One important thing to remember is the anti-tobacco movement also went too far. Matt has a line in there about anti-vaping laws as a victory for the movement, but in fact those laws are almost certainly murdering significant numbers of smokers.
Vaping is far less dangerous than smoking and allows people to enjoy nicotine, which Matt concedes is enjoyable. (Full disclosure: I don't smoke or vape.) And yet we apply the same rules against secondhand smoke to public vaping, make vapes difficult to obtain, fill them with warning labels, etc. Why? Because just like Prohibitionists favored putting poison in alcohol, the anti-smoking lobby WANTS to murder smokers because they want to deter people from the fun they disapprove of, rather than focusing on actually saving lives by preventing smoking and chewing tobacco.
This is, I think, a danger in all such movements. They attract puritans, and they don't shut down after winning the important victories. And they can end up losing the thread and lurching towards sociopathy when society doesn't do exactly what they want.
I mean, I think plenty of people find the smoke/steam from vaping a fairly unpleasant externality. It may not be dangerous in the way that tobacco smoke is, but I'd say it's still pretty reasonable to want less unpleasant stuff smelling up spaces you're in. (I've found myself struggling re: Marijuana in recent years living in NYC for this reason, as a huge percentage of public spaces just reek of pot smoke now; is it killing people? Probably not, but it's gross.)
I’m confused about your vaping take. I understand it’s better for smokers who want to still smoke, but isn’t it dangerous that so many kids got hooked on it? I was in high school/college during the vaping boom. It was pretty bad
I was a parent of high schoolers during the vaping boom and it was shocking to me.
In the article Matt quotes Bill Clinton saying these products "will be out of our children’s reach forever". That's the social context around nicotine I grew up into -- like, "we" worked hard for decades to make smoking not cool and finally succeeded, basically as Matt's article describes. Then overnight suddenly my 15-year-old, along with a large percentage of her peers, is a proud nicotine user and "everyone" seems to be okay with it -- apologies for the hyperbole, but again, I was shocked that there just seemed to be no serious consequences for either the kids at school or the shops selling these products to kids.
I don't think it's just a puritan streak that makes me wish the social context for kids vaping had been different. I'd be happy with a model that was based on strong enforced consequences for selling nicotine products to minors. But if the way to get to that result is via social stigmatization of vaping across the board, I'd be willing to go along with that.
I think this goes to show that the goal ended up being not so much targeted specifically at nicotine itself, but internally the other substances in tobacco that was causing massive health problems, and externally the nuisance that smoking in public places caused. There's a robust discussion going on in this thread about the merits of nicotine consumption, but it's become clear that it's definitely a substance that people wanted to seek out, independent of it being packaged with tobacco.
Kids who get hooked on vaping are... hooked on something that doesn't contain all the stuff that tobacco smoke contains that causes lung disease and cancer.
And since a lot of kids still do get hooked on actual smoking, you very much should want the vaping to be available as an alternative.
Cigarettes were not very cool for my generation and smoking rates were real low. I don’t think the massive vaping boom is just people that would have been smokers. They’re kids who got hooked, and while it’s not as bad as cigarettes, it’s still bad.
Being physically addicted to things to which people would not otherwise be addicted is per se bad and a valid target of state regulation to be balanced against harm-reduction of those who are present addicts.
"Physically" is a weird qualification Is a nicotine addiction even really physical? And even if it is, why the qualification?-- a shopping or gambling addiction is very harmful whereas a vaping addiction basically isn't.
I think you are looking for a distinction that will allow you to dump on vapers that isn't actually there.
"They’re kids who got hooked, and while it’s not as bad as cigarettes, it’s still bad."
Honestly? Barely.
The biggest problems: it's a waste of money (although, again, it can be done crazy cheap if you use refillable devices) and that nicotine addiction can lead to you being a bit of an asshole when you miss a fix.
There has been absolutely no finding of adverse health effects besides nicotine withdrawal. I saw a paper describe vaping as CONSERVATIVELY 95% better than smoking.
These things have been around 20 years. There's no other shoe that's about to drop on us. It's water vapor and it does exactly what we believed water vapor to do: nothing.
The opposition to vaping kind of demonstrates that this wasn't really about health or science for a lot of people, it was about puritanism.
It’s obviously nowhere near as bad as smoke, but it’s still not good to regularly inhale that much heated stuff that people don’t have a long history with.
Impurities in the vaping solution are a solveable problem. I think it's probably more interesting to know whether there's any reason to think vaping is going to cause significant health problems decades in the future.
I've read a comment before speculating that you could end up with COPD due to the constant nicotine use in your lungs from someone with the right background to have an opinion, but I simply do not know enough to evaluate his claim.
How long does the history have to be until it's not "not long" anymore? It's been two decades since early adopters started vaping.
This has been looked into extensively, and the only reason you don't hear about it is because nobody has found the result that they want (vaping is just as bad for you as smoking!!!!!!!!!11!!! Banning this thing that mildly annoys me is a GRAVE PUBLIC HEALTH MATTER!)
I’m not sure why you seem to be talking as though the only two options here are “exactly as harmful as cigarettes” or “exactly zero harm”. I think the most likely truth is “slight harm, very much less than cigarettes”, but the fact that it’s addictive gives a presumptive reason to put some moderate controls to help people who choose to quit or want to choose not to fall into the habit.
It's not that dangerous, and moralists trying to up the level of danger so they can maintain the homicidal deterrent and stop people from having fun is a very bad project.
They do the same thing with diet soda. I'm sure there's a big bandwagon forming to say that losing weight with GLP-1s is bad and carries some secret downside. Some people just hate the idea of people "getting away" with something. It's the same reason that saying "we spend too many billions on public benefits" is a less effective political argument than "welfare queens."
I'm personally very skeptical that vaping is harmless, but I don't have proof of that.
Some kids at the high school I teach at will go to great lengths to sneak a vape hit in. I find it mind boggling. I've smelled it-- it's not even weed. They're literally risking getting in a lot of trouble just to inhale some bubble gum smell.
I'm not gonna argue that vaping is healthy, particularly as a mental health/impulse control sort of indicator, but is it "dangerous"? Is it any more unhealthy than drinking Coke or eating Doritos? Doesn't seem to be. The conflation with smoking generally seems to create a real puritanical moral panic element to how a subset of people think about it.
I personally get more nervous about foreign particulates entering the lungs, so I don't think it's absolutely crazy to be concerned. But as you say, being better than smoking tobacco is a very low bar to cross.
It's definitely dangerous. "Not as dangerous as cigarettes" doesn't mean "not dangerous" at all. I think many folks are misled by the term "vape" — but it's very different from WATER vapor. This is from Cleveland Clinic:
"E-liquid, also called e-juice or vape juice, is what vaping devices use to make the vapor you breathe in. E-liquids aren’t just water. They usually contain: Flavoring. Each flavoring has its own set of ingredients. Nicotine, the addictive and harmful substance in cigarettes and other tobacco products. Propylene glycol and glycerin, used to create vapor. E-liquids and flavorings sometimes have other ingredients, including: Chemicals that can cause cancer (carcinogens), like acetaldehyde and formaldehyde. Chemicals known to cause lung disease, such as acrolein, diacetyl and diethyleneglycol...Vitamin E acetate, linked to lung injury caused by vaping (EVALI, see below). Heavy metals like nickel, tin, lead and cadmium. Tiny (ultrafine) particles that can get deep into your lungs."
I'm agnostic as to the proper way to regulate vaping. But it seems to me we missed the boat on this: just as the scourge of cigarette smoking was rapidly being consigned to history, big tobacco pulled out a win that conveniently doubles as a significant risk to public health.
And here's some info on that nice new disease, EVALI. Sounds wonderful:
I think it was more the age of the kids -- they can't buy cigarettes, and shouldn't be able to get vapes, either, but there seemed to be a movement to target teenagers with vapes that smelled like the bubblegum scented stuff they tend to buy at the mall. Or maybe it was seen as a way to mask marijuana consumption or something.
I've been watching South Park since they're making fun of Trump this season. In the last episode, the little main character boy has to go to the hospital because he can't stop laughing when someone says, "six seven". That made me laugh.
I remember several years ago some schools had to ban flaming hot cheetos because kids were obsessive about them and apparently getting flaming hot Cheeto dust all over the place.
One of the fun half-truths that was promoted to drive down smoking rates is that nicotine is not a drug with any effects besides addiction.
That is not true, and stupid. Nicotine is an awesome drug. I suspect a majority of the population would rank it above weed, in terms of things they'd rather be inhaling and/or high on. (Nobody gets paranoid from a nicotine buzz.)
Did you mean to reply to me? I'm not taking a pro-vaping stance here. (If you're referring to my concession that vape smoke/steam isn't as dangerous as tobacco smoke, I was talking about second-hand smoke).
People who vape act like it's totally undetectable. It's still really unpleasant to be around! I have no problem banning vaping in public on the grounds that it's annoying. I don't think people should be able to blast loud music in public either.
Because fun is a value. So is individual liberty. And there's no such thing as individual liberty that is completely undetectable to you.
The freedom of gay people includes the freedom to act like gay couples in public and in front of families and children. The freedom of speech includes the freedom to engage in protests that make loud noises that other people have to hear, and to demonstrate on sidewalks and in parks that other people may use. The freedom to run in a marathon involves the closure of the streets; the freedom to use the beach involves the freedom to dress immodestly in bikinis and speedos, etc.
This is what a free society means. If your hueristic is "anyone else's freedom must be undetectable", you end up with an authoritarian society.
I think we should ban people from playing recorded audio in public entirely (except through headphones), but allow it in certain locations at relatively modest volumes (so people can have outdoor parties). And people can apply for an event licence to go above that volume. Wanna throw an outdoor dance party on the beach? Sure, but book a licence with the city/county first and they can make sure there aren't going to be 20 on the same stretch of beach the same day, and they know where the neighbours are and can tell you what time to switch off so the neighbours can sleep.
The tendency in law is to ban *amplified* music, and I think it should be OK for a busker to use a keyboard or an electric guitar (or other instrument) with a small amplifier. Create a standard for "this is a small amp that requires no licence or only a standard busking licence, the same as an acoustic instrument" and get it applied by enough places and there will be plenty of small battery-powered amps that hit exactly that power/volume level. You can create a market for a "busking amp" that way.
It's disgusting. A lot of vapers don't realize how off putting their behavior is. At least smokers don't light it up constantly inside or in groups of people. But vapers can't help themselves.
I don't understand what you're saying—they ban vaping in outdoor spaces in one state (is it even enforced?), great, but you're saying you think such prohibitions are indefensible. I've definitely encountered plenty of vaping in public spaces (e.g., the NYC subway) and don't like it. I will say that Marijuana is much stinkier (I'd say stinkier even than tobacco), but all of them stink and I don't want people polluting the air in public spaces.
Of course you don't like it. But you don't realize the role that dislike of others' fun is playing in your argument, because the "pollution" from vaping is minimal. Ban cars, trucks, and buses if you don't want pollution in public places.
I don't think objecting to others having fun with vapes has pretty much anything to do with my argument, but I suppose I can't really argue against someone that can apparently read my mind more fully than even I can. (It's also absolutely absurd to suggest that vehicles are merely for "fun," which is what you must be doing if you want your analogy to hold)
a. I don't want anyone having fun. (This is the strawman it's fun to attack.)
b. I don't want people vaping because I think it's bad for them and better for the world if fewer people do it.
c. I don't want people vaping because I dislike the smell. (This is the easiest to defend.)
I can't read anyone's mind, but as far as smoking goes, I have zero (a), a little (b), and a whole lot of (c). For vaping, I don't personally care if someone vapes in my presence--I haven't noticed it being especially unpleasant. I'd much rather have people vaping than smoking tobacco or dope around me, FWIW.
Matt basically pre-rebuttaled his argument, likely without even thinking someone would try it in the comments.
> Even though I personally really enjoyed smoking back in the day, the thing about cigarettes is that you can live a smoke-free life just fine. By contrast, we do not have any economically feasible alternatives to fossil fuels for a wide range of socially critical applications, like freight shipping and agriculture.
"Hey liberals you don't like pollution then why don't you get rid of all the cars in public very-curious" is silly and the people who pressed "like" should feel bad about themselves.
Sometimes people do understand others' motivations for holding a position better than the person holding the position. We can, after all, deceive ourselves quite a bit in order to reach the conclusions we want to. Not saying that's what's going on here but "you're not in my head" is not an automatically winning rebuttal.
It’s about as fun as yelling at people in comments on the internet. As in, sometimes there’s a little bit of a rush when you do it, and that’s what gets you into it, but then it becomes an addiction and you do it more and more and you have trouble stopping yourself even when you know you shouldn’t. But you still sometimes get that rush when you get just the right hit in.
Maybe the biggest problem with smoking bans is that they gave people this delusion that they deserve to be in control of everything they smell throughout the day. It's the world. It smells like stuff.
Sorry, but that's a really silly regulation unless you just hate people enjoying nicotine.
Did they ban perfume? No? Okay, then it's just puritanism. That's fine. Just don't deny it.
I have to say that it would be very, very good for existing smokers if there were advantages that came from vaping, like being able to smoke in an outdoor mall, rather than everybody just subscribing to this preposterous fiction that it's anything like smoking.
As a person who always hated 2nd hand smoke, and of rationally balanced (as in not reflexively anti-regulation) libertarian sympathies, I entirely agree with Dilan - vaping I may not like but Vape steam is nothing on the order of cigarette smoke (nor the pot smell). Me merely disliking it is not a valid reason to ban or restrict.
Now the pot smell stink that's now pervading NYC and DC, that's another level and rises to public nuisance. I've always been pro-legalization (although not a pot user at all) from a liberal-libertarian PoV but the nasty reek rises well above vaping and in fact insofar as there's very good reasons to understand pot smoke as not effectively different than tobacco burning - perfectly good reasons to analyze it in the same way as tobacco.
Vaping not really at least as far as I know the science, so my mere irritation with it doesn't trigger me to want regulation.
"Me merely disliking it is not a valid reason to ban or restrict."
Why not? I mean other than your libertarian sympathies. We ban and restrict all sorts of thing just because we don't like them. For example, I can't just let my grass grow all summer and it many cities, you can't paint your house bright pink, etc.
It seems like blanket statewide bans on doing something in a public place, including privately-owned public spaces like bars or restaurants, should be reserved for stuff that's either physically harmful or objectionable to a large fraction of people. Narrower bans (no vaping in this particular open space, no durians on the subway, whatever) seem a lot more defensible on "I don't like this" grounds.
I agree. I was sort of playing devils advocate but at the same time a lot of rules amount to “ most people don’t like this thing” and that’s often enough.
Because it is not efficent, it leads to prescriptivist nannying and eventually backlash.
Banning paint colors on houses is fucking stupid, sure townships do this - they're fucking stupid, wasteful and idits engaged in wasteful stick-up-the-assedness.
I’m not sure what’s inefficient about banning vaping in certain public spaces. But I agree this stuff is dumb. My neighbor recently painted her house a really ugly color and other than lots of people asking me about it, it has had no impact on me.
you are not sure as you're looking at this evidently (a) not via economics, (b) not via the lens of all efforts of any kind are allways trade offs - there are not unlimited resources to enforce rule sets, regs, and there is always going to be a trade-off on efforts.
It's not efficient as the Return on Effort is clearly going to be weak given no particular good evidence at all that there is any strong real world health effect, smell annoyance is weak tea re vaping, and time and effort spent on X will always take away from Y. Given effort is not free, that bandwidth and focus are not unlimited, efficient deployment of regs and enforcement should have a reasonable cost-benefit.
(and equally rules-on-books that are not enforced are not free, as they both sap credibility of other rules and engender period wasteful enforcement. No free lunches exist... ergo I favor focus on best regulation with good returns to society and doing that regulation well and enforcing it reasonably)
To some extent the second-hand objection to vaping isn’t because it’s genuinely annoying but because people enjoy having the power to self-righteously object to it, using secondhand smoke as a precedent.
That may be true of some objectors, but I don't care about people using vapes, provided it doesn't smell up the spaces up I'm in or blow into my face. The fact that some objectors may object for reasons you find distasteful hardly means that all objectors do, or that all objections are therefore suspect by association.
The first time I saw someone make a blow a big cloud of vape in a grocery store I was completely dumb-founded. The vaping thing had been going so good, but now people seem to want to show off that they can do it. I was most annoyed of the obvious harm to the cause of vaping it was doing. The behavior is not something people want to associate with.
That first time was also the very last time as laws quickly got passed. I don't think we should have had those laws -- this stuff seems something that can be handled by the free market. Let some stores allow it or not, and people can vote with their feet.
I wonder if that will rely on passage of time? I don't see people aggressively enforcing no smoking in outdoor spaces where it is prohibited or unwanted, but I also don't see a lot of people smoking in those places anymore, either. Maybe pot smoke will eventually be reduced through public pressure/shaming/complaints?
This depends so much on where you live. I keep reading about NYC smelling super gross and while I occasionally get a dank whiff, the Bay Area just isn't this bad. It makes me wonder if California's legalization is just a better regime than New York's.
I'm not sure what to think about whether vape steam is unpleasant or not. I've had very little experience coming across this but it seems like it could be all over the map depending on the vape.
Yeah, it depends. Pot vapes are stinkier than tobacco vapes. The Vuse and Juul tobacco vapes that they sell at 7/11 are only available in menthol or regular, and don’t really have a scent, at least not after the vapor dissipates. These are kind of like e-cigarettes, almost. These are great, I keep one in my car because I don’t smoke cigarettes in my car and drive long distances for work. My sense of smell isn’t super sensitive, but these are designed to basically leave no lingering smell.
But there are different, bigger vapes for nicotine juice - I don’t know what you’d call those, but they’re qualitatively different and use different juice that you get at a vape store, and refill them. They have parts that wear out that you buy separately when they do, and you can adjust the strength of the vaporizer. You can buy all different flavors of vape juice for these, and some of those *will* leave a smell that lingers for a while. I personally don’t like this kind. They’re complicated, finicky, more expensive on the front end, and less discreet. But they’re quite popular, as evidenced by the proliferation of vape stores.
"I mean, I think plenty of people find the smoke/steam from vaping a fairly unpleasant externality."
People deal with a lot of unpleasant externalities in the world, and we legislate very few of them. I'd rather have somebody vaping next to me rather than somebody who didn't wash their ass.
There is a system for regulating this kind of thing and it's called "politeness."
I agree with the general take, but saying that anti-vapers are motivated by opposition to fun seems a bit extreme. There is *some* legitimate uncertainty as to whether the substitution effect (smokers switch to vapes) dominates the complement effect (non-users are drawn to vapes, and some of them start using cigarettes also). To be clear, I am extremely confident that the first effect is larger, but I don’t think it’s insane to disagree.
There’s also general bureaucracy / inertia / “abundance-of-cautionism”. There are very obvious biological and chemical reasons to think vaping is much safer, but we don’t have like 50 years of longitudinal data to absolutely prove it. I think this sort of thinking is pernicious, but I don’t think it’s really moralistic in character. To the effect that it’s downstream of ideology at all, it’s more to do with the idea that causing harm is worse than letting harm happen, which is dumb but is pervasive in all sorts of places.
I think some of this is simpler than people are making it. There is almost no upside to allowing vaping in public assuming you also don't allow smoking in public. If you only ban vaping I suppose maybe some people end up smoking who would otherwise just vape, but I'm pretty skeptical of that. Getting back to vaping, there is no real upside so people just have very little tolerance for any downside. Even minor annoyance of a bad small or the small likelihood that a younger vaper will move onto smoking is enough to tip the scales. Add that to the fact that vapers are a tiny minority and it seems fairly simple to explain why it is banned without having to get into some of the more puritanical or emotional reasons (people just enjoy being self-righteous) offered in some other comments.
The upside of allowing vaping is that it is a much safer way to enjoy nicotine, and thus we should do nothing to discourage it (which may cause more people to smoke tobacco).
The reason for banning smoking was second hand smoke effects. I think you would need to prove that vaping caused the same health problems for it to be ok to ban.
There is upside to vaping as compared to smoking but not as compared to doing neither of those things. I get that it feels good to think bad things about people who disagree with you but I just don’t think it’s true that anti-vapers are those things.
Yeah I tend to agree that the impulse to protect people from themselves is a bad impulse for democrats. So is the impulse to try and create some sort of society free from unpleasant things. Just not sure we need to assign some of the motives people are assigning here.
but someone’s fun can have negative externalities and sometimes people want to ban it. take public transit: a person may enjoy having a loud conversation on their phone while blaring music. most other people would prefer they shut up. there’s no health risk here. It’s just one persons annoyance is another persons fun.
And we do this all the time. lots of municipalities have laws around noise complaints after a certain time and try to ban vehicles that make loud noises. why would it be surprising or puritan that people want to ban people making gross smells?
Accusing people of puritanism is non responsive. to actually engage, argue that the persons annoyance isn’t worth restricting other people’s freedom.
PS i find vaping completely inoffensive and have no desire to ban it. but that’s because the smell doesn’t bother me. however, marijuana smoke revolts me and i desperately want it banned.
Well, we aren't doing much about marijuana smoke, are we? Plus farts and body odor and various sorts of food. Just this thing that despite what people say in this thread, most people don't even smell anyway.
I wouldn't go so far as to say that "not adopting a harm reduction framework for regulating all nicotine-related products" equals "murdering significant numbers of smokers."
My thought as well. If not allowing them to vape is really murder because it means some percentage of them will continue smoking cigarettes and eventually die from doing so then it would seem like his proposed solution should be an absolute ban on smoking of any kind, and we should use the maximum power of the state to enforce that since not preventing those deaths is literally murder. We should literally arrest people we catch smoking and lock them up for as long as necessary to ensure they don't smoke and make us eventually murder them.
But something tells me that's not the position Dilan would take...
Yea, the e-cigarette rules process out of the FDA was genuinely disgusting as both a policy and legal matter. It should be seen as a cautionary tale of what not to do, especially when next thing you know a lunatic like RFK is running that show.
Carbon sequestration/new techs more broadly are the e-cigarette of the climate movement: the thing that markedly reduces the harm they’ve been pointing to but which doesn’t satisfy their puritanical impulses and instead inspires their animosity.
I'm skeptical that carbon sequestration will work at the scale needed and at an acceptable cost, and worry that it's relatively easy to sell carbon offsets based on voodoo math and not actually reduce atmospheric CO2 much. In principle, it seems like a good idea, and maybe it can be made to work, but I'd like to see some convincing evidence that it can work at scale and without lots of fraud.
I was with you until you went to "anti-smokers WANT smokers to die." I don't think anybody thinks that far ahead and the anti-vapers just aren't aware of the fact that vaping is much safer.
Vaping is safer than smoking. I think most people are aware of that. But, not vaping is much safer than vaping, so the question becomes how many people vape who would have never smoked and how does that compare to the people who switched from smoking to vaping.
The argument that people make that vaping is harmless feels absurd to me.
I think the evidence we have is that vaping is largely an alternative to smoking so the anti-vaping campaign is wrong on cost benefit grounds, but I don't think that means they're wishing death upon smokers.
So here's how it works. People want folks to not use nicotine. You can see that even in this thread. A lot of people are VERY concerned about the fact that other people might use nicotine. To the point where they actually lie and make nicotine into this really dangerous substance, when in point of fact it isn't. It's the other stuff in cigarettes that cause cancer.
Pre-vaping, the status quo was that the punishment for using nicotine was a gruesome, painful death. Which is pretty useful if you think the problem is people using nicotine rather than people getting cancer or emphysema.
Vaping takes that away. It means now people can recreationally use nicotine without the risk of cancer. Which... any rational person should support. But in reality, it's super-unpopular with lots of people, because it doesn't stop people from using nicotine. (Again, see this thread for examples of it.)
So what's actually going on? Well, what's going on is vaping takes away the thing that was literally the killer argument against nicotine use. It allows people to do it relatively safely. And if you are a moralist about folks who have fun through nicotine use, that bothers you. It shouldn't, but it does.
As I said in my original post, there's historical parallels to this. Prohibitionists absolutely had the government poison alcohol. Because if you really believe that people shouldn't engage in a certain sort of fun, you don't want it to be safe. Another example of this is the religious right hating condoms and the Catholic Church hating all sorts of birth control. That baby and that STD were the things that were supposed to stop you from having illicit sex.
This is a real form of reasoning, whether people acknowledge it or not, and it does real work in the argument against safer forms of fun.
My understanding is that even chewing tobacco (and pipes and cigars) are vastly less bad for you than smoking cigarettes, so they might admit a different policy response too (or maybe not; they are still not good for you, and neither is vaping and produce smells etc).
I don't think you need much moralism when the practice is thoroughly gross and unhygienic. If they ate it instead of keeping a nasty sludge bottle on their desks it'd be fine.
I guess if being completely grossed out by the spitting is "opposing the fun", yeah, I oppose the fun. I'm not sure I'd want it legally banned, but I definitely think trying to make it socially unacceptable is fine.
Prior to entering the trades I've never seen it but it's just a thing at rural coded workplaces... It's surprising that it's even tolerated but it just is.
Do you find that moralists are opposed to, like, playing frisbee in the park? If not, maybe what they object to is not fun per se but some kind of externality.
Moralists are of course supportive of the sorts of fun they approve of. That's the point-- they want to decide how the rest of us have fun and how we don't.
But that’s just begging the question. If what they enjoy is controlling other’s fun, why do they permit *any* kinds of fun? What determines whether a kind of fun is one they approve of or disapprove of?
In some ways the question of whether vaping is a bad thing is about why smoking is bad. Is smoking something we should discourage because nicotine is addictive or because tobacco smoke is incredibly carcinogenic? I know plenty of smart rational people with will explain that we need to ban vaping because nicotine is addictive and they know someone who smoked even as they were treated for lung cancer. But vaping is light years safer because it doesn't contain tar and over 50 other carcinogens. There have been safety issues with vaping, but those were with black market vapes and the way to fix that is to regulate it.
One of the most effective public health campaigns to reduce lung cancer deaths was Sweden getting it smokers to switch from smoking to snus, which is a traditional Scandinavian oral tobacco product and comes with lower risks of cancer and cardiovascular disease. In Europe it's only legal in Sweden, Norway and Switzerland. When Sweden joined the EU they specifically negotiated a clause that allowed it to be legal, though the EU is making noise about banning it on public health grounds.
Vapes and snus are harm reduction. In an ideal world, nobody would get addicted to nicotine but people are addicted to nicotine and that's not the world we live so it's better that people get their nicotine from safer methods. Public health has made a lot of mistakes in recent years and the insistence that vaping cannot play a role in getting people to stop smoking is one of them. Every now and then there'll be a study claiming that vaping is just as dangerous as smoking and it turns out it's crap quality. Or they will insist that vaping is not safe (what is) without noting that it's a lot less dangerous than smoking. So you have people switching from vaping back to cigarettes because they think cigarettes are safer. Misleading the public about an alternative to one of the leading causes of death is going to get people killed.
What makes this even odder is that public health has embraced harm reduction for illegal drugs. Where I live, we have a harm reduction team that passes out supplies, narcan and test strips but if someone asks about treatment they have to give them a referral to someone else. We even had a nasty fight over whether second hand fentanyl was harmful. But when it comes to nicotine, the health department's primary goal is to get people to become nicotine free.
"the anti-smoking lobby WANTS to murder smokers because they want to deter people from the fun they disapprove of" Honestly this reminds of a cultural campaign in the UK to try to shame people into supporting legalizing prostitution because otherwise you are "pro-murder and pro-serial killer" (Charlie Booker had a whole funny bit about this back in his Newswipe days). It's argumentative style that doesn't stand up to even the slightest scrutiny IMO. Everyone needs to calm down and read more Hirschman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rhetoric_of_Reaction#Proposal
It's the lowest rung on the dark arts ladder. If you don't support <my proposed fix for this problem> it's because you hate <whomever is being harmed by this problem>.
So smoking is the health threshold by which we should determine whether a product should be legal or not? Nicotine is still pretty bad for you! I'm not sure what the answer here is but as a non-smoker (and we are the majority), I don't like the secondhand vape smoke or the marijuana smoke.
This is the conclusion “Smokeless oral nicotine product use has potential adverse effects on some but not all biomarkers of CVD risk” pretty non-comittal and weak.
I don’t have studies to hand for you but it’s not good for your heart (or so I concluded the last time I looked into this). Of course the dose makes the poison but frequent use is associated with heart diseases. Which does make intuitive sense—it’s a stimulant. That’s not conclusive—caffeine doesn’t seem to have long term harmful effects on your heart for most people—but a lot of people are walking sound with high blood pressure and dosing a stimulant that increases heart rate and blood pressure all day probably isn’t harmless.
I also concluded, though, that compared to my other vices (like not lifting weights, eating red meat, drinking alcohol, etc.) it should be pretty low on my list of stuff to worry about.
Nicotine is actually bad for you, in a way similar to caffeine. It wears out your blood vessels, not your lungs. But cigarette smoking, which people should also do, is much worse for your health because of the tar and carcinogens in tobacco that nicotine juice doesn’t have.
I ultimately agree with Dilan downthread, but from a pure harm reduction standpoint I think you're correct to push totally toward nicotine pouches instead. From my memory though, vaping came first, so what Dilan said about harm reduction upthread would still have applied.
As I recall, it was deliberately designed to not be a pleasant experience, so as to serve not only as tobacco cessation but also eventually nicotine cessation--thus why vapers couldn't ultimately get their product defined as a tobacco cessation product. But I might be wrong on that, someone like Dilan could set me straight.
And that's the point. When people are saying "it shouldn't be pleasant", as far as I am concerned they are being authoritarian puritan prudes. How about allowing other people to engage in pleasant activities they disapprove of? That's kind of what a free society is all about.
Vape juice is mostly nicotine, glycerin, and propylene glycol. The latter two are pretty innocuous chemicals not known to be carcinogenic when vaporized. Cheap cannabis vapes were the ones that had the vitamin E based solubilizers that caused popcorn lung, tobacco vapes don’t.
Some of the unregulated vape juice with exotic flavors, especially sweet flavors, I wouldn’t trust to be nontoxic when vaporized, based on what happened with cheap cannabis vapes. I like the Vuse/Juul e-cigarettes that you can buy at 7-11, though. Those companies are big and regulated and I think the product is fairly satisfying, too. It gets me through my work day and long commutes when I don’t want to stink up myself or my car with cigarette smoke.
I think we know that in a vacuum that smoking is worse for you than vaping, but I don’t think we know very well yet exactly how dangerous vaping is.
It might be very dangerous and you could still conclude that it should be unhindered by government, and that’s fine! People have different priorities and values.
But I think vaping is dangerous and it’s reasonable to have policies that discourage people from doing it.
Tangentially, I really, really find flight-shaming to be the absolute lowest and laziest form of performing concern about climate change.
And unfortunately, it's really popular among senior academics who built their career in part on flying to conferences, research sites and collaborations, and then turn around and sanctimoniously tell younger scholars that flying is bad and you shouldn't do it!
This is not true. One transatlantic flight is about 10% US annual per capita carbon emissions. So giving up two international trips is comparable to switching entirely to electric cars, for example.
Until someone comes up with a way to enable carbon-free, fast international travel, I think it’s a waste of time to vex about air travel, especially since there is still significant work to be done in other areas that are much more practical to address and impactful.
I think we should make the prices of things like transatlantic flights reflect the costs imposed by them, so that customers correctly take those costs into account instead of expecting them to somehow make some kind of personal moral balancing decision. Put a price on CO2 emissions and let markets do their magic.
I think climate change is important and that a single person's decision to fly is not.
On the other hand a private plane is like 100 people flying and if you do it enough you are getting into "stuff a single person does that can actually matter" territory.
The thing about carbon emissions is that they are precisely continuous and thus there isn't a threshold where some amount "doesn't matter": it all matters precisely as much as the amount emitted.
Cars and planes are pretty close in emissions per passenger mile. If the car has more than one passenger, it's going to be cleaner unless it's a really low MPG vehicle.
That's not correct a 787 gets 102 mpg per passenger. The vast majority of 787s are flown full. The vast majority of vehicles are occupied by one person.
Sure, if you take the most fuel efficient passenger jet, consider only CO2 and not NO emissions (a quick search says that's anywhere from negligible to 90% as bad as the CO2 depending on various assumptions) , and assume it's 100% full (Google says ~85% is the airline average), and compare it to an average ICE car with one passenger, the jet's around 3x better.
If you loosen these assumptions a bit, you get that the plane is maybe 1.75x as efficient as a car with one person, and probably loses out if the car has more than one passenger. Yes, most car trips are solo, but a cross-country car ride is more likely to be a recreational journey with multiple people.
I don't understand what the complaint is. One person flying twice to Europe and back is similar to one person switching from electric back to gasoline cars.
I'd really like it if we had kept flight-shaming separate from travel-shaming, ie it's only bad to fly if there was an alternative way of getting there.
If it would only take a day or two more to go to a week-long event, then you shouldn't fly. But if you'd have to spend three months on a ship, then of course you should fly.
That is flight-shaming shouldn't be "don't go to that conference", but "the university will pay the extra for you to go by train/ferry".
For these sorts of events, it is possible to travel within North America or within Europe without flying. It's inconvenient and expensive, but the expensive bit should be addressed by "someone else paying" and the purpose of the shaming should be to get people to put up with the inconvenience.
But it is really stupid to try to stop people flying across the Atlantic.
Yeah, not flying also has a bunch of costs. If you drive instead of fly for someplace 600 miles away (about 1000 km), you put out less CO2 but have a substantially higher chance of dying in a car accident, burn two days of your vacation on driving cross-country, are subject to weather and construction delays that are outside your control, etc. Passenger rail in the US ranges from lousy to awful to nonexistent. And so on.
Very much agreed. A day or two is a LOT of time. Doubly so if you are burning vacation.
I'm not going to do a 2 day drive some place for vacation. I might do an 8 hour drive instead of a couple hour flight (knowing that you also burn a lot of other time at the airport)
I was talking very specifically about work-related conferences; employers really should be prepared to pay you to spend a day travelling to avoid you flying, especially as you can work on a laptop while on the train.
As for vacation, I can see that your experiences are very different from mine - I really struggle to use up all my vacation days every year (but then I have 27 in addition to public holidays).
But in that case I'm not going to waste two weekends of my own time on both ends of a train journey to a week long conference. It's an absurd suggestion!
agreed if you are going any distance there should almost always be a travel day.
And that travel day will NOT be one of my weekend days.
As for vacation, I finally just got back to 4 weeks (20 days). I was at 15 for a while.
But even at 20, I don't have much problem burning through most of them. I take a couple of days here and there. For example, in the summer, taking the kids to the river to swim (or the lake to wakeboard). In the winter to the snow to go sledding etc
plus Holiday time, usually take a day off for their birthdays etc
Once again we have to cheer on the efforts of Donald Trump in fighting climate change by greatly reducing the number of transoceanic passengers coming to the US.
Yeah - in Europe we have actual viable alternatives, at least intra-Europe. Like, I'm not going to fly from Paris to London because it's way easier and probably cheaper to take the Eurostar. There is a point of diminishing returns (e.g. stupid Gulf of Finland), but trains actually work here, unlike in the US!
Yeah, I wouldn't expect someone to take a train through the Balkans, and I'd only expect someone to get a ferry across the Baltic if they start on one coast (so Stockholm to Helsinki, get a ferry; Oslo to Helsinki, get a plane).
But I can get from my home in Manchester to Barcelona in a day by train. It seems entirely reasonable to just take a day to travel, especially if it's work travel and they're expecting you to be there for several days. I can take a laptop and work on the train!
And I have more days of annual leave than I can really use most years, so tacking an extra day of travel on each end of my holiday seems perfectly fine.
If we had trains in the U.S. comparable to what I've used in Europe, I'd travel more. It's much less stressful than driving or navigating most airports here. I did take Amtrak from Connecticut to NYC, and found it just as nice as my experience in Europe, but that particular line is well run and timely because it hooks Boston to NYC to D.C. Most other multi-state passenger trains here have wonky schedules, depending on where you live.
My experience is that the people most into anti-conference activism are junior -- people who have a job (grad students are less activist about the organization of academia) but are still young and radical.
And in the UK, where international field trips are ubiquitous in certain disciplines, we now have to grapple with "climate anxiety" among undergraduates (among their many other anxieties that make educating them difficult). This is a problem because for such disciplines (e.g. geography), ever-more exotic and far-flung field trips are the equivalent of U.S. colleges having extravagant facilities: it's an arms race to one-up each other to attract a shrinking pool of students.
Totally OT but this overuse of the word “anxiety” drives me nuts. WaPo has an article about Obama’s efforts to combat Republican gerrymandering, and the headline says it reflects his “anxiety” about Trump. Nah. Obama undoubtedly has “concerns” but he’s not a guy who gives off “anxiety” vibes. Not every negative reaction to something external is anxiety!
(Hope it’s obvious I’m not saying YOU overuse the word anxiety)
They still are, amidst various academic bullshit. But I've grown to not like huge conferences - it's all about small colloquiums and workshops where you can actually hang out with the participants and drink beer, etc.
My deep belief is hating on private jets is just deep jealously, and climate change explanation lets people disdain the rich while feeling morally righteous. If all the private jets switched to carbon-free fuel tomorrow, people would still hate them.
I wouldn't (I'd be very happy if that happened), but I would say, private aviation is also a big rich person's exemption from security theater as well.
I guess, though I tend to think of flight shaming (and I’m talking more about commercial, not private jets per se) is more mimetic than it is motivated by any strong emotion.
"Marijuana policy has moved in the opposite direction, but the number one complaint I hear about marijuana legalization isn’t any kind of detailed policy analysis — it’s annoyance that the smell has become ubiquitous in lots of places."
What do people think of marijuana legalization at this point?
Similar to gambling I feel like the commercialization has been pretty not great.
Better than prohibition but still with plenty of trade offs. For the life of me I can't understand why public consumption seems to be completely ignored. I don't care much about what people do in their own homes but its ridiculous the way I can't take my kids to any shopping center or public place without them being exposed to it.
This is underappreciated with respect to Oregon’s drug decriminalization as well. People know that alcohol is legal but that doesn’t mean you’re allowed to take over a park with a couple 30-racks. The attendant de facto legalization of public consumption is 90% of the problem.
Do you see people using in public, or is it just a lingering smell? Also, where and in what environments do you come across this.
I can't actually remember seeing anyone smoking. So enforcement of any ban would probably be nearly impossible. But I also don't think I encounter the smell nearly as often as others on here.
I live in a close in DC suburb and cannot leave my neighborhood without smelling it. That includes while driving my kids to school at like 730 on a weekday morning or stopping at the shopping center up the street. I don't want to go too much into my personal history but I was quite the partier in my younger days, and even in middle age don't have hang ups about responsible adults having a little fun on a Friday night. But if it's annoying to me then I imagine it's quite the nuisance to those without my generally laid back attitude towards this sort of thing. At minimum I would like a little more respect for people who aren't trying to take questions about what exactly it is from their 8 year olds, to say nothing about those who create even more difficulties and dangers on the roads.
It's kind of weird that there are lots of non-stinky ways to consume cannabis, but people still walk around smoking joints and pipes rather than just popping an edible. There's probably a tactile component to it, kind of like cigarette smoking, that adds to the experience beyond the chemical reaction in your brain.
It's that, combined with cost. My guess is that a lot of the product being smoked may still be black market, since its significantly cheaper given cannabis taxes.
Also more controllable. I'm a VERY infrequent user, but on the maybe 1-2 times a year I'll partake I find it more enjoyable to puff a vape pen than to take an edible. The effects seem hit much faster, but also you can take as big or small a hit as you want, and you can take as many or as few hits as you want. That's different than an edible where you frequently have to wait a while to feel the impact, and at that point you may get hit with a harder reaction than you anticipated, which is not fun.
Different types of consumption have different effects for different people. (For example, edibles are completely useless for me.)
Also, not everybody thinks it's "stinky."
Really, why not just assume, since you obviously don't know anything about cannabis, that there IS a reason, and not just that weed smokers are a bunch of dum-dumbs?
Interesting. Makes me think there's also a whole lot of people wandering around with a an alcohol buzz at 7:30 in the morning, and we just don't realize it because we don't smell it. Alcohol is still more compelling for the user and more widespread in its usage.
I'm hard pressed though to think of an enforcement mechanism since the it seems the act is quick and at least somewhat furtive, but the resulting smell is lingering long after.
As for the kids, tell them that's people smoking, and it's bad for them and they shouldn't be doing it. Alternatively, nobody should be doing anything that smells that bad in public.
There are absolutely people doing that with alcohol. I had an old room mate who ultimately went to med-school but was working in some sort of orderly/EMT type function at a big hospital when we lived in the same house. He'd regularly tell stories about people coming in for a fall or some other injury being determines to be drunk out of their minds in the middle of the day.
Anyway my intent isn't to tell people what they should and shouldn't put in their bodies. I'd be a huge hypocrite if I tried. But I am asking what the modern post legalization pothead thinks they owe other people. Even in these comments it seems like the answer is 'absolutely nothing' which strikes me as both wrong but also as good of a way as I can imagine to build support for a backlash.
In Wissahickon Park in Philadelphia if you walk the 5 mile length of the picturesque "Forbidden Drive" you will encounter multiple people smoking weed as they saunter along. Even walking around my neighborhood I'd say I smell it at least once on every walk. It is pervasive.
I see it in Miami all the time. I saw three tourists passing around a pretty big blunt down by the river yesterday on my way home. I see people walking around smoking, too, including a lot of construction workers in the morning on the way to their job site. These are guys working with rebar and concrete. (And, hopefully, not the tower crane operators.)
Having had two large construction projects going near my house recently, I can confirm that the parking area used by the workers gathering in the mornings consistently reeks of marijuana.
Dunno where you live, but here all the big, luxury condo towers are shoddy. Maybe that’s due to everyone being stoned all day. (There’s one really large one with three towers that had to replace all its PVC pipe because the contractor used the wrong kind—the kind that off gasses something that corrodes steel rebar, and the pipe is encased in concrete in many places. I think it was a $2M+ repair. I know of three buildings—there are likely more—that had to redo the waterproofing on their amenity decks and pools, including where I live. Drooping balconies. Stuff like that.)
I see it all the time in Seattle but not as often as I see people using harder drugs. I see it in the park across the street and the Capitol Hill Link light rail station.
I like smelling weed occasionally when walking around Seattle. It reminds me that I live in a civilized place, a blue state. Unfortunately I occasionally see people using hard drugs in public, which is the dark side of this place
The smell doesn't bother me, either. Not like tobacco. The worst thing about the drugs is what it's doing to the bodies and spirits of the users. Every day I hear anger and screaming outside because their lives suck.
That sucks it’s every day for you. I rarely see anyone doing hard drugs in public these days, but I did the other day walking past the bus stops at Alaska Junction. Dude just passed out in the middle of the sidewalk while his buddies were around smoking off of foil. They need to take that shit out of West Seattle and back to Capitol Hill where it belongs!
It’s one of those things like we were talking about yesterday, no one wants to be the “bad” guy but someone needs to. I would support the cops doing something about that shit, but it’s not like I called the cops or anything, I had better shit to do with my day, and I’d feel like an asshole doing so besides
Eh hard to say given the degree to which its been driven from public spaces. Having been a consumer of both products I will say I think tobacco smoke seems to dissipate outdoors and with pretty minimal distance to a degree weed smoke doesn't. But I'm also not sure its apples to apples. Everyone hitting their vape or whatever publicly is almost certainly intoxicated and by virtue of where they are it's also fair to say they're very likely driving under the influence (my perception is that a lot of the odor is wafting out of moving vehicles).
I'm not a teetotaler or particularly interested in policing people's good times but I think it's fair to say we've permitted a level of free for all with this that we don't tolerate with anything else. Back in the day part of the case for legalization was that it would allow for better control over the negative externalities. I think that's still possible but it isn't what has happened.
Tobacco cigarettes are not inebriating so the apology doesn’t fully hold. I would object to people loitering in front of my grocery store drinking and smoking, yes.
True, but so are heroin addicts. Still (correctly) considered unpleasant to walk past people nodding off in doorways. People find being around people high on drugs in public in broad daylight unpleasant and inappropriate for children.
You could always just toke in your house before you go out for a stroll. And if you can't wait then I'd consider whether you're really in control of your usage.
In my state it happened that way because they just... didn't put anything in the law about it. As a result, if smoking is allowed somewhere, then smoking anything legal is allowed there. Municipalities can pass ordinances but I don't know that any actually have.
I honestly do not think your children smelling marijuana is a huge problem but I can understand disagreement.
I don't think it's a huge problem in the greater scheme of things either. I do think it's an annoyance and disrespectful, and people should be less butt hurt about being told as much. Like yes, there are things that can fly in a college town but eventually it's time to grow up a little bit. On the extreme end I also think it can be a contributing factor to a larger sense of disorder, with ramifications that are a well trodden topic on this substack.
If you had told me in 2013 that the result of legalization will be "pot shops will only sell products that are so potent that it's impossible to use them casually," I might have had some pause.
I do think that a lot of this comes from it still being illegal federally - it feels like the primary regulator is federal (ie the FDA) and the fact that legalization is a state matter is what's driving the poor regulation; states just don't have any experience or expertise in regulating this sort of thing.
Correct. Most people I know take edibles now and you can get those in low doses, cut them in half, in quarters, etc. then there are 1:1 CBD:THC, 2:1, CBD only. Flower is a little different because it caters to harder users. But I go online and filter the inventory at the shop around the corner by THC%, and there are usually a few under 25%, sometimes a few at like 12%. And then, I can pop a tiny tiny bit in a pipe and take one hit. This is a market equilibrium non-issue and doesn’t need regulation.
I admit I'm not in-country and so haven't tried to buy anything for years, but my understanding was that if you wanted something that wouldn't immediately knock you on your ass you have to make that very clear to the budtender.
Meh, edibles are regulated to be 10mg or less, and you can always take half if that’s too much. My 75 year old mom has to take a whole one to feel anything even with no tolerance at all.
They do sell some really high potency stuff like hash and concentrates and hash infused joints, but you have to be specifically looking for those. They cater to the high-tolerance people looking to get blasted. But the edibles sold in legal dispensaries are fairly well-dosed. Flower is stronger now, though. Blame Rafael Caro Quintero for that!
I wonder how dialed in the mg per serving really are though. Is it +/- 1 mg? 5 mg? A 20mg gummie might not have much effect and a 5mg can knock you on your ass.
Yeah, I think there should probably be more and better state inspections of these facilities to make sure they’re doing proper quality control. I have a specific brand of peanut butter cup that I like with really tight QC, but it’s one of the most expensive edibles out there. I’ve bought cheaper stuff and there was more variation.
I wouldn't go that far in terms of potency - but it is clear that there has been a bit of an arms race in comparison to the explosion of higher ABV IPAs in brewery culture like 10-15 years ago.
Depends on the state, and seems to be mostly a dosage issue with edibles. Some states the max dose is 5mg, others are much higher. IMO, 5mg is more than enough for most people and you can always take multiple doses if it floats your boat.
It's wildly, obviously, vastly superior to have legal weed than prohibition. It's not even remotely close.
It's good to encourage people to use vapes/edibles though, for both health reasons, and because smoking flower can be a pretty substantial pollutant of public spaces.
How is this "wildly obvious"? I believe there's pretty firm statistics that mental illness related to weed consumption has skyrocketed since weed has largely been decriminalized. Additionally, I haven't any numbers on this but intuitively it seems wildly obvious that the decriminalization of weed has lead to wider use amongst teens, which seems inherently bad.
I agree it's good that less people are being locked up for weed use but I'm not sure that's outweighed by the negative externalities associated with wider spread marijuana use.
Wider use among teens? Since when, when we were in high school? I seriously doubt it. Kids these days aren’t social enough to do it, they don’t even drive anymore lol
It seems widely concluded that marijuana use has been increasing in recent years since widespread decriminilization and legalization - so I think it's safe to infer this includes teens.
The question we have to ask ourselves is whether this is a good thing. IMO, it clearly isn't.
Is it, though? I feel like the big increase in potency definitely happened while it was still illegal. People wanted to get just as high under the different criminal breakpoints for possession, so breeders were going for more and more potent pot.
I'd say that this just suggests that we are better at detecting and diagnosing mental illness than we were in the past. Mental illness tends to manifest in the teen years, which is also when kids start experimenting with drugs and alcohol. Seems hard to control for all that, as well as control for kids using weed to self medicate a preexisting and undiagnosed mental illness. This is not to say that pot isn't bad for young brains, but claiming that weed is all of the sudden causing a spike in mental illness in teens smells a bit like reefer madness 2.0.
Both gambling and pot require regulation, and the problem is Prohibitionists are inclined not to want to regulate and the other side is libertarians who also don't want to.
Marijuana legalization was to prevent people from being charged with a crime for possession. I'm happy that people have unrestricted access to _possession_. There is no externality in possession. I never voted for public _use_.
Nobody actually thought people only wanted to walk around with some pot in their pocket--the whole point of legalization/decriminalization is that a bunch of people want to smoke it and we ought not to put them in jail for it.
I am against it. I have witnessed too many drivers smoking pot and the main effect of legalization is increased THC potency. Cannabis Use Disorder is on the rise and the drugs are being designed to induce more adverse physiological effects.
The increased potency came way before the legalization. It's such an easy science, controlling cross pollination of plants --- the equivalent of having different strains of tomatoes, that increased potency was inevitable.
"the main effect of legalization is increased THC potency"
I really question that claim because that would be the inverse of the historical trajectory of basically every other drug -- bans encourage producing higher and higher potency strains to make smuggling/concealment of the product easier by allowing you to carry the same "high" in a smaller volume of space. (This is corroborated on the flipside by the fact that nobody is bothering to breed strains of caffeinated plants -- all of which are legal -- with higher and higher potency.)
Since distilled alcohol dates back to ancient history and its precise time and place of invention are unknown (and possibly was independently invented multiple times in many different places), I don't think that would ever be fully answerable. However, it does seem clear that various means of restricting alcohol sales historically (not just literal prohibition, but also heavy taxes -- that's what "moonshining" was originally about) had the tendency to encourage people to produce higher strength alcohols for the same reason of reducing the volume of the same "dosage."
Does distillation go back to antiquity? I thought it was invented/discovered by medieval Arabic alchemists, which is why “alcohol” has that Arabic “al” at the beginning.
You're correct about the etymology, but a quick Google search shows lots of sources claiming that there were distilled alcohols being produced in China by no later than circa 800 BC.
Tobacco companies used capital to increase the nicotine potency of their drugs. Legalization create capital pathways to professionally engineer marijuana to be more habit forming because there is a commercial incentive to do so. The main effect is access to capital. Around 30% of cannabis users in the US have Cannabis Use Disorder.
This is a thing with energy drinks and other caffeine-added products. Panera had to settle a lawsuit for killing some people with caffeinated lemonade.
I don’t know why growers haven’t produced this effect horticulturally, but I have two guesses -
1. Increased caffeine comes with some trade offs in the flavor of the product
2. Selective breeding for potency already happened 1000 years ago.
(1) I'm pretty sure most people who drink coffee (and to a lesser extent other caffeinated beverages) do it to help wake themselves up/become more alert, i.e., to "feel high," it's just a different kind of high.
(2) Caffeine addiction is a real thing (https://www.addictioncenter.com/stimulants/caffeine/), so it's not like there wouldn't be an incentive to increase caffeine content to make the products more addictive.
(Kola nut is what the "cola" originally was in Coca-Cola and Pepsi Cola. Those products dropped actual kola from their recipes many years ago to sub in cheaper ingredients, but you can find premium "natural" sodas and energy drinks that still use it.)
I really find this hard to understand... While I wouldn't call it sedating my ability to do anything, let alone getting in a car is impaired to a degree I'd never even felt after a night of binge drinking. How do they manage it? Mega high tolerance?
There are rising rate of CUD which would suggest that many users are not reducing the amount they consume as potency increases.
If I am quoting my wife correctly (she works in addiction) around 30% of cannabis users have CUD.
https://thecausalfallacy.com/p/the-iron-law-of-liberalization This is who I quote when I talk about how capital from legalization has resulted in increased potency. Like with alcohol and tobacco, a small minority of consumers are the real profit drivers and they demand high potency due to tolerance.
I live in Colorado and I think it’s mostly been fine, but do think it ought to be regulated more similarly to tobacco, especially when it comes to smoking in public spaces. IOW, there should not be a legal or normative exception to smoking bans for pot.
This makes sense, but we allow tobacco smoking outdoors - 25 feet away from store entrances is the rule in Seattle - and we should do the same for weed, too.
I think that depends on the market, doesn't it? I've seen a lot of claims about how widespread illegal grow operations are in states that legalization combined with very high taxes of legal sales.
Well, the Supreme Court will decide by the end of this term whether the 40+ states that have legalized marijuana in some form or another have, in so doing, inadvertently stripped millions of Americans of their Second Amendment right to bear arms.
Section 922(g) of the Gun Control Act of 1968 has issues...
(g)It shall be unlawful for any person—
(1)who has been convicted in any court of, a crime punishable by imprisonment for a term exceeding one year;
(2)who is a fugitive from justice;
(3)who is an unlawful user of or addicted to any controlled substance (as defined in section 102 of the Controlled Substances Act (21 U.S.C. 802));
(4)who has been adjudicated as a mental defective or who has been committed to a mental institution;
(5)who, being an alien—
(A)is illegally or unlawfully in the United States; or
(B)except as provided in subsection (y)(2), has been admitted to the United States under a nonimmigrant visa (as that term is defined in section 101(a)(26) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (8 U.S.C. 1101(a)(26)));
(6)who has been discharged from the Armed Forces under dishonorable conditions;
(7)who, having been a citizen of the United States, has renounced his citizenship;
(8)who is subject to a court order that—
(A)was issued after a hearing of which such person received actual notice, and at which such person had an opportunity to participate;
(B)restrains such person from harassing, stalking, or threatening an intimate partner of such person or child of such intimate partner or person, or engaging in other conduct that would place an intimate partner in reasonable fear of bodily injury to the partner or child; and
(C)
(i)includes a finding that such person represents a credible threat to the physical safety of such intimate partner or child; or
(ii)by its terms explicitly prohibits the use, attempted use, or threatened use of physical force against such intimate partner or child that would reasonably be expected to cause bodily injury; or
(9)who has been convicted in any court of a misdemeanor crime of domestic violence,
to ship or transport in interstate or foreign commerce, or possess in or affecting commerce, any firearm or ammunition; or to receive any firearm or ammunition which has been shipped or transported in interstate or foreign commerce.
Section 8 was the Rahimi case, this case is about section 3.
I don't know about other states but Maryland prohibits purchase of a handgun by 'habitual drunkard(s)' which I believe is interpreted to apply to people found guilty of certain alcohol related offenses.
I would absolutely be in favor of banning gun sales if you have a DUI on your record. If you can't be trusted not to get behind the wheel drunk, you can't be trusted with a firearm. Constitutional concerns notwithstanding.
I think that legalization was the right move, but I think we need to add more friction to the process of buying and using marijuana.
For context, I moved to Colorado shortly after marijuana was made de facto legal here. I do not use marijuana.
Some thoughts:
-For a couple years after legalization, marijuana users were very obnoxious and had to make pot into a visible lifestyle. That seems to have calmed down, I suspect because other states legalized.
-Vaping and edibles are very, very common, and I suspect how most marijuana is ingested. I think this is bad because they seem like easy ways to consume a lot.
-Some people consume a LOT of marijuana. Guys from my BJJ gym would go vape in their cars between classes. It was a bit much.
-Marijuana retailers do a relatively good job of being low-profile. They're not any more prominent than a Subway franchise in general.
-Marijuana consumption is net-negative for society. We would be better off if everyone abstained. I just think that arresting/incarcerating people for marijuana is worse than legalization.
-The only form in which marijuana should be sold is actual plant parts. THC-containing oils, vapes, and edibles should be illegal to sell.
-Marijuana sales should only be legal on weekdays, only at inconvenient times, and marijuana stores should be unstylish.
-Marijuana grow ops were a big issue early in legalization. I don't know why, but it was common for people to rent houses and grow marijuana in ways that caused problems (often electrical fires). Rental listings used to say "NO GROW OPS," and my friend in local government had to deal with several illegal grow operations. Colorado has a ton of cheap land in the eastern part of the state; I have no idea why people didn't just throw up warehouses and grow out in Limon or Fort Morgan or something.
I knew several heavy pot smokers who were incredibly annoying. Always going on about how weed isn't addictive (they were definitely addicted), it's gonna cure cancer, the whole deal. They became significantly less annoying once it was legalized, thought they smoked a lot more so I was much more likely to have to ask them to please go outside to smoke because I didn't want my house to smell like a Grateful Dead concert.
> Vaping and edibles are very, very common, and I suspect how most marijuana is ingested. I think this is bad because they seem like easy ways to consume a lot.
Edibles are too expensive for that! The ones I buy are so tasty that I wish they were 1mg and not 10mg, but came in packs of 100 for the same price so I could actually pig out on them.
Two takes. The first is that decriminalization isn't a very American concept. Something can be legal, legal and regulated, or illegal. Decriminalization reads as either legality or lawlessness. The second is that complaints about the smell aren't actually because cannabis smells bad, any more than someone who enjoys smoking cannabis actually enjoys the smell. It's everything associated with smelling cannabis-people getting high in public, on the road, and around you. It's comparable to seeing public drinking, and seeing empty beer cans everywhere.
Was in favor of it and still am. Think it needs to be treated like alcohol in public settings (can't have an open container on the street so can't smoke a blunt on the street).
I feel like it's just wildly different depending on the state. I actually find in my town that I smell pot smoke less often after legalization than I did before because of the well-regulated edibles and vape cartridges. Before legalization, everyone smoked joints.
As someone who's always hated smoking, I also like that the edibles have exact dosages and that the pot stores are clean and nice. The only tip I have for the marijuana industry is that us casuals would really like a weaker product. I have a feeling that my ideal dosage is not 5 or 10 MG but 7.5, but I'd have to use a pill cutter to get that dosage.
Disastrous even if I personally do both. Legalizing them just made it easier to do both and enabled addictions. The old arguments about how safe marijuana is are obviously outdated as well given how strong strains are.
It is worth mentioning the important similarity between global warming and tobacco: that in the 1960s, scientists at some of the most important companies involved realized that these were serious problems and then the companies lied about it repeatedly in a successful effort to delay regulation.
Yeah, that's kind of the problem with the end of MY take. The outright lying about the science coming from oil companies was very similar to what tobacco companies did.
My wife and I recently rewatched "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?" and two things just stood out to us. One, this was not actually a kids movie and in retrospect we're both kind of stunned we were allowed to watch this movie when were kids given the raunch of a lot of the jokes.
Second, it floored us to realized that literally the central plot of the movie is about the corruption involved with destroying Los Angeles' streetcar system. Like someone in the screenwriting process clearly knew their history and had passionate views on the matter.
Except actually the movie gets a lot of that wrong! It suggests that Los Angeles used to have a great public transit system, when in fact it actually had a great *private* transit system that people hated because of how it squeezed nickels and dimes out of them! The streetcars died because people actively prevented the city from saving them, in favor of the liberatory appeal of automobiles. The car companies encouraged this attitude, but it’s far from clear that their influence was that important.
Oh I'm aware. If I'm not mistaken, the biggest reason the streetcar system in most cities failed is they were big money losers. Not just Los Angeles.
There's a fellow we know who wrote an astute post at Vox that a lot of recent "love" for streetcars was misplaced and really about too many upper class libs being to enamored with the aesthetics of streetcars instead of thinking about whether they make sense as a quality public transport. That same fellow has noted that too many public transport projects are too concerned with looking nice as opposed to providing good service. https://www.slowboring.com/p/fancy-stations-make-quality-mass. I would guess mostly because too many public transportation proposals are targeted at voters who are not actually going to use said public transportation.
LA's streetcar system was terrible, too. It was built on the cheap, it was falling apart, nobody was willing to spend the money needed to bring it up to a good state of repair AND automobile traffic was slowing the whole thing down to a crawl. Trolleys are slower than buses!
To be fair, trolleys are only slower than buses when they both run in mixed traffic, which didn’t have to remain the case - the streets with the Pacific Electric streetcars were all wide enough to dedicate the relevant lanes. (Though I think the Los Angeles Railway streets were often narrower.)
But yeah, a lot of the streetcars were run as loss leaders so that Samuel Huntington could buy cheap real estate, run a streetcar out there, sell the real estate at a profit, and then let the streetcar fall apart (hence all the places like Huntington Beach and Huntington Park and the like in a bunch of directions).
It's good to maintain two lists: 1) movies / TV that are not actually for kids despite superficial appearances; 2) songs that are in no way shape or form love songs despite superficial lyrical or musical cues ("Every Breath You Take," "The One I Love," "Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)," "You're Beautiful," "Hallalujah," etc.
If I remember correctly, there is an interview with Sting where he says people come up to him and tell him how "Every Breath You take" was their wedding song and his reaction is just horror that a couple would think a song about a stalker would make for a good love song.
Ultimate example of aesthetics of a song not matching content; "No Rain" from Blind Melon. That one has the added bonus of having a famous music video of a girl in a bee costume to the point that there are people who think the song is about bees or something. When in reality the song was about the lead singer's crippling and ultimately deadly heroin addiction.
I'm aware that Sting says that about "Every Breath You Take," but I'm incredulous that he sincerely thought that listeners wouldn't hear it as a love song. It's the same as Alan Moore being outraged that readers of "Watchmen" like the character of Rorschach and claiming that wasn't his intent -- the creator is either lying or he's completely oblivious to how his own preferred artform works.
Oh yeah, “No Rain.” Great song, and if you listen to it it’s obvious what it’s about.
Actually, that whole album slaps, really. Too bad “No Rain” - which, again, great song - was such a hit that it totally overshadowed the rest of the album.
Edit: the bee costume is not out of nowhere; it’s on the cover of the album and it’s someone’s sister or something. But I agree that it distracts even further from the song’s intended meaning.
The latter is also a great example of how much a song's use in a movie (or movies) can shape it's legacy.
Seriously, you can't tell me that if I tell you to think of the opening riff of Fortune Son you're first thought isn't a helicopter full of "green" soldiers flying over a Vietnamese jungle.
Yeah - adding it to the list. There's so many! The I-IV-V-vi is a tricksy chord progression. Edit: really, it’s I-V-vi-VI, but really I just mean any combination thereof.
To be fair it's the best of the three animated retellings of _Chinatown_ that have come out of Hollywood (the others being _Rango_ and _Zootopia_). Just be glad they left out the incest, mostly.
I guess my mind might be pilled by watching plenty of The Simpsons and South Park as they'd emerge in the following decade, but while it's certainly not a movie designed for the expressed purpose of kids, it also seems rather tame to me comparatively speaking.
I mean I should define "kids" here. Both my wife and I first watched that movie when were both like 8 or 9 respectively (not like 15).
And yes big Simpsons and South Park fan here as well and you're correct to note that compared to those tv shows "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" is kind of tame. Having said that, I definitely was not allowed to watch The Simpsons until I was like 12-13 years old.
My parents were very generous with what we watched, I was watching things like George Carlin specials on HBO before I was a teenager. We just set some simple rules on what to and not to say outside the house. We "corrupted" all of our Mormon neighbors when they would always come over to our house to watch syndicated Simpsons reruns at 5 PM.
I’d personally love to see a “Big Social Media” push towards regulation of content to minors particularly. I know in recent years a couple bills have circulated in Congress with very little buzz but I hope there’s a continued, concerted push to protect minors from an inundation of content that is changing the chemistry of their brains.
I was ready for this to be about social media! I was thinking: maybe every parent's struggle with "screen time" limits is the second hand smoke of social media? I.e., a national social media time limit (??) gets support because it makes it easier for me to manage my kids?
The other, and more deadly, second-hand smoke of social media addiction, and smartphones generally, is distracted driving. That's an externality that could be reduced by safer product design.
California law now makes it an offense to do literally anything with a phone that’s not hands free while driving, but I think the blocker here is that cops aren’t actually stopping more people just for doing this.
That definitely can't be blamed specifically on social media, or even smartphones, because that was a problem dating way back to when the first mobile phones were invented.
Sure, but ancient history like that isn't really the question that the risk-utility balancing test for whether a product is unreasonably unsafe asks, such as under the Third Restatement. It's more about whether there's feasible design tweak available under the current state of the art that if adopted would reduce the harm. I'm a product liability defense lawyer at heart and by experience so I'm certainly not saying there is here--there are always more trade-offs than might appear once you get into the details of a product's design and commercial feasibility. But it's also hard to deny that there are potentially feasible technical options available now that didn't used to be, such as the ubiquity of face-recognition locking and unlocking of phones combined with motion sensors.
"and creating a world in which being a nicotine addict is annoying and marginalizing has proven to be a pretty effective way of getting fewer people to smoke."
The problem with translating this to climate so far is the you can't marginalize the group that is *everyone*.
Interestingly, you could draw another parallel from the anti-smoking campaigns to the anti-vaccine and climate movements: the lack of memory. Vaccines arose in response to diseases like smallpox (which was really really really really bad), but now that nobody has it anymore, nobody has any memory of what living with it is like. So you get people who refuse to vaccinate their kids for measles, and then you get measles outbreaks.
On climate, the slow but steady temperature increases over the past 50 years have (somewhat) erased the collective memory of what "normal" climate was supposed to look like ("normal" in quotes because you can certainly quibble with what that means). You could also turn this on its head and think about what unknown climate effects we'll have 30 years from now and realize there's no way the human brain can really imagine living with it until we're there, and that makes the problem way more difficult.
Polio was around well within living memory, my parents have friends who got it as children, there were regular outbreaks in the US in the 1950s. I think the folk memory disappeared quite quickly. Michael Bloomberg was 13 when they was a large outbreak in his hometown, it is definitely something he would remember well.
Hopefully when polio comes back it’ll take some of the steam from the antivaxxer movement, but I’m not so sure anymore. They’ll claim it’s toxins or something. It’s sad though. The parents deserve to suffer for their idiocy but not the children.
Almost 30 years ago Al Gore prophesied that we would have 20-30 ft sea level rise by now. I'm not sure we still understand all the intricacies of atmospheric science and it's relationship to terra firma and the Sun. It may just be that atmosphere changes happen on a geologic time scale not a human one. The good news I think is that we still have time---oil is a limited resource and won't last indefinitely anyway, at least not affordable oil. I'm thinking that the free market can solve a good chunk of the problem by making alternatives better and cheaper than fossil fuel applications. Look what China has done with BYD already. Forward thinking I'd say we need to be pushing for green infrastructure to be ready for this (a more robust grid, stop hamstringing nuclear power, etc.).
Do you have a citation of Al Gore predicting 20 foot sea level rise in a couple decades? This sounds like you’re just free associating about how anyone who talks about the climate must be wrong about everything.
A Google search suggests he's conflating statements Gore made in general about potential maximum sea rise (with no specific date attached) and statements about a much more modest increase (two feet) with an estimated date range of 2040 to 2050.
Even if Gore had said that, I always say, he [was] a politician. (i) people should be getting their information from climate scientists, not politicians, and (ii) if some people say incorrect things, it doesn't invalidate people with good track records.
The tobacco litigation happened while I was in law school, and it helped make me cynical about legal reasoning.
The FDA attempted to regulate cigarettes as drug-delivery devices under the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938. Congress wasn’t really thinking about cigarettes when it passed this act, and the industry didn’t see it as a threat. But clever lawyers figured out that cigarettes fit within the definition of drug-delivery device. The problem is, such devices could only be approved if they were “safe and effective for their intended use.” It’s pretty clear that cigarettes are not safe and could not be approved, but the FDA ignored its foundational statute and proposed regulating the continued distribution of cigarettes anyway.
Basically, lawyers found a law and tried to commandeer its words for their own ends. The game is fundamentally semantic. It’s also rigged because the FDA has enough juice that it almost got away with using a statute that was passed to require “safe and effective” products to regulate cigarettes.
The intellectual bankruptcy of legal reasoning would be a great subject for a series of columns. We have far too many lawyers who have far too much prestige.
Isn’t the real tie between the MAHA movement and big tabacco just the complete bald face lying about public health risks? The difference is MAHA is bald face lying about the risks of vaccines or Tylenol whereas big tabacco’s lie was about downplaying risks.
I guess what I’m getting at is unfortunately I think right wingers learned their own lessons from the success in Big Tabacco forestalling legislation so long. Namely, you can get away with a whole lot if you have complete lack of shame about straight up lying to Americans.
The motives seem quite different though, for tobacco manufacturers it's bog standard profit, where with MAHA...I don't even know what the fuck for sure, a bizarre appeal to nature argument, it seems.
MAHA seems be a combo of the worst elements of Identity politics coming together with absolute lunatic who happens to come from possibly the most famous family in America thereby giving him undue influence he never deserved.
We can debate for hours how long COVID restrictions should have been in place or how strict they should have been. But it became an identity politics thing the moment Trump tweeted out "Liberate Michigan!". I know in one of his few good moments was being pro vaccine, but he poisoned the well with those tweets and clearly put his thumb on the scale of "COVID is fake news". All because he got jealous at all the attention Andrew Cuomo was getting.
So yeah MAHA is all just the worst kind of devotion to an awful human being and result is hundreds of thousands of people unnecessarily dead from not taking COVID vaccines and likely thousands more dead in the future because orange man has polarized his supporters against all vaccines and in quite possibly the most unconscionable decision of his Presidency put a crazy man in charge of the nations' health.
There's going to be a lot of fodder for historians as to what was the most destructive element of Trump's presidency and life, but I think a strong case can be made that turning a large portion of this country against vaccines in general may be top of the list.
Oh sure, there have always been charlatans to take advantage of parting fools from their money. But the true believers seems to be infiltrating much higher ranks now.
I can't tell how they're defining "wellness." Is it all beauty/cosmetic, fitness, and non-Rx med stuff, or only stuff that is kinda woo-coded? Are they counting all psychotherapy, or only the "talk about your feelings" kind and not the "diagnose a convict with schizophrenia" kind?
I suspect a lot of resistance to the idea that smoking was very bad for you came from smokers who *really* did not want to believe that their habit was doing them harm.
I'm sure some such dissonance existed, but I'm skeptical it was substantial, I think most people became well aware of the tradeoffs, and either chose to continue, or struggled with the effort to quit.
One big gap between tobacco and social media (which IMO is crying out for regulation) is the clarity of the harm. While I'd love to imagine a surgeon general warning on scrolling algorithms, it doesn't see to me the research has been as crystal clear as it was for smoking.
Maybe the big studies are still underway, but I don't know what to make of the relatively weak scholarship about the harms.
Do the big warning labels have any impact? Not quite the same but in California basically everything seems to have a cancer warning and I completely ignore them.
It's a great question. One thing I would say: you could figure it out pretty quickly. If you required (e.g.) "every content curation algorithm must insert a warning on the harms of social media once every 10 posts" ... the results would be VERY measurable.
Yeah, i think legally speaking, "causing lung cancer" is a lot closer to harm than "shortening your attention span", even if you had definitive proof of the latter.
Right, I don't even know if "shortening your attention span" is the harm? How would you measure that? If you could measure it, what are the damages? This is kind of the big problem: we all say "it's bad" without being able to point to something unambiguous like lung cancer.
It's not just smoking. I wonder how many of the SB community under the age of, say, 45 know that mandatory seat belt usage was once a big honking controversy. And yet here we are and we don't even have the wacko libertarian/MAGA types railing against the nanny state mandate on seat belt use.
It wasn't always that way. Just like with the anti-smoking crusade, it took a lot of science (getting thrown around like a rag doll is apparently dangerous, scientists discovered), a public education campaign, lots of litigation, increasing levels of federal and state legislation and -- my big surprise -- auto company lobbying *in favor* of the mandates. I fondly recall some of the weirder steps along the way, such as the automatic seatbelts that gave you no choice to be belted once you sat down (is that still a thing?) And I remember the old attitudes, like in 1970 when I got my driver's license and proudly told a policeman I always used a seatbelt and his look of disdain and expression of "do I give a you know what?" has remained with me always.
When I was in driving school, they actually addressed an apparently common refrain from people who don't want to wear seatbelts, which was "Wouldn't I rather be thrown from the vehicle if I'm in a collision?" Yeah, being hurled through a windshield at 70 mph is going to be way better for you. Motivated reasoning is a hell of a drug.
Since seatbelts are required equipment that save lives more effectively and/or cheaply than all the other measures, if I were a car company I'd have supported seatbelt mandates and oppose the more expensive measures like $1000 airbags (well, probably the price has come down by now).
"the number one complaint I hear about marijuana legalization isn’t any kind of detailed policy analysis — it’s annoyance that the smell has become ubiquitous in lots of places."
I'm 100% serious -- if I worked in the marijuana industry, I would be sinking every spare dollar into figuring out how to produce a marijuana variety that was no more odiferous than tobacco when burned, because if marijuana gets criminalized again the putrid stench of it is going to be the biggest single factor driving public support for the a ban.
I don't know if marijuana smells worse than cigarettes (I hate both) but marijuana just sits there so heavily. I hate walking through a cloud of cigarette smoke outside, but once you get a short distance away it dissipates and it's over. Pot isn't like that. It lingers on the ground and spreads and doesn't fade easily. At least that's how I perceive it.
I hate both, but marijuana smoke smells worse to me than tobacco cigarette smoke (although not necessarily worse than pipe or cigar). But yes, the lingering issue with marijuana smoke is dramatically worse -- it really annoys me when I'm walking somewhere and encounter random marijuana smoke without a user in sight or a block+ ahead of you on the sidewalk at an intensity similar to what you'd have to be literally standing adjacent to a cigarette smoker to experience.
As an aside, that's why I've said the biggest effect of marijuana legalization is now to make me retroactively believe all those stories from police officers about smelling marijuana under seemingly improbable circumstances (from a closed car; from a house porch on a sidewalk 30 feet away; etc.) to justify searches/arrests.
It's amazing dispensaries aren't having cashiers so things like "please don't smoke this outside, wait until you get home. Just take an edible instead." They have to know a backlash is coming.
They should definitely do that. But I find that there's a moderately strong correlation between guys who openly smoke pot in public around strangers and guys who give the impression that they take pleasure in doing things that other people don't want them to do.
I have no clue if it is or not (I've never knowingly been in the presence of anyone vaping THC). However, even if it is, there's clearly still a large market for smokable marijuana based on what I encounter walking to and from work each day (and not uncommonly in my own house if I have the windows open on a mild morning/evening).
But part of what one enjoys is the smell and flavor, and if the users aren’t going to voluntarily switch to the low smell varietals, then the companies aren’t going to benefit.
(2) Regardless of whether anyone enjoys the smell, it seems like a good strategy would be to develop a "reduced odor" strain and then push for recriminalization of more odiferous strains to drive people who demand smokeable delivery methods into buying your legally-compliant product.
I just taught a mini-microeconomics unit to my 9th graders and taught them about smoking bans as part of my lesson on externalities. The kids had no idea this was even a thing. I also read David Yeager’s book on motivating teens and he discussed the Truth campaign which came about because of the tobacco settlement. But his larger point was that the advertising had to make sense for teens because typical “Don’t” campaigns don’t actually work. That’s why I’m interested in MAHA’s focus on sticking it to corporations which is what made Truth more sticky for teens.
It’s completely insane. One of my guilty pleasures is the Facebook group “Detox, Antivax, and Woo Insanity” that reposts the crazy, harmful medical shit people believe. Nicotine patches are totally a thing idiots are convinced will detox them from supposed vaccine toxins. People who got their kids vaccinated before they became antivax are putting them on their kids. It’s child abuse (just like not getting your kid vaccinated is)
Tobacco and climate change issues have little in common, politically or economically.
a) Tobacco is regulated/axes/restricted, paternalistically, becasue it is harmful to the users, who are a minority. CO2 emissions are beneficial to the emitter, the harm is generalized.
b) Tobacco use was promoted by tobacco products and opposition to regulation /taxation came from tobacco companies. Fossil fuel companies do not promote use of fossil fuels and opposition to taxing net emissions of CO2 des not come primarily if at all from fossil fuel companies.
c) Anti-smoking advocates (sensibly) never tried to ban or restrict tobacco growing, manufacturing, or transportation activates. Net CO2 emissions opponents have failed to learn that lesson.
d) Becasue users are a minority, restricting the _externality_ (not the self harm) of indoor smoking was politically popular. [When are non-marihuana users going to succeed in banning the marihuana stench externality?] Fossil fuel users is everyone.
I stand corrected of what I said. I should have said something like, Fossil fule companies do not ecourage consumers to use fossil fuels as tobaccoo companined did smoking."
This was a good historic timeline told by Matt about what these times were like, and I'm glad that this article is on the record. It demonstrates that tobacco is a very sui generis case with rebard to policy that cannot be easily replicated for other cases.
So the only disappointment was the last paragraph. I actually came close to critiquing Joel Wertheimer's article last night when I learned about it and read it, but thought it would be too late to do so, and I was largely going to say that "You can't simply treat [product] like Big Tobacco.". I'm glad I held off, because this article did an excellent job of demonstrating why.
Many PH problems fall into exactly this dynamic. People should read about the history of lead poisoning in this country because it's an exact mirror of tobacco but decades earlier.
That's not applicable either, because it involved activity that fully takes places on government property, and thus governments have fully legitimate reasons to regulate what goes on on that property. There also wasn't a market of people buying and selling lack of seat belt use.
One important thing to remember is the anti-tobacco movement also went too far. Matt has a line in there about anti-vaping laws as a victory for the movement, but in fact those laws are almost certainly murdering significant numbers of smokers.
Vaping is far less dangerous than smoking and allows people to enjoy nicotine, which Matt concedes is enjoyable. (Full disclosure: I don't smoke or vape.) And yet we apply the same rules against secondhand smoke to public vaping, make vapes difficult to obtain, fill them with warning labels, etc. Why? Because just like Prohibitionists favored putting poison in alcohol, the anti-smoking lobby WANTS to murder smokers because they want to deter people from the fun they disapprove of, rather than focusing on actually saving lives by preventing smoking and chewing tobacco.
This is, I think, a danger in all such movements. They attract puritans, and they don't shut down after winning the important victories. And they can end up losing the thread and lurching towards sociopathy when society doesn't do exactly what they want.
I mean, I think plenty of people find the smoke/steam from vaping a fairly unpleasant externality. It may not be dangerous in the way that tobacco smoke is, but I'd say it's still pretty reasonable to want less unpleasant stuff smelling up spaces you're in. (I've found myself struggling re: Marijuana in recent years living in NYC for this reason, as a huge percentage of public spaces just reek of pot smoke now; is it killing people? Probably not, but it's gross.)
I’m confused about your vaping take. I understand it’s better for smokers who want to still smoke, but isn’t it dangerous that so many kids got hooked on it? I was in high school/college during the vaping boom. It was pretty bad
I was a parent of high schoolers during the vaping boom and it was shocking to me.
In the article Matt quotes Bill Clinton saying these products "will be out of our children’s reach forever". That's the social context around nicotine I grew up into -- like, "we" worked hard for decades to make smoking not cool and finally succeeded, basically as Matt's article describes. Then overnight suddenly my 15-year-old, along with a large percentage of her peers, is a proud nicotine user and "everyone" seems to be okay with it -- apologies for the hyperbole, but again, I was shocked that there just seemed to be no serious consequences for either the kids at school or the shops selling these products to kids.
I don't think it's just a puritan streak that makes me wish the social context for kids vaping had been different. I'd be happy with a model that was based on strong enforced consequences for selling nicotine products to minors. But if the way to get to that result is via social stigmatization of vaping across the board, I'd be willing to go along with that.
I think this goes to show that the goal ended up being not so much targeted specifically at nicotine itself, but internally the other substances in tobacco that was causing massive health problems, and externally the nuisance that smoking in public places caused. There's a robust discussion going on in this thread about the merits of nicotine consumption, but it's become clear that it's definitely a substance that people wanted to seek out, independent of it being packaged with tobacco.
Kids who get hooked on vaping are... hooked on something that doesn't contain all the stuff that tobacco smoke contains that causes lung disease and cancer.
And since a lot of kids still do get hooked on actual smoking, you very much should want the vaping to be available as an alternative.
Cigarettes were not very cool for my generation and smoking rates were real low. I don’t think the massive vaping boom is just people that would have been smokers. They’re kids who got hooked, and while it’s not as bad as cigarettes, it’s still bad.
Being physically addicted to things to which people would not otherwise be addicted is per se bad and a valid target of state regulation to be balanced against harm-reduction of those who are present addicts.
"Physically" is a weird qualification Is a nicotine addiction even really physical? And even if it is, why the qualification?-- a shopping or gambling addiction is very harmful whereas a vaping addiction basically isn't.
I think you are looking for a distinction that will allow you to dump on vapers that isn't actually there.
"They’re kids who got hooked, and while it’s not as bad as cigarettes, it’s still bad."
Honestly? Barely.
The biggest problems: it's a waste of money (although, again, it can be done crazy cheap if you use refillable devices) and that nicotine addiction can lead to you being a bit of an asshole when you miss a fix.
There has been absolutely no finding of adverse health effects besides nicotine withdrawal. I saw a paper describe vaping as CONSERVATIVELY 95% better than smoking.
These things have been around 20 years. There's no other shoe that's about to drop on us. It's water vapor and it does exactly what we believed water vapor to do: nothing.
The opposition to vaping kind of demonstrates that this wasn't really about health or science for a lot of people, it was about puritanism.
It’s obviously nowhere near as bad as smoke, but it’s still not good to regularly inhale that much heated stuff that people don’t have a long history with.
Also issues with heavy metal exposure/bad supply chains leading to bad stuff ending up in vapes.
Impurities in the vaping solution are a solveable problem. I think it's probably more interesting to know whether there's any reason to think vaping is going to cause significant health problems decades in the future.
I've read a comment before speculating that you could end up with COPD due to the constant nicotine use in your lungs from someone with the right background to have an opinion, but I simply do not know enough to evaluate his claim.
How long does the history have to be until it's not "not long" anymore? It's been two decades since early adopters started vaping.
This has been looked into extensively, and the only reason you don't hear about it is because nobody has found the result that they want (vaping is just as bad for you as smoking!!!!!!!!!11!!! Banning this thing that mildly annoys me is a GRAVE PUBLIC HEALTH MATTER!)
I’m not sure why you seem to be talking as though the only two options here are “exactly as harmful as cigarettes” or “exactly zero harm”. I think the most likely truth is “slight harm, very much less than cigarettes”, but the fact that it’s addictive gives a presumptive reason to put some moderate controls to help people who choose to quit or want to choose not to fall into the habit.
It's not that dangerous, and moralists trying to up the level of danger so they can maintain the homicidal deterrent and stop people from having fun is a very bad project.
They do the same thing with diet soda. I'm sure there's a big bandwagon forming to say that losing weight with GLP-1s is bad and carries some secret downside. Some people just hate the idea of people "getting away" with something. It's the same reason that saying "we spend too many billions on public benefits" is a less effective political argument than "welfare queens."
Dangerous because... they start smoking? Is that a thing?
I'm personally very skeptical that vaping is harmless, but I don't have proof of that.
Some kids at the high school I teach at will go to great lengths to sneak a vape hit in. I find it mind boggling. I've smelled it-- it's not even weed. They're literally risking getting in a lot of trouble just to inhale some bubble gum smell.
I'm not gonna argue that vaping is healthy, particularly as a mental health/impulse control sort of indicator, but is it "dangerous"? Is it any more unhealthy than drinking Coke or eating Doritos? Doesn't seem to be. The conflation with smoking generally seems to create a real puritanical moral panic element to how a subset of people think about it.
I personally get more nervous about foreign particulates entering the lungs, so I don't think it's absolutely crazy to be concerned. But as you say, being better than smoking tobacco is a very low bar to cross.
Addiction is a harm in itself.
It's definitely dangerous. "Not as dangerous as cigarettes" doesn't mean "not dangerous" at all. I think many folks are misled by the term "vape" — but it's very different from WATER vapor. This is from Cleveland Clinic:
"E-liquid, also called e-juice or vape juice, is what vaping devices use to make the vapor you breathe in. E-liquids aren’t just water. They usually contain: Flavoring. Each flavoring has its own set of ingredients. Nicotine, the addictive and harmful substance in cigarettes and other tobacco products. Propylene glycol and glycerin, used to create vapor. E-liquids and flavorings sometimes have other ingredients, including: Chemicals that can cause cancer (carcinogens), like acetaldehyde and formaldehyde. Chemicals known to cause lung disease, such as acrolein, diacetyl and diethyleneglycol...Vitamin E acetate, linked to lung injury caused by vaping (EVALI, see below). Heavy metals like nickel, tin, lead and cadmium. Tiny (ultrafine) particles that can get deep into your lungs."
https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/treatments/21162-vaping
I'm agnostic as to the proper way to regulate vaping. But it seems to me we missed the boat on this: just as the scourge of cigarette smoking was rapidly being consigned to history, big tobacco pulled out a win that conveniently doubles as a significant risk to public health.
And here's some info on that nice new disease, EVALI. Sounds wonderful:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaping-associated_pulmonary_injury
I think it was more the age of the kids -- they can't buy cigarettes, and shouldn't be able to get vapes, either, but there seemed to be a movement to target teenagers with vapes that smelled like the bubblegum scented stuff they tend to buy at the mall. Or maybe it was seen as a way to mask marijuana consumption or something.
Nicotine is a neurotoxin. Yes vaping won't give cancer but it is bad for you and also makes it way more likely you get into smoking later
Kids are weird and obsessive. Math teachers are trying to avoid putting the numbers six and seven together because some internet meme.
https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/six-seven-meme-teens-math-teachers-42764bcb?st=Fs7HPM&reflink=article_copyURL_share
I've been watching South Park since they're making fun of Trump this season. In the last episode, the little main character boy has to go to the hospital because he can't stop laughing when someone says, "six seven". That made me laugh.
Oh I know. One of my 5th grade students explained this to me. (I teach music so I have a lot of grades.)
I remember several years ago some schools had to ban flaming hot cheetos because kids were obsessive about them and apparently getting flaming hot Cheeto dust all over the place.
It's not just "bubble gum smell." It's a drug.
One of the fun half-truths that was promoted to drive down smoking rates is that nicotine is not a drug with any effects besides addiction.
That is not true, and stupid. Nicotine is an awesome drug. I suspect a majority of the population would rank it above weed, in terms of things they'd rather be inhaling and/or high on. (Nobody gets paranoid from a nicotine buzz.)
Actually I think my students are vaping the ones that are just fruity flavors. They sell those.
I've sometimes worried that this could become a thing if they get too hardass on vaping after the fact...
Did you mean to reply to me? I'm not taking a pro-vaping stance here. (If you're referring to my concession that vape smoke/steam isn't as dangerous as tobacco smoke, I was talking about second-hand smoke).
Oh whoops I meant to respond to Dilan.
It's hard to decouple the spread of vaping among teens and the softening of rules and laws regarding teenagers, especially within schools.
They ban vaping at outdoor malls in California. So don't tell me this is about the smell.
A room full of smokers fills with smoke. Vaping is NOTHING like that.
People who vape act like it's totally undetectable. It's still really unpleasant to be around! I have no problem banning vaping in public on the grounds that it's annoying. I don't think people should be able to blast loud music in public either.
It's not "undetectable", but "undetectable" is not the standard for restricting people's fun.
Why not? You're just making rules up. We ban all kinds of things in public because they're unpleasant even if they're not actively harmful.
Why not?
Because fun is a value. So is individual liberty. And there's no such thing as individual liberty that is completely undetectable to you.
The freedom of gay people includes the freedom to act like gay couples in public and in front of families and children. The freedom of speech includes the freedom to engage in protests that make loud noises that other people have to hear, and to demonstrate on sidewalks and in parks that other people may use. The freedom to run in a marathon involves the closure of the streets; the freedom to use the beach involves the freedom to dress immodestly in bikinis and speedos, etc.
This is what a free society means. If your hueristic is "anyone else's freedom must be undetectable", you end up with an authoritarian society.
I think we should ban people from playing recorded audio in public entirely (except through headphones), but allow it in certain locations at relatively modest volumes (so people can have outdoor parties). And people can apply for an event licence to go above that volume. Wanna throw an outdoor dance party on the beach? Sure, but book a licence with the city/county first and they can make sure there aren't going to be 20 on the same stretch of beach the same day, and they know where the neighbours are and can tell you what time to switch off so the neighbours can sleep.
The tendency in law is to ban *amplified* music, and I think it should be OK for a busker to use a keyboard or an electric guitar (or other instrument) with a small amplifier. Create a standard for "this is a small amp that requires no licence or only a standard busking licence, the same as an acoustic instrument" and get it applied by enough places and there will be plenty of small battery-powered amps that hit exactly that power/volume level. You can create a market for a "busking amp" that way.
Yeah, I'm going to oppose that.
Judge Smails agrees.
It's disgusting. A lot of vapers don't realize how off putting their behavior is. At least smokers don't light it up constantly inside or in groups of people. But vapers can't help themselves.
Vapers probably just don't give a shit about your pathology.
Stop giving a shit about theirs. I'm sorry but people claiming injury from vaping are ridiculous to me.
You probably do a lot of things other people think are "disgusting." But they haven't been given a license by society to shit on you for it.
"People who vape act like it's totally undetectable. It's still really unpleasant to be around!"
I'm gonna hot-take this and say most of the unpleasantness is psychosomatic.
I'd rather smell almost any vape versus, like, walking past a Subway restaurant in the middle of summer.
No, it’s not. You just think you’re better than other people
I don't understand what you're saying—they ban vaping in outdoor spaces in one state (is it even enforced?), great, but you're saying you think such prohibitions are indefensible. I've definitely encountered plenty of vaping in public spaces (e.g., the NYC subway) and don't like it. I will say that Marijuana is much stinkier (I'd say stinkier even than tobacco), but all of them stink and I don't want people polluting the air in public spaces.
Of course you don't like it. But you don't realize the role that dislike of others' fun is playing in your argument, because the "pollution" from vaping is minimal. Ban cars, trucks, and buses if you don't want pollution in public places.
I don't think objecting to others having fun with vapes has pretty much anything to do with my argument, but I suppose I can't really argue against someone that can apparently read my mind more fully than even I can. (It's also absolutely absurd to suggest that vehicles are merely for "fun," which is what you must be doing if you want your analogy to hold)
There are multiple possible motivations here:
a. I don't want anyone having fun. (This is the strawman it's fun to attack.)
b. I don't want people vaping because I think it's bad for them and better for the world if fewer people do it.
c. I don't want people vaping because I dislike the smell. (This is the easiest to defend.)
I can't read anyone's mind, but as far as smoking goes, I have zero (a), a little (b), and a whole lot of (c). For vaping, I don't personally care if someone vapes in my presence--I haven't noticed it being especially unpleasant. I'd much rather have people vaping than smoking tobacco or dope around me, FWIW.
Matt basically pre-rebuttaled his argument, likely without even thinking someone would try it in the comments.
> Even though I personally really enjoyed smoking back in the day, the thing about cigarettes is that you can live a smoke-free life just fine. By contrast, we do not have any economically feasible alternatives to fossil fuels for a wide range of socially critical applications, like freight shipping and agriculture.
"Hey liberals you don't like pollution then why don't you get rid of all the cars in public very-curious" is silly and the people who pressed "like" should feel bad about themselves.
Sometimes people do understand others' motivations for holding a position better than the person holding the position. We can, after all, deceive ourselves quite a bit in order to reach the conclusions we want to. Not saying that's what's going on here but "you're not in my head" is not an automatically winning rebuttal.
Is vaping even fun?
It’s about as fun as yelling at people in comments on the internet. As in, sometimes there’s a little bit of a rush when you do it, and that’s what gets you into it, but then it becomes an addiction and you do it more and more and you have trouble stopping yourself even when you know you shouldn’t. But you still sometimes get that rush when you get just the right hit in.
Maybe the biggest problem with smoking bans is that they gave people this delusion that they deserve to be in control of everything they smell throughout the day. It's the world. It smells like stuff.
>They ban vaping at outdoor malls in California.<
California gets many things right.
Sorry, but that's a really silly regulation unless you just hate people enjoying nicotine.
Did they ban perfume? No? Okay, then it's just puritanism. That's fine. Just don't deny it.
I have to say that it would be very, very good for existing smokers if there were advantages that came from vaping, like being able to smoke in an outdoor mall, rather than everybody just subscribing to this preposterous fiction that it's anything like smoking.
As a person who always hated 2nd hand smoke, and of rationally balanced (as in not reflexively anti-regulation) libertarian sympathies, I entirely agree with Dilan - vaping I may not like but Vape steam is nothing on the order of cigarette smoke (nor the pot smell). Me merely disliking it is not a valid reason to ban or restrict.
Now the pot smell stink that's now pervading NYC and DC, that's another level and rises to public nuisance. I've always been pro-legalization (although not a pot user at all) from a liberal-libertarian PoV but the nasty reek rises well above vaping and in fact insofar as there's very good reasons to understand pot smoke as not effectively different than tobacco burning - perfectly good reasons to analyze it in the same way as tobacco.
Vaping not really at least as far as I know the science, so my mere irritation with it doesn't trigger me to want regulation.
"Me merely disliking it is not a valid reason to ban or restrict."
Why not? I mean other than your libertarian sympathies. We ban and restrict all sorts of thing just because we don't like them. For example, I can't just let my grass grow all summer and it many cities, you can't paint your house bright pink, etc.
It seems like blanket statewide bans on doing something in a public place, including privately-owned public spaces like bars or restaurants, should be reserved for stuff that's either physically harmful or objectionable to a large fraction of people. Narrower bans (no vaping in this particular open space, no durians on the subway, whatever) seem a lot more defensible on "I don't like this" grounds.
I agree. I was sort of playing devils advocate but at the same time a lot of rules amount to “ most people don’t like this thing” and that’s often enough.
Why not?
Because it is not efficent, it leads to prescriptivist nannying and eventually backlash.
Banning paint colors on houses is fucking stupid, sure townships do this - they're fucking stupid, wasteful and idits engaged in wasteful stick-up-the-assedness.
I’m not sure what’s inefficient about banning vaping in certain public spaces. But I agree this stuff is dumb. My neighbor recently painted her house a really ugly color and other than lots of people asking me about it, it has had no impact on me.
you are not sure as you're looking at this evidently (a) not via economics, (b) not via the lens of all efforts of any kind are allways trade offs - there are not unlimited resources to enforce rule sets, regs, and there is always going to be a trade-off on efforts.
It's not efficient as the Return on Effort is clearly going to be weak given no particular good evidence at all that there is any strong real world health effect, smell annoyance is weak tea re vaping, and time and effort spent on X will always take away from Y. Given effort is not free, that bandwidth and focus are not unlimited, efficient deployment of regs and enforcement should have a reasonable cost-benefit.
(and equally rules-on-books that are not enforced are not free, as they both sap credibility of other rules and engender period wasteful enforcement. No free lunches exist... ergo I favor focus on best regulation with good returns to society and doing that regulation well and enforcing it reasonably)
To some extent the second-hand objection to vaping isn’t because it’s genuinely annoying but because people enjoy having the power to self-righteously object to it, using secondhand smoke as a precedent.
That may be true of some objectors, but I don't care about people using vapes, provided it doesn't smell up the spaces up I'm in or blow into my face. The fact that some objectors may object for reasons you find distasteful hardly means that all objectors do, or that all objections are therefore suspect by association.
As I said, to SOME extent
I'm not really sure why you replied to me, then; you're just restating what Dilan had already said in his initial post.
The first time I saw someone make a blow a big cloud of vape in a grocery store I was completely dumb-founded. The vaping thing had been going so good, but now people seem to want to show off that they can do it. I was most annoyed of the obvious harm to the cause of vaping it was doing. The behavior is not something people want to associate with.
That first time was also the very last time as laws quickly got passed. I don't think we should have had those laws -- this stuff seems something that can be handled by the free market. Let some stores allow it or not, and people can vote with their feet.
And there is basicaly NO enforcing of of any laws that may exist on use of marijuana in ways that expose others to the stench!
I wonder if that will rely on passage of time? I don't see people aggressively enforcing no smoking in outdoor spaces where it is prohibited or unwanted, but I also don't see a lot of people smoking in those places anymore, either. Maybe pot smoke will eventually be reduced through public pressure/shaming/complaints?
This depends so much on where you live. I keep reading about NYC smelling super gross and while I occasionally get a dank whiff, the Bay Area just isn't this bad. It makes me wonder if California's legalization is just a better regime than New York's.
It’s terrible in DC
I'm not sure what to think about whether vape steam is unpleasant or not. I've had very little experience coming across this but it seems like it could be all over the map depending on the vape.
"Get your shit out of my face". I think it's a straightforward argument, whether or not you ultimately agree with it.
Yeah, it depends. Pot vapes are stinkier than tobacco vapes. The Vuse and Juul tobacco vapes that they sell at 7/11 are only available in menthol or regular, and don’t really have a scent, at least not after the vapor dissipates. These are kind of like e-cigarettes, almost. These are great, I keep one in my car because I don’t smoke cigarettes in my car and drive long distances for work. My sense of smell isn’t super sensitive, but these are designed to basically leave no lingering smell.
But there are different, bigger vapes for nicotine juice - I don’t know what you’d call those, but they’re qualitatively different and use different juice that you get at a vape store, and refill them. They have parts that wear out that you buy separately when they do, and you can adjust the strength of the vaporizer. You can buy all different flavors of vape juice for these, and some of those *will* leave a smell that lingers for a while. I personally don’t like this kind. They’re complicated, finicky, more expensive on the front end, and less discreet. But they’re quite popular, as evidenced by the proliferation of vape stores.
I love the smell of marijuana smoke
(Nope im not a smoker)
As Eliza says, it can be high variance. The good stuff can be really good, but the bad stuff can be super skunky.
We should just ban skunk weed. I find the smell of other pot strains to be quite pleasant 😏
"I mean, I think plenty of people find the smoke/steam from vaping a fairly unpleasant externality."
People deal with a lot of unpleasant externalities in the world, and we legislate very few of them. I'd rather have somebody vaping next to me rather than somebody who didn't wash their ass.
There is a system for regulating this kind of thing and it's called "politeness."
What is the best evidence on the health consequences of vaping?
I agree with the general take, but saying that anti-vapers are motivated by opposition to fun seems a bit extreme. There is *some* legitimate uncertainty as to whether the substitution effect (smokers switch to vapes) dominates the complement effect (non-users are drawn to vapes, and some of them start using cigarettes also). To be clear, I am extremely confident that the first effect is larger, but I don’t think it’s insane to disagree.
There’s also general bureaucracy / inertia / “abundance-of-cautionism”. There are very obvious biological and chemical reasons to think vaping is much safer, but we don’t have like 50 years of longitudinal data to absolutely prove it. I think this sort of thinking is pernicious, but I don’t think it’s really moralistic in character. To the effect that it’s downstream of ideology at all, it’s more to do with the idea that causing harm is worse than letting harm happen, which is dumb but is pervasive in all sorts of places.
I think some of this is simpler than people are making it. There is almost no upside to allowing vaping in public assuming you also don't allow smoking in public. If you only ban vaping I suppose maybe some people end up smoking who would otherwise just vape, but I'm pretty skeptical of that. Getting back to vaping, there is no real upside so people just have very little tolerance for any downside. Even minor annoyance of a bad small or the small likelihood that a younger vaper will move onto smoking is enough to tip the scales. Add that to the fact that vapers are a tiny minority and it seems fairly simple to explain why it is banned without having to get into some of the more puritanical or emotional reasons (people just enjoy being self-righteous) offered in some other comments.
The upside of allowing vaping is that it is a much safer way to enjoy nicotine, and thus we should do nothing to discourage it (which may cause more people to smoke tobacco).
The reason for banning smoking was second hand smoke effects. I think you would need to prove that vaping caused the same health problems for it to be ok to ban.
Second-hand smoke effects that were mainly bullshit anyway, at least when it comes to health.
What do you mean ok to ban? Morally? Legally? It’s not as if there is a right to vape any more than there is a right not to smell someone vaping.
I mean using the police power of the state to say that private businesses can't allow people to vape if they want.
There’s upside if you vape. Anti-vapers are just self-important and self-righteous. There’s nothing else to it
There is upside to vaping as compared to smoking but not as compared to doing neither of those things. I get that it feels good to think bad things about people who disagree with you but I just don’t think it’s true that anti-vapers are those things.
I think this kind of thing is the worst impulse among liberals and Democrats
Yeah I tend to agree that the impulse to protect people from themselves is a bad impulse for democrats. So is the impulse to try and create some sort of society free from unpleasant things. Just not sure we need to assign some of the motives people are assigning here.
Your second sentence is anti-thought.
but someone’s fun can have negative externalities and sometimes people want to ban it. take public transit: a person may enjoy having a loud conversation on their phone while blaring music. most other people would prefer they shut up. there’s no health risk here. It’s just one persons annoyance is another persons fun.
And we do this all the time. lots of municipalities have laws around noise complaints after a certain time and try to ban vehicles that make loud noises. why would it be surprising or puritan that people want to ban people making gross smells?
Accusing people of puritanism is non responsive. to actually engage, argue that the persons annoyance isn’t worth restricting other people’s freedom.
PS i find vaping completely inoffensive and have no desire to ban it. but that’s because the smell doesn’t bother me. however, marijuana smoke revolts me and i desperately want it banned.
Sometimes the antipuritans can start to look temperamentally identical to the puritans.
I write to clarify that this is a separate and wholly distinct Joseph. A whole other Joseph.
I recommend you change your handle to "David" to avoid this confusion in the future.
David is my father. No, seriously, that's my dad's name.
This is why avatars are good.
It's particularly cruel when Substack rolls the same colored default avatars for people who choose the same usernames.
There really should be a requirement for unique usernames on Substack.
I tried for “Sir Beverley Milton-Osborne, Baron Osborne,” but Substack says it’s too many characters.
We’ve already got too many characters in here. *ba dum tiss*
*fires finger pistols at you*
Well, we aren't doing much about marijuana smoke, are we? Plus farts and body odor and various sorts of food. Just this thing that despite what people say in this thread, most people don't even smell anyway.
Like with a bubblegum flavor vape people will notice the smell, but not that of a menthol Juul
I wouldn't go so far as to say that "not adopting a harm reduction framework for regulating all nicotine-related products" equals "murdering significant numbers of smokers."
My thought as well. If not allowing them to vape is really murder because it means some percentage of them will continue smoking cigarettes and eventually die from doing so then it would seem like his proposed solution should be an absolute ban on smoking of any kind, and we should use the maximum power of the state to enforce that since not preventing those deaths is literally murder. We should literally arrest people we catch smoking and lock them up for as long as necessary to ensure they don't smoke and make us eventually murder them.
But something tells me that's not the position Dilan would take...
Yea, the e-cigarette rules process out of the FDA was genuinely disgusting as both a policy and legal matter. It should be seen as a cautionary tale of what not to do, especially when next thing you know a lunatic like RFK is running that show.
Carbon sequestration/new techs more broadly are the e-cigarette of the climate movement: the thing that markedly reduces the harm they’ve been pointing to but which doesn’t satisfy their puritanical impulses and instead inspires their animosity.
I'm skeptical that carbon sequestration will work at the scale needed and at an acceptable cost, and worry that it's relatively easy to sell carbon offsets based on voodoo math and not actually reduce atmospheric CO2 much. In principle, it seems like a good idea, and maybe it can be made to work, but I'd like to see some convincing evidence that it can work at scale and without lots of fraud.
The only way to get that evidence is to try to implement it at scale.
I was with you until you went to "anti-smokers WANT smokers to die." I don't think anybody thinks that far ahead and the anti-vapers just aren't aware of the fact that vaping is much safer.
Vaping is safer than smoking. I think most people are aware of that. But, not vaping is much safer than vaping, so the question becomes how many people vape who would have never smoked and how does that compare to the people who switched from smoking to vaping.
The argument that people make that vaping is harmless feels absurd to me.
I think the evidence we have is that vaping is largely an alternative to smoking so the anti-vaping campaign is wrong on cost benefit grounds, but I don't think that means they're wishing death upon smokers.
So here's how it works. People want folks to not use nicotine. You can see that even in this thread. A lot of people are VERY concerned about the fact that other people might use nicotine. To the point where they actually lie and make nicotine into this really dangerous substance, when in point of fact it isn't. It's the other stuff in cigarettes that cause cancer.
Pre-vaping, the status quo was that the punishment for using nicotine was a gruesome, painful death. Which is pretty useful if you think the problem is people using nicotine rather than people getting cancer or emphysema.
Vaping takes that away. It means now people can recreationally use nicotine without the risk of cancer. Which... any rational person should support. But in reality, it's super-unpopular with lots of people, because it doesn't stop people from using nicotine. (Again, see this thread for examples of it.)
So what's actually going on? Well, what's going on is vaping takes away the thing that was literally the killer argument against nicotine use. It allows people to do it relatively safely. And if you are a moralist about folks who have fun through nicotine use, that bothers you. It shouldn't, but it does.
As I said in my original post, there's historical parallels to this. Prohibitionists absolutely had the government poison alcohol. Because if you really believe that people shouldn't engage in a certain sort of fun, you don't want it to be safe. Another example of this is the religious right hating condoms and the Catholic Church hating all sorts of birth control. That baby and that STD were the things that were supposed to stop you from having illicit sex.
This is a real form of reasoning, whether people acknowledge it or not, and it does real work in the argument against safer forms of fun.
Thanks for explaining this further, makes good sense.
My understanding is that even chewing tobacco (and pipes and cigars) are vastly less bad for you than smoking cigarettes, so they might admit a different policy response too (or maybe not; they are still not good for you, and neither is vaping and produce smells etc).
Lung damage is typically exceptionally bad, one can't live for very long at all without proper oxygen intake.
I agree with this but not sure what broader point you are making (i.e. are you agreeing or disagreeing with my comment?).
I'm agreeing with you that smoking tobacco is likely the worst.
Related to the above, linking an interesting article arguing that chewing tobacco may also be lower risk than most people believe:
https://www.sensible-med.com/p/defining-the-risk-of-oral-tobacco
It probably is. But again, moralists oppose the fun. The disease is a useful tool to stop the fun.
I don't think you need much moralism when the practice is thoroughly gross and unhygienic. If they ate it instead of keeping a nasty sludge bottle on their desks it'd be fine.
Or they just disposed of it the moment it left their mouth, like gum.
I guess if being completely grossed out by the spitting is "opposing the fun", yeah, I oppose the fun. I'm not sure I'd want it legally banned, but I definitely think trying to make it socially unacceptable is fine.
Prior to entering the trades I've never seen it but it's just a thing at rural coded workplaces... It's surprising that it's even tolerated but it just is.
Do you find that moralists are opposed to, like, playing frisbee in the park? If not, maybe what they object to is not fun per se but some kind of externality.
Moralists are of course supportive of the sorts of fun they approve of. That's the point-- they want to decide how the rest of us have fun and how we don't.
But that’s just begging the question. If what they enjoy is controlling other’s fun, why do they permit *any* kinds of fun? What determines whether a kind of fun is one they approve of or disapprove of?
Reminds me of one of many wild Lyman Stone tweets, where at least he's consistent in targeting *all* fun! https://x.com/lymanstoneky/status/1880276276235346065
"Is it a thing people mostly buy or do because it is enjoyable and fun?
It is not taxed highly enough."
In some ways the question of whether vaping is a bad thing is about why smoking is bad. Is smoking something we should discourage because nicotine is addictive or because tobacco smoke is incredibly carcinogenic? I know plenty of smart rational people with will explain that we need to ban vaping because nicotine is addictive and they know someone who smoked even as they were treated for lung cancer. But vaping is light years safer because it doesn't contain tar and over 50 other carcinogens. There have been safety issues with vaping, but those were with black market vapes and the way to fix that is to regulate it.
One of the most effective public health campaigns to reduce lung cancer deaths was Sweden getting it smokers to switch from smoking to snus, which is a traditional Scandinavian oral tobacco product and comes with lower risks of cancer and cardiovascular disease. In Europe it's only legal in Sweden, Norway and Switzerland. When Sweden joined the EU they specifically negotiated a clause that allowed it to be legal, though the EU is making noise about banning it on public health grounds.
Vapes and snus are harm reduction. In an ideal world, nobody would get addicted to nicotine but people are addicted to nicotine and that's not the world we live so it's better that people get their nicotine from safer methods. Public health has made a lot of mistakes in recent years and the insistence that vaping cannot play a role in getting people to stop smoking is one of them. Every now and then there'll be a study claiming that vaping is just as dangerous as smoking and it turns out it's crap quality. Or they will insist that vaping is not safe (what is) without noting that it's a lot less dangerous than smoking. So you have people switching from vaping back to cigarettes because they think cigarettes are safer. Misleading the public about an alternative to one of the leading causes of death is going to get people killed.
What makes this even odder is that public health has embraced harm reduction for illegal drugs. Where I live, we have a harm reduction team that passes out supplies, narcan and test strips but if someone asks about treatment they have to give them a referral to someone else. We even had a nasty fight over whether second hand fentanyl was harmful. But when it comes to nicotine, the health department's primary goal is to get people to become nicotine free.
"the anti-smoking lobby WANTS to murder smokers because they want to deter people from the fun they disapprove of" Honestly this reminds of a cultural campaign in the UK to try to shame people into supporting legalizing prostitution because otherwise you are "pro-murder and pro-serial killer" (Charlie Booker had a whole funny bit about this back in his Newswipe days). It's argumentative style that doesn't stand up to even the slightest scrutiny IMO. Everyone needs to calm down and read more Hirschman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rhetoric_of_Reaction#Proposal
It's the lowest rung on the dark arts ladder. If you don't support <my proposed fix for this problem> it's because you hate <whomever is being harmed by this problem>.
I guess from a nicotine delivery standpoint, Zyn seems better than vaping health wise, so I don't necessarily think going at vaping is/was a bad idea.
That's bad reasoning. Every product that is safer than smoking should be widely avaliable. Allow people to choose their own fun!
So smoking is the health threshold by which we should determine whether a product should be legal or not? Nicotine is still pretty bad for you! I'm not sure what the answer here is but as a non-smoker (and we are the majority), I don't like the secondhand vape smoke or the marijuana smoke.
Is there any evidence that nicotine has negative health effects?
https://gwern.net/nicotine
The cardiovascular effects have been well known for a long time:
https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/CIR.0000000000001293
This is the conclusion “Smokeless oral nicotine product use has potential adverse effects on some but not all biomarkers of CVD risk” pretty non-comittal and weak.
I don’t have studies to hand for you but it’s not good for your heart (or so I concluded the last time I looked into this). Of course the dose makes the poison but frequent use is associated with heart diseases. Which does make intuitive sense—it’s a stimulant. That’s not conclusive—caffeine doesn’t seem to have long term harmful effects on your heart for most people—but a lot of people are walking sound with high blood pressure and dosing a stimulant that increases heart rate and blood pressure all day probably isn’t harmless.
I also concluded, though, that compared to my other vices (like not lifting weights, eating red meat, drinking alcohol, etc.) it should be pretty low on my list of stuff to worry about.
Nicotine is not actually bad for you. It's addictive but it's also fun and not bad for you. It's the other stuff in tobacco which is bad for you.
So no, you shouldn't be able to police others' use of nicotine qua nicotine.
And that should also help explain why tobacco became an acceptable recreational drug many centuries ago, as opposed to cannabis or others.
Nicotine is actually bad for you, in a way similar to caffeine. It wears out your blood vessels, not your lungs. But cigarette smoking, which people should also do, is much worse for your health because of the tar and carcinogens in tobacco that nicotine juice doesn’t have.
This comment seems fine except for the wild "which people should also do" phrase inserted in the middle.
“Nicotine is actually bad for you…”
Nicotine was used as an insecticide for hundreds of years.
The cardiovascular effects have been well known for a long time:
https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/CIR.0000000000001293
Which again, is not an argument either for or against vaping or Zyn, just that saying it's harmless is an overstatement.
Tobacco should be widely available too!
I knew you'd have a lot to comment on this thread.
Yeah, freedom is good
So is expressing that freedom on social media!
I mean they can still do that with vaping and cigarettes or are you thinking vaping indoors should have been allowed?
Vaping indoors should be allowed, but also, here where I live, they prohibit even vaping outdoors.
Second one seems silly to me fwiw
The thing is, it's a tell....
Zyn is so much more intense and strong than a vape. I tried it once and had to throw it out, it burned
I ultimately agree with Dilan downthread, but from a pure harm reduction standpoint I think you're correct to push totally toward nicotine pouches instead. From my memory though, vaping came first, so what Dilan said about harm reduction upthread would still have applied.
I tried Zyn, I think they’re more harmful than you think. They’re super potent
Potency seems like something that's able to be calibrated. And harm reduction doesn't always mean harm elimination.
Should have got them substituted on nicotine gum instead :), was long term use of nicotine gum (with no tobacco use) a thing people did?
As I recall, it was deliberately designed to not be a pleasant experience, so as to serve not only as tobacco cessation but also eventually nicotine cessation--thus why vapers couldn't ultimately get their product defined as a tobacco cessation product. But I might be wrong on that, someone like Dilan could set me straight.
And that's the point. When people are saying "it shouldn't be pleasant", as far as I am concerned they are being authoritarian puritan prudes. How about allowing other people to engage in pleasant activities they disapprove of? That's kind of what a free society is all about.
Yeah, nicotine gum is useful for a long flight, but it isn’t pleasant. There’s no flavor to it.
I am skeptical that vaping is more than a single order of magnitude better for you than smoking
A single order of magnitude is a BFD though
What’s the mechanism by which vaping generates 10% as many deaths per capita as smoking does from cancer and emphysema?
You are inhaling weird chemicals. I will be surprised if the number of life-years lost is less than 10% of what smoking causes
Vape juice is mostly nicotine, glycerin, and propylene glycol. The latter two are pretty innocuous chemicals not known to be carcinogenic when vaporized. Cheap cannabis vapes were the ones that had the vitamin E based solubilizers that caused popcorn lung, tobacco vapes don’t.
Some of the unregulated vape juice with exotic flavors, especially sweet flavors, I wouldn’t trust to be nontoxic when vaporized, based on what happened with cheap cannabis vapes. I like the Vuse/Juul e-cigarettes that you can buy at 7-11, though. Those companies are big and regulated and I think the product is fairly satisfying, too. It gets me through my work day and long commutes when I don’t want to stink up myself or my car with cigarette smoke.
1. I am skeptical we know for sure that vaping is a lot less harmful than smoking, so I am not opposed to warnings.
2. On the other hand: I don't find vape personally bothersome at all. I am willing to take the risk on second hand vape.
The lower health effects of vaping are only for non-flavored vapes. Teens were heavily using flavored vapes over non-flavored vapes.
This is wildly untrue. No amount of vaping is remotely comparable to habitual smoking.
But this assumes that everyone who vapes would otherwise be smoking. I don't think that's true.
Even if they are just vaping, it just isn't that dangerous.
I think we know that in a vacuum that smoking is worse for you than vaping, but I don’t think we know very well yet exactly how dangerous vaping is.
It might be very dangerous and you could still conclude that it should be unhindered by government, and that’s fine! People have different priorities and values.
But I think vaping is dangerous and it’s reasonable to have policies that discourage people from doing it.
I don’t think it’s clear yet if vaping is safer than smoking. I’ve seen articles saying that the vapor clings to throat more.
Tangentially, I really, really find flight-shaming to be the absolute lowest and laziest form of performing concern about climate change.
And unfortunately, it's really popular among senior academics who built their career in part on flying to conferences, research sites and collaborations, and then turn around and sanctimoniously tell younger scholars that flying is bad and you shouldn't do it!
Flying commercial isn't all that bad anyway.
Flying PRIVATE is wasteful, but good luck getting rich people to give that up.
This is not true. One transatlantic flight is about 10% US annual per capita carbon emissions. So giving up two international trips is comparable to switching entirely to electric cars, for example.
Until someone comes up with a way to enable carbon-free, fast international travel, I think it’s a waste of time to vex about air travel, especially since there is still significant work to be done in other areas that are much more practical to address and impactful.
Which is irrelevant in the scheme of things.
If you just don't think climate change is important you should just say that and we can all save time arguing.
I think we should make the prices of things like transatlantic flights reflect the costs imposed by them, so that customers correctly take those costs into account instead of expecting them to somehow make some kind of personal moral balancing decision. Put a price on CO2 emissions and let markets do their magic.
So that just punishes lower income people. Again.
I think climate change is important and that a single person's decision to fly is not.
On the other hand a private plane is like 100 people flying and if you do it enough you are getting into "stuff a single person does that can actually matter" territory.
The thing about carbon emissions is that they are precisely continuous and thus there isn't a threshold where some amount "doesn't matter": it all matters precisely as much as the amount emitted.
Right but traveling 8,000 miles by car for any purpose would be worse. It's not the plane that's the issue it's the going someplace.
Cars and planes are pretty close in emissions per passenger mile. If the car has more than one passenger, it's going to be cleaner unless it's a really low MPG vehicle.
That's not correct a 787 gets 102 mpg per passenger. The vast majority of 787s are flown full. The vast majority of vehicles are occupied by one person.
Sure, if you take the most fuel efficient passenger jet, consider only CO2 and not NO emissions (a quick search says that's anywhere from negligible to 90% as bad as the CO2 depending on various assumptions) , and assume it's 100% full (Google says ~85% is the airline average), and compare it to an average ICE car with one passenger, the jet's around 3x better.
If you loosen these assumptions a bit, you get that the plane is maybe 1.75x as efficient as a car with one person, and probably loses out if the car has more than one passenger. Yes, most car trips are solo, but a cross-country car ride is more likely to be a recreational journey with multiple people.
Is that per passenger, or for the whole flight with like 200 people on it?
Per passenger
OK, thanks.
Any such benchmarking needs to be per-capita to per-capita. Not total to per-capita.
That is per capita.
But you're using an aggregate per-capita average as the denominator for a single person's change in emissions - that's what's being pointed out.
I don't understand what the complaint is. One person flying twice to Europe and back is similar to one person switching from electric back to gasoline cars.
Isn't that one trip? Or are people emigrating in this hypothetical
Two round trips
Bill Maher had a great monologue on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=63KXfwC9BdU
I'd really like it if we had kept flight-shaming separate from travel-shaming, ie it's only bad to fly if there was an alternative way of getting there.
If it would only take a day or two more to go to a week-long event, then you shouldn't fly. But if you'd have to spend three months on a ship, then of course you should fly.
That is flight-shaming shouldn't be "don't go to that conference", but "the university will pay the extra for you to go by train/ferry".
For these sorts of events, it is possible to travel within North America or within Europe without flying. It's inconvenient and expensive, but the expensive bit should be addressed by "someone else paying" and the purpose of the shaming should be to get people to put up with the inconvenience.
But it is really stupid to try to stop people flying across the Atlantic.
Also it's depressing that my best alternative to flying is a diesel Amtrak train that goes 40 mph
Yeah, not flying also has a bunch of costs. If you drive instead of fly for someplace 600 miles away (about 1000 km), you put out less CO2 but have a substantially higher chance of dying in a car accident, burn two days of your vacation on driving cross-country, are subject to weather and construction delays that are outside your control, etc. Passenger rail in the US ranges from lousy to awful to nonexistent. And so on.
A day or two? More like an hour or two. I take the train from Philly to NYC or DC, but I am not taking a train to Chicago.
Very much agreed. A day or two is a LOT of time. Doubly so if you are burning vacation.
I'm not going to do a 2 day drive some place for vacation. I might do an 8 hour drive instead of a couple hour flight (knowing that you also burn a lot of other time at the airport)
I was talking very specifically about work-related conferences; employers really should be prepared to pay you to spend a day travelling to avoid you flying, especially as you can work on a laptop while on the train.
As for vacation, I can see that your experiences are very different from mine - I really struggle to use up all my vacation days every year (but then I have 27 in addition to public holidays).
But in that case I'm not going to waste two weekends of my own time on both ends of a train journey to a week long conference. It's an absurd suggestion!
agreed if you are going any distance there should almost always be a travel day.
And that travel day will NOT be one of my weekend days.
As for vacation, I finally just got back to 4 weeks (20 days). I was at 15 for a while.
But even at 20, I don't have much problem burning through most of them. I take a couple of days here and there. For example, in the summer, taking the kids to the river to swim (or the lake to wakeboard). In the winter to the snow to go sledding etc
plus Holiday time, usually take a day off for their birthdays etc
Once again we have to cheer on the efforts of Donald Trump in fighting climate change by greatly reducing the number of transoceanic passengers coming to the US.
Yeah - in Europe we have actual viable alternatives, at least intra-Europe. Like, I'm not going to fly from Paris to London because it's way easier and probably cheaper to take the Eurostar. There is a point of diminishing returns (e.g. stupid Gulf of Finland), but trains actually work here, unlike in the US!
Yeah, I wouldn't expect someone to take a train through the Balkans, and I'd only expect someone to get a ferry across the Baltic if they start on one coast (so Stockholm to Helsinki, get a ferry; Oslo to Helsinki, get a plane).
But I can get from my home in Manchester to Barcelona in a day by train. It seems entirely reasonable to just take a day to travel, especially if it's work travel and they're expecting you to be there for several days. I can take a laptop and work on the train!
And I have more days of annual leave than I can really use most years, so tacking an extra day of travel on each end of my holiday seems perfectly fine.
If we had trains in the U.S. comparable to what I've used in Europe, I'd travel more. It's much less stressful than driving or navigating most airports here. I did take Amtrak from Connecticut to NYC, and found it just as nice as my experience in Europe, but that particular line is well run and timely because it hooks Boston to NYC to D.C. Most other multi-state passenger trains here have wonky schedules, depending on where you live.
My experience is that the people most into anti-conference activism are junior -- people who have a job (grad students are less activist about the organization of academia) but are still young and radical.
Yeah, that's also a strong constituency.
And in the UK, where international field trips are ubiquitous in certain disciplines, we now have to grapple with "climate anxiety" among undergraduates (among their many other anxieties that make educating them difficult). This is a problem because for such disciplines (e.g. geography), ever-more exotic and far-flung field trips are the equivalent of U.S. colleges having extravagant facilities: it's an arms race to one-up each other to attract a shrinking pool of students.
Totally OT but this overuse of the word “anxiety” drives me nuts. WaPo has an article about Obama’s efforts to combat Republican gerrymandering, and the headline says it reflects his “anxiety” about Trump. Nah. Obama undoubtedly has “concerns” but he’s not a guy who gives off “anxiety” vibes. Not every negative reaction to something external is anxiety!
(Hope it’s obvious I’m not saying YOU overuse the word anxiety)
"Concern" isn't sufficiently pathological for people to understand that things are serious though!
I agree that “anxiety” is overused! And don’t worry, I got what you meant.
You mean Lisa J shouldn't be . . . anxious? [/runs off laughing maniacally]
Conferences were basically the only perk of grad school
They still are, amidst various academic bullshit. But I've grown to not like huge conferences - it's all about small colloquiums and workshops where you can actually hang out with the participants and drink beer, etc.
My deep belief is hating on private jets is just deep jealously, and climate change explanation lets people disdain the rich while feeling morally righteous. If all the private jets switched to carbon-free fuel tomorrow, people would still hate them.
I wouldn't (I'd be very happy if that happened), but I would say, private aviation is also a big rich person's exemption from security theater as well.
I guess, though I tend to think of flight shaming (and I’m talking more about commercial, not private jets per se) is more mimetic than it is motivated by any strong emotion.
"Marijuana policy has moved in the opposite direction, but the number one complaint I hear about marijuana legalization isn’t any kind of detailed policy analysis — it’s annoyance that the smell has become ubiquitous in lots of places."
What do people think of marijuana legalization at this point?
Similar to gambling I feel like the commercialization has been pretty not great.
Better than prohibition but still with plenty of trade offs. For the life of me I can't understand why public consumption seems to be completely ignored. I don't care much about what people do in their own homes but its ridiculous the way I can't take my kids to any shopping center or public place without them being exposed to it.
This is underappreciated with respect to Oregon’s drug decriminalization as well. People know that alcohol is legal but that doesn’t mean you’re allowed to take over a park with a couple 30-racks. The attendant de facto legalization of public consumption is 90% of the problem.
Do you see people using in public, or is it just a lingering smell? Also, where and in what environments do you come across this.
I can't actually remember seeing anyone smoking. So enforcement of any ban would probably be nearly impossible. But I also don't think I encounter the smell nearly as often as others on here.
I live in a close in DC suburb and cannot leave my neighborhood without smelling it. That includes while driving my kids to school at like 730 on a weekday morning or stopping at the shopping center up the street. I don't want to go too much into my personal history but I was quite the partier in my younger days, and even in middle age don't have hang ups about responsible adults having a little fun on a Friday night. But if it's annoying to me then I imagine it's quite the nuisance to those without my generally laid back attitude towards this sort of thing. At minimum I would like a little more respect for people who aren't trying to take questions about what exactly it is from their 8 year olds, to say nothing about those who create even more difficulties and dangers on the roads.
It's kind of weird that there are lots of non-stinky ways to consume cannabis, but people still walk around smoking joints and pipes rather than just popping an edible. There's probably a tactile component to it, kind of like cigarette smoking, that adds to the experience beyond the chemical reaction in your brain.
It's that, combined with cost. My guess is that a lot of the product being smoked may still be black market, since its significantly cheaper given cannabis taxes.
Also more controllable. I'm a VERY infrequent user, but on the maybe 1-2 times a year I'll partake I find it more enjoyable to puff a vape pen than to take an edible. The effects seem hit much faster, but also you can take as big or small a hit as you want, and you can take as many or as few hits as you want. That's different than an edible where you frequently have to wait a while to feel the impact, and at that point you may get hit with a harder reaction than you anticipated, which is not fun.
Different types of consumption have different effects for different people. (For example, edibles are completely useless for me.)
Also, not everybody thinks it's "stinky."
Really, why not just assume, since you obviously don't know anything about cannabis, that there IS a reason, and not just that weed smokers are a bunch of dum-dumbs?
" but I was quite the partier in my younger days"
same...
Interesting. Makes me think there's also a whole lot of people wandering around with a an alcohol buzz at 7:30 in the morning, and we just don't realize it because we don't smell it. Alcohol is still more compelling for the user and more widespread in its usage.
I'm hard pressed though to think of an enforcement mechanism since the it seems the act is quick and at least somewhat furtive, but the resulting smell is lingering long after.
As for the kids, tell them that's people smoking, and it's bad for them and they shouldn't be doing it. Alternatively, nobody should be doing anything that smells that bad in public.
There are absolutely people doing that with alcohol. I had an old room mate who ultimately went to med-school but was working in some sort of orderly/EMT type function at a big hospital when we lived in the same house. He'd regularly tell stories about people coming in for a fall or some other injury being determines to be drunk out of their minds in the middle of the day.
Anyway my intent isn't to tell people what they should and shouldn't put in their bodies. I'd be a huge hypocrite if I tried. But I am asking what the modern post legalization pothead thinks they owe other people. Even in these comments it seems like the answer is 'absolutely nothing' which strikes me as both wrong but also as good of a way as I can imagine to build support for a backlash.
I dated an alcoholic like that once. Don’t recommend.
That’s not to say day drinking on the beach when you’re on vacation or the occasional glass of wine with lunch on a non work day is a problem at all
I'd suggest that THC supresses the urge to consume more alcohol.
I assure you this is not the case... Though compared to the urge to make peanut butter sandwiches at 2 AM it's minimal.
In Wissahickon Park in Philadelphia if you walk the 5 mile length of the picturesque "Forbidden Drive" you will encounter multiple people smoking weed as they saunter along. Even walking around my neighborhood I'd say I smell it at least once on every walk. It is pervasive.
I see it in Miami all the time. I saw three tourists passing around a pretty big blunt down by the river yesterday on my way home. I see people walking around smoking, too, including a lot of construction workers in the morning on the way to their job site. These are guys working with rebar and concrete. (And, hopefully, not the tower crane operators.)
Having had two large construction projects going near my house recently, I can confirm that the parking area used by the workers gathering in the mornings consistently reeks of marijuana.
Dunno where you live, but here all the big, luxury condo towers are shoddy. Maybe that’s due to everyone being stoned all day. (There’s one really large one with three towers that had to replace all its PVC pipe because the contractor used the wrong kind—the kind that off gasses something that corrodes steel rebar, and the pipe is encased in concrete in many places. I think it was a $2M+ repair. I know of three buildings—there are likely more—that had to redo the waterproofing on their amenity decks and pools, including where I live. Drooping balconies. Stuff like that.)
Yay for the Latin American-style corruption in Miami code enforcement! Surfside, you ain’t seen nothing yet!
Well, it may help with the chronic pain a manual laborer like that endures, too
And the boredom.
I see it all the time in Seattle but not as often as I see people using harder drugs. I see it in the park across the street and the Capitol Hill Link light rail station.
Yeah, you’re talking about the park right across from Safeway at John and 15th, right? I used to live facing it. Yeah it got pretty rough.
I like smelling weed occasionally when walking around Seattle. It reminds me that I live in a civilized place, a blue state. Unfortunately I occasionally see people using hard drugs in public, which is the dark side of this place
The smell doesn't bother me, either. Not like tobacco. The worst thing about the drugs is what it's doing to the bodies and spirits of the users. Every day I hear anger and screaming outside because their lives suck.
That sucks it’s every day for you. I rarely see anyone doing hard drugs in public these days, but I did the other day walking past the bus stops at Alaska Junction. Dude just passed out in the middle of the sidewalk while his buddies were around smoking off of foil. They need to take that shit out of West Seattle and back to Capitol Hill where it belongs!
It’s one of those things like we were talking about yesterday, no one wants to be the “bad” guy but someone needs to. I would support the cops doing something about that shit, but it’s not like I called the cops or anything, I had better shit to do with my day, and I’d feel like an asshole doing so besides
Do you similarly object to the public use of tobacco cigarettes?
Eh hard to say given the degree to which its been driven from public spaces. Having been a consumer of both products I will say I think tobacco smoke seems to dissipate outdoors and with pretty minimal distance to a degree weed smoke doesn't. But I'm also not sure its apples to apples. Everyone hitting their vape or whatever publicly is almost certainly intoxicated and by virtue of where they are it's also fair to say they're very likely driving under the influence (my perception is that a lot of the odor is wafting out of moving vehicles).
I'm not a teetotaler or particularly interested in policing people's good times but I think it's fair to say we've permitted a level of free for all with this that we don't tolerate with anything else. Back in the day part of the case for legalization was that it would allow for better control over the negative externalities. I think that's still possible but it isn't what has happened.
Tobacco cigarettes are not inebriating so the apology doesn’t fully hold. I would object to people loitering in front of my grocery store drinking and smoking, yes.
The inebriating effect is very different than alcohol though. Drunk people are rowdy. Weed smokers are generally minding their own business.
True, but so are heroin addicts. Still (correctly) considered unpleasant to walk past people nodding off in doorways. People find being around people high on drugs in public in broad daylight unpleasant and inappropriate for children.
Marijuana users aren't like heroin addicts in any relevant ways
People don't regularly steal things to buy marijuana, or kill themselves using it, so maybe be a little careful with your comparisons.
(To quote the late Bob Saget in "Half Baked": "I sucked **** for cocaine. You ever suck **** for weed?)
You could always just toke in your house before you go out for a stroll. And if you can't wait then I'd consider whether you're really in control of your usage.
> You could always just toke in your house before you go out for a stroll.
Not if you live in an apartment building, or with someone who’s sensitive to smoke, or someone you’re trying to hide your use from.
Some people live in apartment buildings where smoking in your house is against the rules.
The effects of marijuana use range widely, from a pleasant euphoria to psychosis (rare, especially for normal people using in moderation, but known).
In my state it happened that way because they just... didn't put anything in the law about it. As a result, if smoking is allowed somewhere, then smoking anything legal is allowed there. Municipalities can pass ordinances but I don't know that any actually have.
I honestly do not think your children smelling marijuana is a huge problem but I can understand disagreement.
I don't think it's a huge problem in the greater scheme of things either. I do think it's an annoyance and disrespectful, and people should be less butt hurt about being told as much. Like yes, there are things that can fly in a college town but eventually it's time to grow up a little bit. On the extreme end I also think it can be a contributing factor to a larger sense of disorder, with ramifications that are a well trodden topic on this substack.
If you had told me in 2013 that the result of legalization will be "pot shops will only sell products that are so potent that it's impossible to use them casually," I might have had some pause.
FDA could so fix that!
I do think that a lot of this comes from it still being illegal federally - it feels like the primary regulator is federal (ie the FDA) and the fact that legalization is a state matter is what's driving the poor regulation; states just don't have any experience or expertise in regulating this sort of thing.
“…states just don't have any experience or expertise in regulating this sort of thing”
The states have a lot more experience than the FDA when it comes to cannabis regulation.
This is one reason I have flipped my stance.
But that’s not what happened
Correct. Most people I know take edibles now and you can get those in low doses, cut them in half, in quarters, etc. then there are 1:1 CBD:THC, 2:1, CBD only. Flower is a little different because it caters to harder users. But I go online and filter the inventory at the shop around the corner by THC%, and there are usually a few under 25%, sometimes a few at like 12%. And then, I can pop a tiny tiny bit in a pipe and take one hit. This is a market equilibrium non-issue and doesn’t need regulation.
No?
I admit I'm not in-country and so haven't tried to buy anything for years, but my understanding was that if you wanted something that wouldn't immediately knock you on your ass you have to make that very clear to the budtender.
Meh, edibles are regulated to be 10mg or less, and you can always take half if that’s too much. My 75 year old mom has to take a whole one to feel anything even with no tolerance at all.
They do sell some really high potency stuff like hash and concentrates and hash infused joints, but you have to be specifically looking for those. They cater to the high-tolerance people looking to get blasted. But the edibles sold in legal dispensaries are fairly well-dosed. Flower is stronger now, though. Blame Rafael Caro Quintero for that!
I wonder how dialed in the mg per serving really are though. Is it +/- 1 mg? 5 mg? A 20mg gummie might not have much effect and a 5mg can knock you on your ass.
Yeah, I think there should probably be more and better state inspections of these facilities to make sure they’re doing proper quality control. I have a specific brand of peanut butter cup that I like with really tight QC, but it’s one of the most expensive edibles out there. I’ve bought cheaper stuff and there was more variation.
It’s very difficult to make a uniform batch, and even more difficult to test it!
I wouldn't go that far in terms of potency - but it is clear that there has been a bit of an arms race in comparison to the explosion of higher ABV IPAs in brewery culture like 10-15 years ago.
It’s pretty crazy that the so-called Iron Law of Prohibition seems to have been exactly the wrong way around in this case
Depends on the state, and seems to be mostly a dosage issue with edibles. Some states the max dose is 5mg, others are much higher. IMO, 5mg is more than enough for most people and you can always take multiple doses if it floats your boat.
I really can’t believe that there aren’t more low-dose edibles available.
It's wildly, obviously, vastly superior to have legal weed than prohibition. It's not even remotely close.
It's good to encourage people to use vapes/edibles though, for both health reasons, and because smoking flower can be a pretty substantial pollutant of public spaces.
How is this "wildly obvious"? I believe there's pretty firm statistics that mental illness related to weed consumption has skyrocketed since weed has largely been decriminalized. Additionally, I haven't any numbers on this but intuitively it seems wildly obvious that the decriminalization of weed has lead to wider use amongst teens, which seems inherently bad.
I agree it's good that less people are being locked up for weed use but I'm not sure that's outweighed by the negative externalities associated with wider spread marijuana use.
Wider use among teens? Since when, when we were in high school? I seriously doubt it. Kids these days aren’t social enough to do it, they don’t even drive anymore lol
It seems widely concluded that marijuana use has been increasing in recent years since widespread decriminilization and legalization - so I think it's safe to infer this includes teens.
The question we have to ask ourselves is whether this is a good thing. IMO, it clearly isn't.
Source: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2772724624000374#:~:text=Cannabis%20use%20increased%20from%207.59,cannabis%20use%20in%20the%20US.
NIDA/UMichigan survey data suggests that past-12-months use for 12th graders was pretty flat during the latter half of the 2010s and has declined substantially post-COVID: https://monitoringthefuture.org/data/bx-by/drug-prevalence/index.html#drug=%22Marijuana+%28Cannabis%29%22
It’s probably true that the high schoolers who do get high are buying much more potent stuff, though.
Is it, though? I feel like the big increase in potency definitely happened while it was still illegal. People wanted to get just as high under the different criminal breakpoints for possession, so breeders were going for more and more potent pot.
I doubt it. I think the increase is mostly adults. Kids don’t rebel the way they used to
Yeah it's pretty common and easy for them to acquire
"I believe there's pretty firm statistics that mental illness related to weed consumption has skyrocketed since weed has largely been decriminalized."
Sure, but sending significant number of people to jail is also bad for their mental health as well as mental health of their friends and families.
I'd say that this just suggests that we are better at detecting and diagnosing mental illness than we were in the past. Mental illness tends to manifest in the teen years, which is also when kids start experimenting with drugs and alcohol. Seems hard to control for all that, as well as control for kids using weed to self medicate a preexisting and undiagnosed mental illness. This is not to say that pot isn't bad for young brains, but claiming that weed is all of the sudden causing a spike in mental illness in teens smells a bit like reefer madness 2.0.
How many of us smoked weed as teenagers? I’d wager an awful lot. And I don’t know if commenting on SB rises to the level of mental illness!
Both gambling and pot require regulation, and the problem is Prohibitionists are inclined not to want to regulate and the other side is libertarians who also don't want to.
Same is true with sex work BTW.
Marijuana legalization was to prevent people from being charged with a crime for possession. I'm happy that people have unrestricted access to _possession_. There is no externality in possession. I never voted for public _use_.
It was never just about possession for stoners and libertarians.
Nobody actually thought people only wanted to walk around with some pot in their pocket--the whole point of legalization/decriminalization is that a bunch of people want to smoke it and we ought not to put them in jail for it.
Libertarians have problme with externalities
I am against it. I have witnessed too many drivers smoking pot and the main effect of legalization is increased THC potency. Cannabis Use Disorder is on the rise and the drugs are being designed to induce more adverse physiological effects.
The increased potency came way before the legalization. It's such an easy science, controlling cross pollination of plants --- the equivalent of having different strains of tomatoes, that increased potency was inevitable.
"the main effect of legalization is increased THC potency"
I really question that claim because that would be the inverse of the historical trajectory of basically every other drug -- bans encourage producing higher and higher potency strains to make smuggling/concealment of the product easier by allowing you to carry the same "high" in a smaller volume of space. (This is corroborated on the flipside by the fact that nobody is bothering to breed strains of caffeinated plants -- all of which are legal -- with higher and higher potency.)
How does this square with the invention of distilled liquor, which long predated Prohibition?
Since distilled alcohol dates back to ancient history and its precise time and place of invention are unknown (and possibly was independently invented multiple times in many different places), I don't think that would ever be fully answerable. However, it does seem clear that various means of restricting alcohol sales historically (not just literal prohibition, but also heavy taxes -- that's what "moonshining" was originally about) had the tendency to encourage people to produce higher strength alcohols for the same reason of reducing the volume of the same "dosage."
Does distillation go back to antiquity? I thought it was invented/discovered by medieval Arabic alchemists, which is why “alcohol” has that Arabic “al” at the beginning.
You're correct about the etymology, but a quick Google search shows lots of sources claiming that there were distilled alcohols being produced in China by no later than circa 800 BC.
I certainly agree with your bottom line, I'm just trying to think, as are you, how unusual this inverse trajectory is.
Tobacco companies used capital to increase the nicotine potency of their drugs. Legalization create capital pathways to professionally engineer marijuana to be more habit forming because there is a commercial incentive to do so. The main effect is access to capital. Around 30% of cannabis users in the US have Cannabis Use Disorder.
Why don't coffee/tea/kola/etc. producers do the same thing then?
This is a thing with energy drinks and other caffeine-added products. Panera had to settle a lawsuit for killing some people with caffeinated lemonade.
I don’t know why growers haven’t produced this effect horticulturally, but I have two guesses -
1. Increased caffeine comes with some trade offs in the flavor of the product
2. Selective breeding for potency already happened 1000 years ago.
Most people don't drink coffee/tea/kola(?) primarily to feel high...?
They don't? I know I get a welcome buzz from tea to wake me up in the morning.
(1) I'm pretty sure most people who drink coffee (and to a lesser extent other caffeinated beverages) do it to help wake themselves up/become more alert, i.e., to "feel high," it's just a different kind of high.
(2) Caffeine addiction is a real thing (https://www.addictioncenter.com/stimulants/caffeine/), so it's not like there wouldn't be an incentive to increase caffeine content to make the products more addictive.
(Kola nut is what the "cola" originally was in Coca-Cola and Pepsi Cola. Those products dropped actual kola from their recipes many years ago to sub in cheaper ingredients, but you can find premium "natural" sodas and energy drinks that still use it.)
I really find this hard to understand... While I wouldn't call it sedating my ability to do anything, let alone getting in a car is impaired to a degree I'd never even felt after a night of binge drinking. How do they manage it? Mega high tolerance?
increased potency seems like an advantage. you produce less smoke to get the same high
That is not how it’s being used and that is not the consequences of increased potency.
i expect there are different kinds of cannabis users, who use it in different ways. is there data on this?
There are rising rate of CUD which would suggest that many users are not reducing the amount they consume as potency increases.
If I am quoting my wife correctly (she works in addiction) around 30% of cannabis users have CUD.
https://thecausalfallacy.com/p/the-iron-law-of-liberalization This is who I quote when I talk about how capital from legalization has resulted in increased potency. Like with alcohol and tobacco, a small minority of consumers are the real profit drivers and they demand high potency due to tolerance.
i don't know how you can separate the effect of increased potency from the effect of liberalization-driven increases in use, though
I live in Colorado and I think it’s mostly been fine, but do think it ought to be regulated more similarly to tobacco, especially when it comes to smoking in public spaces. IOW, there should not be a legal or normative exception to smoking bans for pot.
This makes sense, but we allow tobacco smoking outdoors - 25 feet away from store entrances is the rule in Seattle - and we should do the same for weed, too.
Weirdly, the map Matt posted shows that Nevada, Colorado, and Michigan have some exceptions to their public smoking bans for marijuana.
I have heard anecdotally that illegal grow operations have become completely unprofitable, which seems like a win and one of the intended outcomes.
It’s still an issue in Southern Oregon.
I think that depends on the market, doesn't it? I've seen a lot of claims about how widespread illegal grow operations are in states that legalization combined with very high taxes of legal sales.
Weed is so damn cheap though..must be for consumption in other states.
Well, the Supreme Court will decide by the end of this term whether the 40+ states that have legalized marijuana in some form or another have, in so doing, inadvertently stripped millions of Americans of their Second Amendment right to bear arms.
That would have been a case that would have really scrambled Scalia's mind if he were still alive.
is this a joke?
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/supreme-court-will-consider-whether-people-who-regularly-smoke-pot-can-legally-own-guns
But not alcohol? That's curious, I'm guessing alcohol users are involved in more gun violence than stoners.
Section 922(g) of the Gun Control Act of 1968 has issues...
(g)It shall be unlawful for any person—
(1)who has been convicted in any court of, a crime punishable by imprisonment for a term exceeding one year;
(2)who is a fugitive from justice;
(3)who is an unlawful user of or addicted to any controlled substance (as defined in section 102 of the Controlled Substances Act (21 U.S.C. 802));
(4)who has been adjudicated as a mental defective or who has been committed to a mental institution;
(5)who, being an alien—
(A)is illegally or unlawfully in the United States; or
(B)except as provided in subsection (y)(2), has been admitted to the United States under a nonimmigrant visa (as that term is defined in section 101(a)(26) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (8 U.S.C. 1101(a)(26)));
(6)who has been discharged from the Armed Forces under dishonorable conditions;
(7)who, having been a citizen of the United States, has renounced his citizenship;
(8)who is subject to a court order that—
(A)was issued after a hearing of which such person received actual notice, and at which such person had an opportunity to participate;
(B)restrains such person from harassing, stalking, or threatening an intimate partner of such person or child of such intimate partner or person, or engaging in other conduct that would place an intimate partner in reasonable fear of bodily injury to the partner or child; and
(C)
(i)includes a finding that such person represents a credible threat to the physical safety of such intimate partner or child; or
(ii)by its terms explicitly prohibits the use, attempted use, or threatened use of physical force against such intimate partner or child that would reasonably be expected to cause bodily injury; or
(9)who has been convicted in any court of a misdemeanor crime of domestic violence,
to ship or transport in interstate or foreign commerce, or possess in or affecting commerce, any firearm or ammunition; or to receive any firearm or ammunition which has been shipped or transported in interstate or foreign commerce.
Section 8 was the Rahimi case, this case is about section 3.
I don't know about other states but Maryland prohibits purchase of a handgun by 'habitual drunkard(s)' which I believe is interpreted to apply to people found guilty of certain alcohol related offenses.
I would absolutely be in favor of banning gun sales if you have a DUI on your record. If you can't be trusted not to get behind the wheel drunk, you can't be trusted with a firearm. Constitutional concerns notwithstanding.
Probably has to do more with the legality differences than aggravation of dangerous gun use, for better or worse.
ohhhh i see
The Feds did that a long time ago. The hope is that SCOTUS correctly finds it unconstitutional.
I think that legalization was the right move, but I think we need to add more friction to the process of buying and using marijuana.
For context, I moved to Colorado shortly after marijuana was made de facto legal here. I do not use marijuana.
Some thoughts:
-For a couple years after legalization, marijuana users were very obnoxious and had to make pot into a visible lifestyle. That seems to have calmed down, I suspect because other states legalized.
-Vaping and edibles are very, very common, and I suspect how most marijuana is ingested. I think this is bad because they seem like easy ways to consume a lot.
-Some people consume a LOT of marijuana. Guys from my BJJ gym would go vape in their cars between classes. It was a bit much.
-Marijuana retailers do a relatively good job of being low-profile. They're not any more prominent than a Subway franchise in general.
-Marijuana consumption is net-negative for society. We would be better off if everyone abstained. I just think that arresting/incarcerating people for marijuana is worse than legalization.
-The only form in which marijuana should be sold is actual plant parts. THC-containing oils, vapes, and edibles should be illegal to sell.
-Marijuana sales should only be legal on weekdays, only at inconvenient times, and marijuana stores should be unstylish.
-Marijuana grow ops were a big issue early in legalization. I don't know why, but it was common for people to rent houses and grow marijuana in ways that caused problems (often electrical fires). Rental listings used to say "NO GROW OPS," and my friend in local government had to deal with several illegal grow operations. Colorado has a ton of cheap land in the eastern part of the state; I have no idea why people didn't just throw up warehouses and grow out in Limon or Fort Morgan or something.
I knew several heavy pot smokers who were incredibly annoying. Always going on about how weed isn't addictive (they were definitely addicted), it's gonna cure cancer, the whole deal. They became significantly less annoying once it was legalized, thought they smoked a lot more so I was much more likely to have to ask them to please go outside to smoke because I didn't want my house to smell like a Grateful Dead concert.
I have nothing against cannabis, but I too always found the wonder drug claims from stoners to be quite annoying.
> Vaping and edibles are very, very common, and I suspect how most marijuana is ingested. I think this is bad because they seem like easy ways to consume a lot.
Edibles are too expensive for that! The ones I buy are so tasty that I wish they were 1mg and not 10mg, but came in packs of 100 for the same price so I could actually pig out on them.
I like the smell of cannabis so that doesn't bother me.
That being said, I do think it's ok to ban consumption of alcohol, cannabis or whatever in public spaces.
But if you are sitting in your front yard smoking, and the person walking by on the sidewalk doesn't like it, too bad.
Worse than I had hoped, enough for me to question the market set ups created, but those are at least regulated and I think decriminalization was good.
Two takes. The first is that decriminalization isn't a very American concept. Something can be legal, legal and regulated, or illegal. Decriminalization reads as either legality or lawlessness. The second is that complaints about the smell aren't actually because cannabis smells bad, any more than someone who enjoys smoking cannabis actually enjoys the smell. It's everything associated with smelling cannabis-people getting high in public, on the road, and around you. It's comparable to seeing public drinking, and seeing empty beer cans everywhere.
There does not seem to have been any major associated rise in traffic incidents. (If I'm wrong about that someone please let me know.)
Was in favor of it and still am. Think it needs to be treated like alcohol in public settings (can't have an open container on the street so can't smoke a blunt on the street).
I feel like it's just wildly different depending on the state. I actually find in my town that I smell pot smoke less often after legalization than I did before because of the well-regulated edibles and vape cartridges. Before legalization, everyone smoked joints.
As someone who's always hated smoking, I also like that the edibles have exact dosages and that the pot stores are clean and nice. The only tip I have for the marijuana industry is that us casuals would really like a weaker product. I have a feeling that my ideal dosage is not 5 or 10 MG but 7.5, but I'd have to use a pill cutter to get that dosage.
Disastrous even if I personally do both. Legalizing them just made it easier to do both and enabled addictions. The old arguments about how safe marijuana is are obviously outdated as well given how strong strains are.
It is worth mentioning the important similarity between global warming and tobacco: that in the 1960s, scientists at some of the most important companies involved realized that these were serious problems and then the companies lied about it repeatedly in a successful effort to delay regulation.
Yeah, that's kind of the problem with the end of MY take. The outright lying about the science coming from oil companies was very similar to what tobacco companies did.
I wrote about his above and I am not persuaded that this was some secret knowledge that only FF companies had access to.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svante_Arrhenius
See also
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy
As famously used in this movie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpaf-O1pY6Q
My wife and I recently rewatched "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?" and two things just stood out to us. One, this was not actually a kids movie and in retrospect we're both kind of stunned we were allowed to watch this movie when were kids given the raunch of a lot of the jokes.
Second, it floored us to realized that literally the central plot of the movie is about the corruption involved with destroying Los Angeles' streetcar system. Like someone in the screenwriting process clearly knew their history and had passionate views on the matter.
Except actually the movie gets a lot of that wrong! It suggests that Los Angeles used to have a great public transit system, when in fact it actually had a great *private* transit system that people hated because of how it squeezed nickels and dimes out of them! The streetcars died because people actively prevented the city from saving them, in favor of the liberatory appeal of automobiles. The car companies encouraged this attitude, but it’s far from clear that their influence was that important.
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/episode-70-the-great-red-car-conspiracy/
Oh I'm aware. If I'm not mistaken, the biggest reason the streetcar system in most cities failed is they were big money losers. Not just Los Angeles.
There's a fellow we know who wrote an astute post at Vox that a lot of recent "love" for streetcars was misplaced and really about too many upper class libs being to enamored with the aesthetics of streetcars instead of thinking about whether they make sense as a quality public transport. That same fellow has noted that too many public transport projects are too concerned with looking nice as opposed to providing good service. https://www.slowboring.com/p/fancy-stations-make-quality-mass. I would guess mostly because too many public transportation proposals are targeted at voters who are not actually going to use said public transportation.
LA's streetcar system was terrible, too. It was built on the cheap, it was falling apart, nobody was willing to spend the money needed to bring it up to a good state of repair AND automobile traffic was slowing the whole thing down to a crawl. Trolleys are slower than buses!
To be fair, trolleys are only slower than buses when they both run in mixed traffic, which didn’t have to remain the case - the streets with the Pacific Electric streetcars were all wide enough to dedicate the relevant lanes. (Though I think the Los Angeles Railway streets were often narrower.)
But yeah, a lot of the streetcars were run as loss leaders so that Samuel Huntington could buy cheap real estate, run a streetcar out there, sell the real estate at a profit, and then let the streetcar fall apart (hence all the places like Huntington Beach and Huntington Park and the like in a bunch of directions).
It's good to maintain two lists: 1) movies / TV that are not actually for kids despite superficial appearances; 2) songs that are in no way shape or form love songs despite superficial lyrical or musical cues ("Every Breath You Take," "The One I Love," "Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)," "You're Beautiful," "Hallalujah," etc.
If I remember correctly, there is an interview with Sting where he says people come up to him and tell him how "Every Breath You take" was their wedding song and his reaction is just horror that a couple would think a song about a stalker would make for a good love song.
Ultimate example of aesthetics of a song not matching content; "No Rain" from Blind Melon. That one has the added bonus of having a famous music video of a girl in a bee costume to the point that there are people who think the song is about bees or something. When in reality the song was about the lead singer's crippling and ultimately deadly heroin addiction.
I'm aware that Sting says that about "Every Breath You Take," but I'm incredulous that he sincerely thought that listeners wouldn't hear it as a love song. It's the same as Alan Moore being outraged that readers of "Watchmen" like the character of Rorschach and claiming that wasn't his intent -- the creator is either lying or he's completely oblivious to how his own preferred artform works.
And how he would read books.
That would never fly in today's music.
Pearl Jam has a song called Bee Girl that leans into this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hknoOmTy-jc
Oh yeah, “No Rain.” Great song, and if you listen to it it’s obvious what it’s about.
Actually, that whole album slaps, really. Too bad “No Rain” - which, again, great song - was such a hit that it totally overshadowed the rest of the album.
Edit: the bee costume is not out of nowhere; it’s on the cover of the album and it’s someone’s sister or something. But I agree that it distracts even further from the song’s intended meaning.
Also, songs that aren't not rah-rah jingoistic even though a lot of people think they are (Born in the USA, Fortunate Son).
The latter is also a great example of how much a song's use in a movie (or movies) can shape it's legacy.
Seriously, you can't tell me that if I tell you to think of the opening riff of Fortune Son you're first thought isn't a helicopter full of "green" soldiers flying over a Vietnamese jungle.
"Every Breath You Take"
This song always gives me the creeps when I listen to it.
It should - that's the point!
"Hallelujah" by Leonard Cohen.
Yeah - adding it to the list. There's so many! The I-IV-V-vi is a tricksy chord progression. Edit: really, it’s I-V-vi-VI, but really I just mean any combination thereof.
To be fair it's the best of the three animated retellings of _Chinatown_ that have come out of Hollywood (the others being _Rango_ and _Zootopia_). Just be glad they left out the incest, mostly.
I guess my mind might be pilled by watching plenty of The Simpsons and South Park as they'd emerge in the following decade, but while it's certainly not a movie designed for the expressed purpose of kids, it also seems rather tame to me comparatively speaking.
I'd classify it as more like The Muppet Show, which absolutely was for kids but they'd also sneak in some jokes that only parents would get.
I mean I should define "kids" here. Both my wife and I first watched that movie when were both like 8 or 9 respectively (not like 15).
And yes big Simpsons and South Park fan here as well and you're correct to note that compared to those tv shows "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" is kind of tame. Having said that, I definitely was not allowed to watch The Simpsons until I was like 12-13 years old.
My parents were very generous with what we watched, I was watching things like George Carlin specials on HBO before I was a teenager. We just set some simple rules on what to and not to say outside the house. We "corrupted" all of our Mormon neighbors when they would always come over to our house to watch syndicated Simpsons reruns at 5 PM.
I’d personally love to see a “Big Social Media” push towards regulation of content to minors particularly. I know in recent years a couple bills have circulated in Congress with very little buzz but I hope there’s a continued, concerted push to protect minors from an inundation of content that is changing the chemistry of their brains.
I was ready for this to be about social media! I was thinking: maybe every parent's struggle with "screen time" limits is the second hand smoke of social media? I.e., a national social media time limit (??) gets support because it makes it easier for me to manage my kids?
The other, and more deadly, second-hand smoke of social media addiction, and smartphones generally, is distracted driving. That's an externality that could be reduced by safer product design.
California law now makes it an offense to do literally anything with a phone that’s not hands free while driving, but I think the blocker here is that cops aren’t actually stopping more people just for doing this.
So does Pennsylvania, yet I've noticed no change in driver behavior.
That definitely can't be blamed specifically on social media, or even smartphones, because that was a problem dating way back to when the first mobile phones were invented.
Sure, but ancient history like that isn't really the question that the risk-utility balancing test for whether a product is unreasonably unsafe asks, such as under the Third Restatement. It's more about whether there's feasible design tweak available under the current state of the art that if adopted would reduce the harm. I'm a product liability defense lawyer at heart and by experience so I'm certainly not saying there is here--there are always more trade-offs than might appear once you get into the details of a product's design and commercial feasibility. But it's also hard to deny that there are potentially feasible technical options available now that didn't used to be, such as the ubiquity of face-recognition locking and unlocking of phones combined with motion sensors.
Ban social media for kids under 18. Also ban smart phones for kids under 18.
I don't think either of these is particularly realistic.
"Social media" is not a well-defined phrase, and "you can't use YouTube if you're under 18" might actually do more harm than good.
95% of teens have a smartphone*, so telling basically every teenager to turn in their smartphones seems pretty implausible.
*https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/teens-and-internet-device-access-fact-sheet/
Parents also have a lot of ability to provide their kids with whatever they feel is appropriate for them.
Will let you know how Australias ban goes when it comes into effect in a month.
"and creating a world in which being a nicotine addict is annoying and marginalizing has proven to be a pretty effective way of getting fewer people to smoke."
The problem with translating this to climate so far is the you can't marginalize the group that is *everyone*.
What about “scrolling phones in restaurants”, maybe we could stigmatize that?
rude if you are with someone else, fine if you are by yourself (assuming there is no audio).
I used to bring a kindle to restaurants when I was eating by myself
Interestingly, you could draw another parallel from the anti-smoking campaigns to the anti-vaccine and climate movements: the lack of memory. Vaccines arose in response to diseases like smallpox (which was really really really really bad), but now that nobody has it anymore, nobody has any memory of what living with it is like. So you get people who refuse to vaccinate their kids for measles, and then you get measles outbreaks.
On climate, the slow but steady temperature increases over the past 50 years have (somewhat) erased the collective memory of what "normal" climate was supposed to look like ("normal" in quotes because you can certainly quibble with what that means). You could also turn this on its head and think about what unknown climate effects we'll have 30 years from now and realize there's no way the human brain can really imagine living with it until we're there, and that makes the problem way more difficult.
Polio was around well within living memory, my parents have friends who got it as children, there were regular outbreaks in the US in the 1950s. I think the folk memory disappeared quite quickly. Michael Bloomberg was 13 when they was a large outbreak in his hometown, it is definitely something he would remember well.
even that's on the margins of living memory. a 2006 study projected that by 2026 there would be only 158k living paralytic polio survivors
https://post-polio.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/PolioSurvivorsInTheUS1915-2000.pdf
and polio, while awful, is itself nothing like the nightmare of a smallpox epidemic
Mia Farrow had polio.
Hopefully when polio comes back it’ll take some of the steam from the antivaxxer movement, but I’m not so sure anymore. They’ll claim it’s toxins or something. It’s sad though. The parents deserve to suffer for their idiocy but not the children.
Almost 30 years ago Al Gore prophesied that we would have 20-30 ft sea level rise by now. I'm not sure we still understand all the intricacies of atmospheric science and it's relationship to terra firma and the Sun. It may just be that atmosphere changes happen on a geologic time scale not a human one. The good news I think is that we still have time---oil is a limited resource and won't last indefinitely anyway, at least not affordable oil. I'm thinking that the free market can solve a good chunk of the problem by making alternatives better and cheaper than fossil fuel applications. Look what China has done with BYD already. Forward thinking I'd say we need to be pushing for green infrastructure to be ready for this (a more robust grid, stop hamstringing nuclear power, etc.).
Do you have a citation of Al Gore predicting 20 foot sea level rise in a couple decades? This sounds like you’re just free associating about how anyone who talks about the climate must be wrong about everything.
A Google search suggests he's conflating statements Gore made in general about potential maximum sea rise (with no specific date attached) and statements about a much more modest increase (two feet) with an estimated date range of 2040 to 2050.
Even if Gore had said that, I always say, he [was] a politician. (i) people should be getting their information from climate scientists, not politicians, and (ii) if some people say incorrect things, it doesn't invalidate people with good track records.
The tobacco litigation happened while I was in law school, and it helped make me cynical about legal reasoning.
The FDA attempted to regulate cigarettes as drug-delivery devices under the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938. Congress wasn’t really thinking about cigarettes when it passed this act, and the industry didn’t see it as a threat. But clever lawyers figured out that cigarettes fit within the definition of drug-delivery device. The problem is, such devices could only be approved if they were “safe and effective for their intended use.” It’s pretty clear that cigarettes are not safe and could not be approved, but the FDA ignored its foundational statute and proposed regulating the continued distribution of cigarettes anyway.
Basically, lawyers found a law and tried to commandeer its words for their own ends. The game is fundamentally semantic. It’s also rigged because the FDA has enough juice that it almost got away with using a statute that was passed to require “safe and effective” products to regulate cigarettes.
The intellectual bankruptcy of legal reasoning would be a great subject for a series of columns. We have far too many lawyers who have far too much prestige.
Isn’t the real tie between the MAHA movement and big tabacco just the complete bald face lying about public health risks? The difference is MAHA is bald face lying about the risks of vaccines or Tylenol whereas big tabacco’s lie was about downplaying risks.
I guess what I’m getting at is unfortunately I think right wingers learned their own lessons from the success in Big Tabacco forestalling legislation so long. Namely, you can get away with a whole lot if you have complete lack of shame about straight up lying to Americans.
The motives seem quite different though, for tobacco manufacturers it's bog standard profit, where with MAHA...I don't even know what the fuck for sure, a bizarre appeal to nature argument, it seems.
MAHA seems be a combo of the worst elements of Identity politics coming together with absolute lunatic who happens to come from possibly the most famous family in America thereby giving him undue influence he never deserved.
We can debate for hours how long COVID restrictions should have been in place or how strict they should have been. But it became an identity politics thing the moment Trump tweeted out "Liberate Michigan!". I know in one of his few good moments was being pro vaccine, but he poisoned the well with those tweets and clearly put his thumb on the scale of "COVID is fake news". All because he got jealous at all the attention Andrew Cuomo was getting.
So yeah MAHA is all just the worst kind of devotion to an awful human being and result is hundreds of thousands of people unnecessarily dead from not taking COVID vaccines and likely thousands more dead in the future because orange man has polarized his supporters against all vaccines and in quite possibly the most unconscionable decision of his Presidency put a crazy man in charge of the nations' health.
There's going to be a lot of fodder for historians as to what was the most destructive element of Trump's presidency and life, but I think a strong case can be made that turning a large portion of this country against vaccines in general may be top of the list.
the us "wellness" industry is nearly as large as the pharmaceutical industry ($480 bn vs $600 bn)
https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/consumer-packaged-goods/our-insights/the-trends-defining-the-1-point-8-trillion-dollar-global-wellness-market-in-2024
around 1.6% of GDP
in 1980 americans smoked 682 billion cigarettes
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.upi.com/amp/Archives/1982/11/21/Cigarette-sales-hit-record/9325406702800/
at an average pretax price of $0.70
https://247wallst.com/special-report/2019/06/19/price-of-a-pack-of-cigarettes-through-the-decades/
so the us cigarette market would've been around 682*0.7/20 = $23 bn, or 0.8% of GDP
Oh sure, there have always been charlatans to take advantage of parting fools from their money. But the true believers seems to be infiltrating much higher ranks now.
I can't tell how they're defining "wellness." Is it all beauty/cosmetic, fitness, and non-Rx med stuff, or only stuff that is kinda woo-coded? Are they counting all psychotherapy, or only the "talk about your feelings" kind and not the "diagnose a convict with schizophrenia" kind?
I suspect a lot of resistance to the idea that smoking was very bad for you came from smokers who *really* did not want to believe that their habit was doing them harm.
Even then, smokers were already calling them coffin nails in the 50s.
I'm sure some such dissonance existed, but I'm skeptical it was substantial, I think most people became well aware of the tradeoffs, and either chose to continue, or struggled with the effort to quit.
It was substantial. The great geneticist and statistician RA Fisher was a major victim of this cognitive dissonance: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2022/06/08/how-can-a-top-scientist-be-so-confidently-wrong-r-a-fisher-and-smoking-example/
Yeah, I was thinking of Fisher and Ayn Rand, both of whom made convincing-to-themselves arguments that let them keep smoking.
One big gap between tobacco and social media (which IMO is crying out for regulation) is the clarity of the harm. While I'd love to imagine a surgeon general warning on scrolling algorithms, it doesn't see to me the research has been as crystal clear as it was for smoking.
Maybe the big studies are still underway, but I don't know what to make of the relatively weak scholarship about the harms.
Do the big warning labels have any impact? Not quite the same but in California basically everything seems to have a cancer warning and I completely ignore them.
It's a great question. One thing I would say: you could figure it out pretty quickly. If you required (e.g.) "every content curation algorithm must insert a warning on the harms of social media once every 10 posts" ... the results would be VERY measurable.
Indeed—but good luck getting any of the companies to actually do this 😭
Yeah, i think legally speaking, "causing lung cancer" is a lot closer to harm than "shortening your attention span", even if you had definitive proof of the latter.
Right, I don't even know if "shortening your attention span" is the harm? How would you measure that? If you could measure it, what are the damages? This is kind of the big problem: we all say "it's bad" without being able to point to something unambiguous like lung cancer.
Haven't there been a decent number of studies linking social media use in teen girls to anxiety and depression?
I don't know about a surgeon general's warning, but I'd like to have mandatory timers on all apps so you know how much time you've wasted there.
Social media is far more harmful than tobacco
It's not just smoking. I wonder how many of the SB community under the age of, say, 45 know that mandatory seat belt usage was once a big honking controversy. And yet here we are and we don't even have the wacko libertarian/MAGA types railing against the nanny state mandate on seat belt use.
It wasn't always that way. Just like with the anti-smoking crusade, it took a lot of science (getting thrown around like a rag doll is apparently dangerous, scientists discovered), a public education campaign, lots of litigation, increasing levels of federal and state legislation and -- my big surprise -- auto company lobbying *in favor* of the mandates. I fondly recall some of the weirder steps along the way, such as the automatic seatbelts that gave you no choice to be belted once you sat down (is that still a thing?) And I remember the old attitudes, like in 1970 when I got my driver's license and proudly told a policeman I always used a seatbelt and his look of disdain and expression of "do I give a you know what?" has remained with me always.
Nice little piece here: https://www.the-rheumatologist.org/article/revisionist-history-seat-belts-resistance-to-public-health-measures/ . Apparently, the auto companies led the charge for states to pass mandatory seatbelt laws in order to avoid a federal mandate to install passive systems, like airbags. Which we eventually got anyway. So now we have belts *and* suspenders.
When I was in driving school, they actually addressed an apparently common refrain from people who don't want to wear seatbelts, which was "Wouldn't I rather be thrown from the vehicle if I'm in a collision?" Yeah, being hurled through a windshield at 70 mph is going to be way better for you. Motivated reasoning is a hell of a drug.
Since seatbelts are required equipment that save lives more effectively and/or cheaply than all the other measures, if I were a car company I'd have supported seatbelt mandates and oppose the more expensive measures like $1000 airbags (well, probably the price has come down by now).
"the number one complaint I hear about marijuana legalization isn’t any kind of detailed policy analysis — it’s annoyance that the smell has become ubiquitous in lots of places."
I'm 100% serious -- if I worked in the marijuana industry, I would be sinking every spare dollar into figuring out how to produce a marijuana variety that was no more odiferous than tobacco when burned, because if marijuana gets criminalized again the putrid stench of it is going to be the biggest single factor driving public support for the a ban.
I don't know if marijuana smells worse than cigarettes (I hate both) but marijuana just sits there so heavily. I hate walking through a cloud of cigarette smoke outside, but once you get a short distance away it dissipates and it's over. Pot isn't like that. It lingers on the ground and spreads and doesn't fade easily. At least that's how I perceive it.
I hate both, but marijuana smoke smells worse to me than tobacco cigarette smoke (although not necessarily worse than pipe or cigar). But yes, the lingering issue with marijuana smoke is dramatically worse -- it really annoys me when I'm walking somewhere and encounter random marijuana smoke without a user in sight or a block+ ahead of you on the sidewalk at an intensity similar to what you'd have to be literally standing adjacent to a cigarette smoker to experience.
As an aside, that's why I've said the biggest effect of marijuana legalization is now to make me retroactively believe all those stories from police officers about smelling marijuana under seemingly improbable circumstances (from a closed car; from a house porch on a sidewalk 30 feet away; etc.) to justify searches/arrests.
Fresh and in small concetrationsm tobacco smell is not so bad.
I still think it's bad, but I agree with this, I had a great uncle who packed his tobacco pipe in this manner.
That's pretty much THC vaping, right? And edibles also exist, as well--although I do know that plenty prefer inhalation for their THC intake.
It's amazing dispensaries aren't having cashiers so things like "please don't smoke this outside, wait until you get home. Just take an edible instead." They have to know a backlash is coming.
They should definitely do that. But I find that there's a moderately strong correlation between guys who openly smoke pot in public around strangers and guys who give the impression that they take pleasure in doing things that other people don't want them to do.
They almost always have signs and people telling you that.
I have no clue if it is or not (I've never knowingly been in the presence of anyone vaping THC). However, even if it is, there's clearly still a large market for smokable marijuana based on what I encounter walking to and from work each day (and not uncommonly in my own house if I have the windows open on a mild morning/evening).
I agree that the market is clearly there, I'm just trying to think if what you want has already been invented.
But part of what one enjoys is the smell and flavor, and if the users aren’t going to voluntarily switch to the low smell varietals, then the companies aren’t going to benefit.
(1) Do people enjoy the smell?
(2) Regardless of whether anyone enjoys the smell, it seems like a good strategy would be to develop a "reduced odor" strain and then push for recriminalization of more odiferous strains to drive people who demand smokeable delivery methods into buying your legally-compliant product.
Yes, people enjoy the smell, just like fans of spicy food enjoy the burn.
Spicey food burns only them!
yep, I enjoy the smell and I don't even smoke.
Same with coffee actually, love the smell, hate the taste
My problem with coffee is that it upsets my stomach. A shame, as otherwise I'd be good with it. Tea doesn't upset it for some reason, though.
yes my wife loves coffee but her stomach doesn't
Yikes! They LIKE that smell! Well let themlike it in a hermetically sealed room.
edibles
I just taught a mini-microeconomics unit to my 9th graders and taught them about smoking bans as part of my lesson on externalities. The kids had no idea this was even a thing. I also read David Yeager’s book on motivating teens and he discussed the Truth campaign which came about because of the tobacco settlement. But his larger point was that the advertising had to make sense for teens because typical “Don’t” campaigns don’t actually work. That’s why I’m interested in MAHA’s focus on sticking it to corporations which is what made Truth more sticky for teens.
"mini-microeconomics"
Nanoeconomics!
Perfect!🤩
Reading this, I just kept thinking, how long until RFK starts claiming that smoking cures autism and wards off measles?
There’s already a group of idiots putting nicotine patches on their kids to “detox” them
"Inject the cigarettes directly into your children's blood!"
It’s completely insane. One of my guilty pleasures is the Facebook group “Detox, Antivax, and Woo Insanity” that reposts the crazy, harmful medical shit people believe. Nicotine patches are totally a thing idiots are convinced will detox them from supposed vaccine toxins. People who got their kids vaccinated before they became antivax are putting them on their kids. It’s child abuse (just like not getting your kid vaccinated is)
Instead of giving your kindergarteners jabs, give them cigarettes instead!
Tobacco and climate change issues have little in common, politically or economically.
a) Tobacco is regulated/axes/restricted, paternalistically, becasue it is harmful to the users, who are a minority. CO2 emissions are beneficial to the emitter, the harm is generalized.
b) Tobacco use was promoted by tobacco products and opposition to regulation /taxation came from tobacco companies. Fossil fuel companies do not promote use of fossil fuels and opposition to taxing net emissions of CO2 des not come primarily if at all from fossil fuel companies.
c) Anti-smoking advocates (sensibly) never tried to ban or restrict tobacco growing, manufacturing, or transportation activates. Net CO2 emissions opponents have failed to learn that lesson.
d) Becasue users are a minority, restricting the _externality_ (not the self harm) of indoor smoking was politically popular. [When are non-marihuana users going to succeed in banning the marihuana stench externality?] Fossil fuel users is everyone.
"Fossil fuel companies do not promote use of fossil fuels"
That's not precisely true?
Just a few examples:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKUZjp6Esn8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDfN_XPd1uA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I2kkR9krHJg
Yeah, that's a weird claim. "A company has a marketing department" is not a conspiracy theory.
I stand corrected of what I said. I should have said something like, Fossil fule companies do not ecourage consumers to use fossil fuels as tobaccoo companined did smoking."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ov6hOEjLln4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=un6_N5qgsic
This was a good historic timeline told by Matt about what these times were like, and I'm glad that this article is on the record. It demonstrates that tobacco is a very sui generis case with rebard to policy that cannot be easily replicated for other cases.
So the only disappointment was the last paragraph. I actually came close to critiquing Joel Wertheimer's article last night when I learned about it and read it, but thought it would be too late to do so, and I was largely going to say that "You can't simply treat [product] like Big Tobacco.". I'm glad I held off, because this article did an excellent job of demonstrating why.
Actually, it can be replicated. For example, mandatory use of seatbelts.
Many PH problems fall into exactly this dynamic. People should read about the history of lead poisoning in this country because it's an exact mirror of tobacco but decades earlier.
That's not applicable either, because it involved activity that fully takes places on government property, and thus governments have fully legitimate reasons to regulate what goes on on that property. There also wasn't a market of people buying and selling lack of seat belt use.