The confusing problem of vaping



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SAN FRANCISCO – A 29-story office building at 123 Mission Street illustrates the political riddles that are rife with these facts: For centuries, tobacco has been a widely used consumer good that causes serious damage and often fatal when it is used as it should be. use. And its harmfulness is a scientific proposal well established and widely disseminated for generations.

The building is the headquarters of Juul, a large company that markets vaping products – electronic cigarettes – that has put one-page ads in major newspapers, apparently trying to limit the sales of its products. product: "Youth vaping is a serious problem" which justifies "suppress sales of minors in retail stores" and remove "flavored products" from stores. Juul's flavors include mint, mango, fruit and cucumber. The flavors of other companies have included "Unicorn Puke" and "Zombie Juice". The target audience is not mature.

This city, the host of Juul, has recently banned such products from being sold in stores or online and delivered to urban addresses. Its goal is to limit smoking, the leading cause of preventable death in the country. Well.

In 2016, cigarette manufacturers spent $ 8.7 billion on advertising and promoting their products, 34% more than the total spending of all presidential and parliamentary campaigns ($ 6.5 billion ) in the 2016 cycle. Businesses claim that their primary goal is to increase market share, not to expand the market by creating new smokers, especially younger ones. However, businesses know that few people start smoking after age 21, so there must be a future market for their products …. Altria, maker of Marlboro and other brands, has invested $ 12.8 billion in Juul.

Some smokers who can not quit smoking can switch to the electronic cigarette, which contains high doses of nicotine but is less harmful than the inhalation of smoke produced by burning tobacco. More people under 18 smoke smoke For some, e-cigarettes will be a gateway to the real: the data shows that vapers become more likely to smoke than non-vapers, but that, although teenage smoking continues to decline, it remains at its lowest historical level. More than three million high school students (one in five) and half a million college students vape. America is rapidly experimenting with a rapidly expanding mbad product and it will take a long time to have enough data to determine whether it will be a net benefit to public health.

In 1906 – 302 years after King James I declared that smoking was "harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs" and 299 years after planting Jamestown, Virginia, whose tobacco increased its cash – a character in a new era. ; O. Henry, said, "Say, sport, do you have a coffin nail on you?" It was well before the surgeon general declared carcinogenic (1964) and addictive (1988) tobacco. Today, cigarettes are stigmatized by common sense, social denigration and government, the best cost-benefit ratio of which is public health warnings.

When students' vaping rate increases by 78% in one year (from 2017 to 2018), it has become a fashionable fad that blossoms in the absence of credible scary information. But then, after more than half a century of aggressive dissemination of such information, 16% of American adults still smoke.

Siddhartha Mukherjee, oncologist, writes in "The Emperor of all diseases: biography of cancer": "During the tumultuous century between 1850 and 1950, the world offered conflict, atomization and disorientation: camaraderie, sense of belonging and familiarity with habits If cancer is the product of modernity, it is the same for its main preventable cause: tobacco. "

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