the WHO and other organizations do, that Vaping hasn't been used by many (myself included) to effectively quit nicotine. Personally I kicked a 2 pack a day habit because of vaping and today I use no nicotine products (including vaping) because of it.
- Agreed.
  More restrictions is uncalled for.
  I quit smoking cigarettes using a "box mod" in 2016 and gradually tapered down from a very high nicotine blend to 0 nicotine using 100% vegetable glycerin and peppermint flavoring and then I finally literally lost my vape and just never bothered to replace it...
  So anyways, I started smoking over 30 years ago and I don't vape or smoke anymore.
Shouldn't that be an argument to regulate it less, not "as heavily"?
Many mundane things are less harmful than cigarettes and shouldn't be regulated as heavily.
Edit: typo
- yup zero logic in his comment, still has 30 upvotes right now.
- What's too heavy about how cigarettes are regulated in your country? I'm in Canada and when I smoked cigarettes I never felt like I was obstructed in making my own choices.
  Many mundane things are less harmful than cigarettes and shouldn't be regulated as heavily
  Why not? We regulate the shit out of food and medicine and those are the exact opposite of harmful when everything goes as planned.
fuck vapes and drug abuse in general, but the fedi isn't pro fucking anything. Just because you see a pattern doesn't mean it's there.

I thought vaping was fine because I didn’t know it had nicotine in it.

Super fucking addictive, it should absolutely be regulated because currently in most places it isn’t, as evidenced by all the kids buying vapes.

it should absolutely be regulated because currently in most places it isn’t, as evidenced by all the kids buying vapes.
They're regulated the same as cigarettes. Kids find ways to get cigarettes, alcohol, and drugs, too, despite how regulated they are.
- It's more to do with the fact that they're intentionally marketed towards kids in a way cigarettes and alcohol aren't so much anymore.
Super fucking addictive,
Nicotine on its own is ballpark as addictive as caffeine, vapes lack the MAOIs contained in cigarettes which on their own are much more addictive (atypical antidepressants, hardly surprising) but in synergy with nicotine even more.
as evidenced by all the kids buying vapes.
They also bought fidget spinners. Also I've never seen a kid with a vape.

If I could just push a button and make all non medical use tobacco become impossible to grow, I would push that button a million times just to be sure. I hope everyone working for Philip Morris gets lung cancer.

That should just be an accepted cost to enter the industry.

- Frankly, we need fewer prohibitions on substances, not more. I drink responsibly and like it. We also know you can't ban alcohol without a black market, so why even feign that it could be done?
  We need better enforcement to prevent people acting like idiots when they drink. I don't have ideas to offer on how, as I haven't pondered it at length, but that's the best path in my mind.
- My bourbon French toast says otherwise.
- It's entirely possible to enjoy alcohol responsibly and the vast majority of people do. Shall we can cars because some people can't stop getting in them while inebriated and crashing them?
  99.999% of smokers are doing substantial damage to themselves and others.

Fuuuuck Philip Morris. Tax them heavily and use the proceeds to pay their customers' medical expenses

Vapes are even worse than cigarettes, for real.

Care to cite your sources in that claim? I'm know they are far from anything that could be considered "good" but "worse than cigs" is news to me.
- I am not the previous poster, but the argument that I've heard on that front is that smoking was already trending rapidly downwards in use and would have made itself obsolete within a couple generations.
  Vaping on the other hand established itself as a "safer" alternative to smoking and became trendy with more younger people who wouldn't have smoked in the first place.
This is incorrect and an easy to debunk claim.. the tar in cigarettes is extremely harmful and vaping removes that element. However, vaping is still bad for you and it is still just as addictive.
- I found it much easier to quit vaping, compared to cigarettes. There are nicotine free liquids, so you can slowly wean off.
110% false. Vaping is far safer
It's different from cigarettes. You don't get all the tar and stuff, but many people get even more nicotine, which is bad for your heart and addictive. I would say it's likely better, but it's different.
(There's also non-nicotine vape products which often aren't regulated so can cause all kinds of issues.)
- Easily the best answer i've gotten on this thread.

That's metal!
- That's iron... In ya blood!

I interviewed with them once, and they swore up and down that they were cleaning up and divesting of all the harmful stuff, and wanted me to trust they were all about health and a smoke-free future.

Thankfully they were so staggeringly full of bullshit during the interviews that I quickly realized it'd be an absolutely horrifically toxic (groan, yes, sorry) place to work irrespective of my other doubts, and I ended up telling them I didn't want to continue the process and that I was so unhappy with the assorted bullshit during the process that I didn't want to ever be approached by them again.

That's the very long way of saying I'm not the slightest bit surprised it turns out they are in fact still massive asshats, and I'm very happy I caught on early enough.

Now can someone give a probability for the success of that?

It's an international organism, with scientific input from almost every nation of the world.

Tell me more about this organism.
- Wikipedia is your friend for a quick overlook. Next stop would be their own site.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

In a message sent by the PMI’s senior vice-president of external affairs last month and seen by the Guardian, staff were told to find “any connection, any lead, whether political or technical” before a meeting of delegates from 182 countries.

The email sent on 22 September by Grégoire Verdeaux, the senior vice-president of external affairs at PMI, said: “The agenda and meeting documents have been made public for the main part.

Unfortunately they reconfirmed every concern we had that this conference may remain as the biggest missed opportunity ever in tobacco control’s history … WHO’s agenda is nothing short of a systematic, methodical, prohibitionist attack on smoke-free products.”

Without “reasonable, constructive outcomes” , Verdeaux wrote, the “WHO will have irreversibly compromised the historic opportunity for public health presented by the recognition that smoke-free products, appropriately regulated, can accelerate the decline of smoking rates faster than tobacco control combined”.

Tobacco companies are not invited to the event and Verdeaux said despite this he would be in Panama “to publicly denounce the absurdity of being excluded from it while PMI today” was “undoubtedly the most helpful private partner WHO could have in the fight against smoking”.

Asked about the leaked email, Verdeaux said in a statement: “What I say publicly and what I say to our employees is exactly the same: I am proud to make the case to governments and media that innovation drives down smoking rates faster and for that reason should be supported and regulated.

The original article contains 880 words, the summary contains 246 words. Saved 72%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

Vaping seems to be healthier than cigarette smoking from what I've read, and it makes sense. Burnt particulate matter is hell on your lungs.

But it should be used for smokers to break addiction. And recreational use needs to be heavily regulated until we can do long term studies that show it's relatively safe.

I'll explain as someone with professional chemistry experience. Vaping vaporizes water to deliver the nicotine -- or just to deliver flavored vapor without the nicotine. This process gives me two major concerns:

It isn't pure water vapor, there's additives and oils even for juices with no nicotine. We don't know what breathing in the vaporized flavor additives does. And, we don't know if the process is generating enough heat to cause chemical reactions and degradation of the non water components. It's completely possible that carcinogenic or toxic compounds could come from this. This warrants a lot more study, and fortunately, it should be quite doable. Spectroscopy could tell us a lot.
Remember how Flint had a lot of lead in their water? Heavy metals in water come from surface atoms on the metal leaching into the water. You can treat the water to either discourage this or cause it to precipitate out. Heat increases the frequency of leaching -- so vaporizing water with the coils is going to lead to heavy metal particles in the vapor. This is where we really don't have information. We can likely determine the quantity and type of metal atoms, but we can't determine what it's going to do to the lungs. A big safety concern with tiny particles is breathing them in, because nanoparticles and the like will also ravage your lungs when inhaled. Doesn't even matter what the solid particle is.

The latter concern is where we need long term research. We need to know if the heavy metal particles in the vapor are causing damage in the same way that nanoparticles do. And we need to know what prolonged exposure to those metal particles does. After 40 years of vaping, would enough metal have deposited in airways to cause health issues? It's very possible.

Is that to say stop right this second? No, but just be aware of the risks and don't go overboard. Heavy drinking is probably still worse for you than this, and smoking is definitely worse.

Water? VG and PG.
- It's not just glycols/oils for all of them at least I thought

Given the damage they have done to society is there a good reason the fines aren't all your companies money and all of your executives money we seize and destroy and products farms and machinery that can't be sold for non-tobacco use?