Monday, July 31, 2017

Follow-up: Perfect being the enemy of the good

Good WSJ article.  https://www.wsj.com/articles/fda-seeks-to-reduce-nicotine-levels-in-cigarettes-to-nonaddictive-levels-1501253894

The FDA wants to regulate nicotine levels to make them non addictive.  Also they will start encouraging people to switch to less dangerous products such as e-cigarettes and smokeless tobacco.

People have noted that low nicotine products have been tried before and didn't make the market.  I suspect that's because they tried going to 0 nicotine.  Instead they should work like the patch and have different levels of nicotine.  Note that e-cigarettes have varying levels of nicotine available.  I suspect regular cigarettes have the levels of nicotine carefully set in order to satisfy the customer.

In some ways this is a bit like coffee and caffeine and such.  We have regular coffee and we have decaf.  I think if coffee caused cancer we would be having similar discussions.  The only thing that's a bit strange is if we have cigarettes that have no nicotine, wouldn't smoking them still cause cancer, since it's not the nicotine that's cancerous, it's the smoking part.

Plus I don't think we've yet drawn a lot of light on the addictive qualities of caffeine.  People need to get their fix in the morning, it's a stimulant, there are withdrawal symptoms, etc.  Like drug use there's all sorts of paraphernalia for making coffee, etc.  The similarities are quite close!  Apparently the thing that gets us all up in arms is intoxication which is the only thing missing in the caffeine.  Although I know some people who become somewhat aggressive after having a few cups of coffee, perhaps like a lighter version of somebody going nuts on crack.

Will be interesting to see how this all goes with the nicotine levels and harm reduction with other product uses.  I think the tobacco companies will thrive and will adjust to this quite nicely.  I think they've seen this coming for years (not that they are prescient but I think they have noticed rightly so that these other products are less harmful).

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