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Smoking Is a Dying Habit. Not in Germany.
(www.wsj.com)
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this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2023
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It is dying here because they are $50 a pack..
As a German living in Australia I can ensure you, smoking is still just as prevalent, it's just people here being addicted to vapes instead of traditional cigarettes.
Disposable vapes are also dangerously cheap (2000 puff vapes are equivalent to about 10 packs of cigarettes, while only costing about $20) and despite efforts to ban them, easily available at any TSG/Ezymart without age verification.
Yeah, vaping is growing in the US too.
Vaping is the next to fall, another unhealthy activity that become less cooler year after year.
I dunno. It's growing pretty quickly globally.
https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/e-cigarette-vaping-market
The anti-smoking movement -- at least in the US -- didn't center around nicotine addiction, but around the negative secondary health effects.
Any similar secondary negative effects for vaping are pretty limited. So it's arguing just against the addiction alone. And I'm not sure that that's an easy case to make.
I don't doubt it's growing, but I think it's the classic temporary trend, a huge growth with an equally huge fall. Vape is harmful, something to be left to itself, there aren't many excuses that hold.
Everything is harmful though, that's the problem of existence. Nicotine is a psychoactive drug that does have both positive and negative effects. Vaping is safer than almost every other delivery method, and it's the safest recreational delivery method available. There's more than enough education on why nicotine is bad, which is the most you can really do.
People still drink, despite the physical addiction risks, the massive health risks of even a single drink a week, and the fact drinking any amount puts you almost comically more at risk of physical injury than not drinking. The education is fully out there. People still do it.
Free will is a hell of a thing, and restricting it has never ended well for those that restrict it, regardless of reason.
No one talked about restrictions, just common sense. A smart person will always realize that smoking or vaping doesn't make sense, that there are no positive aspects, that all the qualities they'd like to associate with are idiocy, to give something toxic a positive aspect. An evolved society must bury these trivia.
Hyperbole works against your goals, and is a direct driver of teen vaping. There are absolutely positive effects with nicotine, to pretend otherwise is simply 'Reefer Madness' for overly panicked sheltered millennials. The primary problem, and thus the messaging, should be that the positives do not outweigh the negatives; and nicotine addiction is incredibly hard to break away from.
An 'evolved' society that resorts to pointless, unfounded, unscientific scare tactics to justify government control isn't an evolved society, it's the 1920s.
Yes that’s why healthy, long living people don’t drink wine or coffee. Oh wait.
Sure, healthy people drink lots of cups of coffee and bottles of wine every day. Or maybe when they die at 60, nobody cares.
That's true, actually.
Longest lifespan: Italy
Hate to break it to you but humanity, or any of its societies, do not qualify as "evolved". We are still squabbling as petty nation states over the minuscule resources of the planet, all the while we are letting it die of greedy neglect. All of mankind but the select few are toiling away in obscurity, systematically excluded from the fruits of their labor.
Where are you getting "evolved" society?
Evolution is the result, I agree with you that we're still behind, discussions like this about smoking I think are indicative of how we actually live.
I mean, I'm not arguing in favor of vaping. I just think that you're being optimistic about people choosing not to vape.
We just have to open our eyes and see things for what they are, ridiculous and damaging. Like cigarettes will stop being a status symbol when they're no longer cool
I dont belive so. Pretty much all the big tobacco companies now also own vaping brands, which are advertised with large budgets - pretty similar to the 80's/90's where smoking companies would spend big money on billboards and magazine ads (look up "popular mechanics" from that time on google books and pay attention to the full page ads), but nowdays it's targeted online ads and influeners.
Vaping is still "new" so its less regulated. Profit margins are high. There is at least one brand that offers a "subscription service" where you get delivered your favorite vaping refills by mail. They will advertise vapes to try to grow their market as long as they can, or as long as regulations don't prevent it. Unfortunately even the goverment suggest to vaping as "healtier" alternative to smoking.
Source: one of my ex-employers for ecommerce solutions with a very flexible moral compass had one of the vaping brands as a customer.
This is very sad. In my area, it's a declining phenomenon. I am convinced anyway that this reality will disappear relatively soon, in less than 20 years.
I don't think it will disappear, because it's intentionally designed to be addictive, making it hard to quit.
You're not wrong. These dependencies will fall at a time when something else will be more important, maybe a global war, or maybe the expected climate change with the end of the world to follow, or who knows maybe aliens or asteroids, anything that distracts a capitalist system of viscid dependencies.
Sure, but those are almost certainly less harmful. Obviously still bad, but a step towards a lesser evil is a step in the right direction.