The Off Topic Topic

[Barrister]

I honestly think it's really as good as a normal haggis.

Damning with faint praise. 

It's genuinely delicious. It's just a large sausage basically

Yes haggis is good.  And yes, it's just a large sausage.

[Razgovory]

God I love haggis. Also veggie haggis is really really good too.

Soy lungs cooked inside a soy stomach?

The lungs, liver and heart is finely chopped so you don't really know it's meat at all because it's mixed with suet, oatmeal and spices etc.

So the veggie haggis just replaces the offal with chopped pulses and lentils I think. Change the suet for a veggie fat and otherwise it's much of a muchness.

I honestly think it's really as good as a normal haggis.

Actually, that sounds tasty.

[Sheilbh]

Fallen down a rabbit hole of art restoration Youtube videos.

Send help!

[Valmy]

Oh? Which ones?

[Sheilbh]

Really interesting piece on the giant Anglo-American row over e-cigarettes (with a cameo from Mike Bloomberg):
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/feb/18/the-great-vape-debate-are-e-cigarettes-saving-smokers-or-creating-new-addicts

Basically the US (and Bloomberg) take a very strict stance based on their experience of a barely regulated market and the way tobacco companies behave, which is corrupting. There's a fear this is the way the tobacco companies are trying to work their way back into respectability. And the US position is hugely influencing the WHO.

In the UK e-cigarettes are promoted by Public Health England and available on the NHS (if you're an in-patient) as a valid form of nicotine replacement therapy. The market's very regulated already and e-cigarettes are basically encouraged to smokers because it's better than smoking. So a lot of public health scientists and officials in the UK think we're watching a tragedy which will result in millions dying, because there's a clamp-down on the most promising way of getting smokers to quit.

[Josquius]

I thought the opposite was happening with e cigarettes. They're becoming too popular and bringing in new smokers. It's insane how many vape shops there are these days and how often you see kids with e cigarettes.

[ulmont]

I thought the opposite was happening with e cigarettes. They're becoming too popular and bringing in new smokers. It's insane how many vape shops there are these days and how often you see kids with e cigarettes.

It's tough to tell because the general trend was downwards before.  From the article:

In 1942, 82% of British men smoked. By 2006, when e-cigarettes first appeared, 22% of adults in England smoked. The number of smokers is now at an all-time low of 14.7%, while 7% of the UK population are vaping regularly.

So the number of "smokers + vapers" has held more or less steady since 2006.  That could reflect just substitution (people who would have been smokers are now vapers) or could reflect a continuing decline in smokers + a rise in new vapers, but I can't really make a case either way.

[Sheilbh]

I thought the opposite was happening with e cigarettes. They're becoming too popular and bringing in new smokers. It's insane how many vape shops there are these days and how often you see kids with e cigarettes.

That's not the evidence in the UK - there's around 3.5 million vapers, of those 2 million are ex smokers and 1-1.5 million are "dual use" smokers and vapers - in every year this has been monitored the number of "dual use" smokers is declining and the number of ex-smokers is increasing. There's only a couple of hundred thousand people who are new smokers. It's rising but only about 6% of vapers are "never smokers" - so I'm not sure it's a gateway drug. And, unlike in the US, tobacco products are heavily regulated- whatever they are - so we have labels, health warnings, ban on advertising and a ban on targeting children etc.

It's a wider issue of basically the US taking a "just say no" approach to tobacco/nicotine and the UK going down a harm reduction approach to managing addiction with a replacement therapy - just like with alcohol or heroin or other drugs. So it's not harmless, but the harm is so much lower than smoking it's worth encouraging use of that is the UK public health perception.

[Barrister]

I thought the opposite was happening with e cigarettes. They're becoming too popular and bringing in new smokers. It's insane how many vape shops there are these days and how often you see kids with e cigarettes.

That's not the evidence in the UK - there's around 3.5 million vapers, of those 2 million are ex smokers and 1-1.5 million are "dual use" smokers and vapers - in every year this has been monitored the number of "dual use" smokers is declining and the number of ex-smokers is increasing. There's only a couple of hundred thousand people who are new smokers. It's rising but only about 6% of vapers are "never smokers" - so I'm not sure it's a gateway drug. And, unlike in the US, tobacco products are heavily regulated- whatever they are - so we have labels, health warnings, ban on advertising and a ban on targeting children etc.

It's a wider issue of basically the US taking a "just say no" approach to tobacco/nicotine and the UK going down a harm reduction approach to managing addiction with a replacement therapy - just like with alcohol or heroin or other drugs. So it's not harmless, but the harm is so much lower than smoking it's worth encouraging use of that is the UK public health perception.

My understanding (and I'm not an expert) is that there wasn't a ban on advertising vapes in the US, and companies (first amongst them Juul) were seeing increases in first-time youth vapers who weren't smokers.  There was even some misunderstanding with some not knowing that vapes contained nicotine.

[Sheilbh]

Yeah the article goes into that.

Interestingly I didn't know part of the reason for the lack of regulation in the US was from heroes of the anti-smoking movement:

A number of health professionals and academics have dedicated their careers to exposing lies about the safety of tobacco products and stopping the promotion of cigarettes around the world. Recent hard-won victories include smoking bans in public spaces and plain packaging with severe health warnings. Despite their efforts, there are still over 1 billion smokers in the world. The global cigarette market was worth $888bn (£682bn) in 2018 and forecast to rise to $1,124bn by 2024.

Stanton Glantz, professor of medicine at the Center for Tobacco Control, Research and Education at the University of California San Francisco, is the loudest of the anti-tobacco lobbyists – in his choice of Hawaiian shirts as well as his pronouncements. Glantz claims he was agnostic when e-cigarettes first appeared. He isn't now. In December, he tweeted: "Using e-cigs increases exposure to toxic chemicals for most users; they would be better off just smoking."

This was a new extreme, even for Glantz. Alex Berezow, vice-president of scientific affairs at the American Council on Science and Health, described the tweet as "mind-boggling". "Unfortunately, Dr Glantz has become something of an ideologue. His (justifiable) animosity toward the tobacco industry has been turned (unjustifiably) to other industries, such as vaping," he wrote on his blog. The research paper that had prompted Glantz's tweet, Berezow pointed out, actually shows that e-cigarette users get less exposure to toxic chemicals than tobacco smokers – not more.

Glantz, who you have to interrupt if you want to ask a question, told me that in the tweet, he was talking about dual-users – people who are both smoking and vaping. "Maybe it was worded inarticulately," he conceded. But he won't back down. He claims the evidence suggests that most people are dual users (in the UK, about a third of vapers are still smoking as well, according to a survey by YouGov).

A giant in the anti-tobacco lobby, Glantz does not understand how researchers he respects can support vaping. Glantz claims that confidence in e-cigarettes, at PHE and among the UK scientists who condone it, is starting to crack. He is convinced the "95% safer" figure is wrong. It came from a paper published in 2014 by a group of experts led by David Nutt – the former government drugs adviser famous in the UK for declaring that ecstasy and LSD were safer than alcohol, which led to his sacking.

"The Nutt paper had no evidence whatsoever. It was 12 guys who sat around and pulled that number out of the air," said Glantz. "The most generous thing you can say about that paper is that it was much earlier in the process and there wasn't a lot of evidence out there." He believes the credibility of Nutt's group has been undermined by revelations that they were part-funded by a consultancy called EuroSwiss Health, run by Delon Human, a South African doctor who has accepted funding from BAT for some of his ventures.

Nutt says that's nonsense. The group comprised 12 world experts. "Has [Glantz] ever read the paper?" he said. "There are 14 variables in that paper [possible harms, such as death from cancer]. It looks at the effect of 12 different forms of nicotine on 14 variables. And I bet he wouldn't actually disagree with any of them." He gives an example. "Does he actually think that tobacco is not much more harmful than vaping on the likelihood of lung cancer?" The paper, he said, "comes up with an answer he doesn't want. That's why he thinks it's bad science."

Nutt, a professor in neuropsychopharmacology at Imperial College London, says he is "saddened" by Glantz's attacks. "He was a hero of mine. He was one of the pioneers in demolishing the myth that tobacco wasn't addictive and opposing the fraud and misinformation and lies of the tobacco industry. But the problem is he is still basically playing the same tune and we're now in a different era." It's proven impossible to stop people selling tobacco, Nutt said. "So the anti-tobacco people have got to attack something else, because that's what they do – they attack and they ban. So basically they've fixed their wagons against vaping because it is one thing they can ban, and they're very successful. It's laughable that in India people go to prison for selling vaping when the government allows advertising of tobacco."

Glantz became an icon of the anti-tobacco movement after he received 4,000 leaked documents from Brown and Williamson, then the US's third-biggest tobacco company, in 1994. They proved the industry knew that smoking caused cancer and had hidden it. Since then, Glantz has always objected vigorously to any compromise with the industry. In 1997, a deal was broached with the tobacco industry by Matt Myers of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. It would have brought in tight federal regulatory control of cigarettes, prohibiting the sort of advertising and marketing that is still ubiquitous in the US, as well as sales to children. But Glantz was opposed to any deal that would allow cigarette manufacturers to continue in business. His goal was to close them down altogether. Myers was stymied by his own allies, and the US still does not have the anti-tobacco regulations that are common in Europe.

Myers is calm and quietly authoritative. He is not against harm reduction, he says. Nor are other public health bodies such as the American Cancer Society or the American Heart Association. "All of us have said that under appropriate circumstances, if e-cigarettes are shown to actually significantly help smokers quit or switch completely, and that there are rules in place to prevent them being marketed in a way that doesn't unduly impact youth, we would be supportive," he said.

Up until now, on a national level, the US has had no regulatory control of e-cigarette sales, marketing, minimum age, or limits on nicotine content. "It's the wild west," said Myers. Tobacco-Free Kids has brought legal action against the FDA over its failure to regulate e-cigarette use and last year won a ruling from a federal judge that there was no excuse for further delay. The e-cigarette companies are irresponsible too, Myers added.

Myers says both sides in the argument interpret scientific studies according to their prior beliefs. He describes PHE's "95% safer" figure as worthless, because not enough research has been done. "I have very little doubt that e-cigarettes under appropriate circumstances are significantly less harmful to a smoker. Do we know exactly how much less harmful? The answer is no, because we have no clue how much nicotine it is delivering, how pure they are, what else they're putting in them. Comparing it to the most lethal product ever created, for public relations purposes, is not helpful."

[DGuller]

I used to think that anti-vaping laws were counter-productive, for the commonly cited reason that vaping could be saving smokers' lives.  It also didn't help that these laws were nakedly paternalistic: there is no reason to treat vaping the same as smoking for second-hand smoke reasons.  That reasoning was already stretched thin for cigarette smoking, and it was stretched to the breaking point for vaping.

I changed my view since then.  I think the rapid growth in nicotine consumption is alarming, and I think that nicotine dependency is dangerous enough on its own.  People who vape are also sucking in way more nicotine than they would suck in from smoking, and it's not a benign substance.  It's very much possible that conversion can go the other way, from vaping to smoking.  If that happens, then it doesn't need to happen frequently enough to cancel out the argument about saving smokers' lives, and then some.

[The Brain]

Vapers gonna vape.

[Savonarola]

Happy National Engineer's Week to all the forum's engineers. This is the time of year when we put aside our differences and focus on what really matters; like pondering could an Evangelion beat up Godzilla?

[Valmy]

Happy National Engineer's Week to all the forum's engineers. This is the time of year when we put aside our differences and focus on what really matters; like pondering could an Evangelion beat up Godzilla?

Does this include Civil Engineers?

[Savonarola]

Happy National Engineer's Week to all the forum's engineers. This is the time of year when we put aside our differences and focus on what really matters; like pondering could an Evangelion beat up Godzilla?

Does this include Civil Engineers?

A contradiction in terms if there ever was one.