As i said in my other comment it, my “ban caffeine” comment was mostly a joke. As far as caffeine causing long term health issues, i can’t recall anything off the top of my head, though i do recall various energy drinks being linked to health issues partially due to other ingredients though.
There is a big difference between caffeine and nicotine.
Caffeine can not make you substantial bound addicted to it. You can develop a tolerance to caffeine and a psychological (not physical) habituation, but not substantial bound addiction.
I am very bothered on this question, because sometimes I hear people wanting to protect others at all costs by making absurd laws that do not take reality into account (smuggling, discreet local sales, adolescent curiosity), and sometimes I hear libertarians ready to do anything to kiss the ass of the most abominable capitalism.
The role of government is to protect its citizens. I think we will all agree that the best thing to do, according to the latest studies we have on drug consumption, is neither to ban nor to do nothing. The best for future generations is to stop promoting these products, that’s all. We must break their image to restore the truth about these products and do a lot of awareness and prevention work among young people. The day tobacco has the same image as heroin, well, no one will smoke it except for a few people with drug addiction profiles.
I’m a little surprised by how accepting folks are towards this government regulation.
Cigarettes seem like an easy, open-and-shut case. It is scientifically harmful. It is demonized. It is popular to regulate it for the benefit of the kids
But I do not trust my government. This is a large reason I am involved with privacy efforts in the first place. I do not trust third parties to oversee, manage, and interject into my life in a moral fashion
I would not be surprised to see my government use these same tools & infrastructure to ban other ‘harmful products’, like dangerous books, or homosexual materials, so on and so forth, for anyone born after 2008 in perpetuity.
So yes, I would rather deprive my government of any such powers, and let individuals & families live as they choose
If I am alone in this belief, I will sulk back to my cave of radical ideology & bother the chat no further
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Not necessarily. I would certainly consider it “less dangerous” than nicotine by a long shot, but caffeine IS a stimulant. There is research to suggest there may be long-term effects on health, and it IS an addictive substance with withdrawal effects.
Furthermore, the degree to which caffeine use is normalized in today’s society brings an additional inherent risk; we make this drug easily accessible to youth and do not adequately inform them of the risks associated (especially with high dosages). This kind of dismissal and ignorance is what leads to cases like the Panera “charged lemonades”, which contained 236mg of caffeine but did not make that information known. Two people died, and one had permanent health implications.
I drank caffeinated beverages for most of my life, and for most of that time, I was completely unaware that I was riding on the edge of the safe daily limit of 400mg the FDA has established for adults. I was not an adult for much of this.
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I do think the picking an arbitrary year approach is a little off putting/wierd to me, but in this case i’m not sure there is much else that could be done to prevent specifically younger generations from participating in this market. Perhaps a *gradually increasing you have to be X years old* instead could work, but i could see people objecting to that in similar ways,
That is a hot take if I’ve ever seen one. I don’t even consume Caffeine—besides the 10 mg in an occasional tea product. I certainly don’t feel the affects. Apparently it can be healthy.
So we are okay with government banning things for under-18s, while Age Verification and protecting kids online should be left up to the parents?
It’s always a question of the slider between individual rights and public health, as during Covid-19 when we realized that many people, without really taking a position, were totally unreasonable in their reasoning (in one direction or the other).
Your freedom is only valuable if it does not encroach on those of others. And, in this case, preventing young people from being protected on the basis that the government could do bad things in the future is hypothetical. This reasoning leads us to be the useful idiot of capital.
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I do not like the institution of the state.
However, cigarettes exist because of the interest of capital. The state is an institution designed to protect capital. The sale of cigarettes would never have occurred in a truly free society because there would have never been a factor necessitating they be produced and marketed to the masses. The state exists to protect and perpetuate the system that cigarettes are a product of and thus the state bears significant responsibility for the harm they have caused.
While it would have been better for us to have lived in a free society where cigarettes would have never existed, we don’t live in that world. If real ongoing death and harm caused by capital and its institutions can be mitigated through regulations, that is a net good for human beings at no net cost to freedom in the grand scheme.
However, do not be fooled, this is not being done as a philanthropic endeavor by the state, as it is still just a tool of the same system that caused the problem in the first place. The only reason these measures are being taken is because the rulers have realized that cigarettes and their effects are a net drain on the system, through loss of productive workers and inflated healthcare costs.
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I could be misinformed because I am not actually in fact a caffeine expert, but my decade-old knowledge recalls studies indicating it can cause developmental issues in children, hence: for minors.
Personally, I do distinguish between things which inflict physical harm, and information. Pixels on a screen or ink in a book can never inflict physical harm.
This is simply because access to information and the ability to share information in turn are freedom of speech issues, whereas access to cigarettes or other drugs is not a freedom of speech issue.
Again to be clear though, even in this case I am only talking about restrictions on the sale of these products to minors, and not restrictions on minors using said products. I would not even support banning a parent or an adult in general giving a minor cigarettes/alcohol outside of a commercial transaction (unless they’re doing to so coerce them somehow obviously, but that’s already an entirely separate crime).
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Not necessarily. I would certainly consider it “less dangerous” than nicotine by a long shot, but caffeine IS a stimulant. There is research to suggest there may be long-term effects on health, and it IS an addictive substance with withdrawal effects.
The meta-study you brought up has, several issues.
Firstly this research focuses on negative impacts of caffeine, regulations and social aspects about consumption, but not about addiction.
Then we have strong sources backing claims, but not all the claims are backed by reputable or strong sources. For example, it uses a mass marketed book – “The Caffeine Advantage” – that is intended nor has it the factual accuracy to back such claims.
To that comes that it lacks completely of any methodology used to search for sources, select the sources and work with them.
A Chinese study about coffee and headaches were completely wrong quoted and the findings of that study were misinterpreted. As well as the use of nonscientific words that have different meaning depending on who reads them. For example detoxification.
They compared daily coffee vs. any caffeinated beverage vs. any caffeine studies form different years to find “trends”, however these are three different things, and you can not compare them.
In addition, they confuse correlation with causation.
“Caffeine stimulates the central nervous system, with psychoactive properties that modify behavior like cocaine and amphetamines”
Is a direct quote from the paper and this is highly misleading and sensational.
Caffeine works primarily as an adenosine receptor antagonist blocking A1 and A2A receptors. Cocaine, and amphetamines act directly on the dopaminergic reward system.
These are completely different pharmacological pathways, not variations on a theme.
Cocaine and amphetamines produce strong activation of the mesolimbic reward pathway, which is why they have high abuse liability and are Schedule II controlled substances.
Caffeine produces only mild physical dependence with relatively benign withdrawal and is not classified as a substance use disorder in DSM-5.
But dependence != addiction.
Caffeine produces mild dependence but generally does not meet the threshold for a clinically significant addiction in the way alcohol, nicotine, opioids, cocaine, or methamphetamine do.
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A number of countries do have age based restrictions on the selling of energy drinks. Age restrictions on energy drinks by country - Wikipedia
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This is a positive v negative freedom argument. The kind that people love to make, whilst driving around in their licensed, taxed and insured cars.
As to a specific year to cut-off smoking, it’s messy. But the other options of bringing in a ban at any stage are worse.
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The government does many bad things, so framing it as a hypothetical is a little reductive. There is good reason to be wary of granting the state even broader powers of coercion.
Can you elaborate on what you mean here? Tobacco has been traded for millennia, long before institutions of the state similar to those we have today.
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This comment immedly made me remind about this news: Man dies after consuming drink equivalent to 200 cups of coffee | Live Science
Cigarettes are kind of uniquely harmful as a tobacco product and have a very specific history. It’s important to note that the UK ban is not on tobacco products, it’s on cigarettes specifically. I also guess it is worth clarifying that when I say cigarettes I mean cigarettes as they are used and understood today, specifically inhaled, manufactured cigarettes with a filter, as obviously a “smaller tobacco cigar” in some form might exist under a noncapitalist system, as they have for over a thousand years in tbe Americas, but the modern manufactured cigarette as we know it was really invented in the 19th century.
In addition to the inherent risks of tobacco use, manufactured cigarettes have specific engineering and chemical modifications that introduce secondary harms. Modern commercial cigarettes utilize filter ventilation (small perforations in the filter), which were historically marketed to reduce tar but actually encourage “compensatory smoking,” where users inhale more deeply to maintain nicotine levels.[263] The manufacturing process also incorporates approximately 600 additives, such as ammonia, which is used to “freebase” nicotine for faster absorption into the brain, and sugars that, when burned, produce the carcinogen acetaldehyde.
Tobacco itself is harmful, but cigarette smoking is both the most addictive and toxic method of use. Modern manufactured cigarettes are a product of capitalism, with their popularity being due largely to marketing (including the invention of actually inhaling the smoke in the 1930s by the cigarette companies’ marketing departments) which would not have happened in a non-capitalist system.
Even outside the cigarette though, widespread use of tobacco recreationally is a product of European colonialism. Before Columbus, Tobacco was in use among Native Americans, but largely for religious and medicinal purposes. The colonizers discovered it and turned it into a mass produced cash crop. The entire history of recreational tobacco use is tied intimately with oppressive systems and the interests of capital.
Alcohol is much more harmful: The Top 15 Most Dangerous Drugs
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This list isn’t comparing cigarettes and alcohol, it’s comparing nicotine and alcohol. Of course alcohol is more dangerous than nicotine alone. The issue is all the other stuff in cigarettes.
You can consume alcohol safely in moderation. There is no safe amount of cigarette use.
Comments like this are dangerous because people who understand that alcohol can be consumed safely in moderation might read it, take it at face value without investigating, and get the impression that means they can consume cigarettes safely in moderation too, but that is not the case.
I like to live dangerously though!
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You do have a fair point though.
I’m thinking that because alcohol use is so widespread and so common in many countries, it seems off to go all out on cigarettes but ignore alcohol. If the aim is to reduce pressure on a country’s health spendings, then it is strange to just ignore alcohol while having such an extreme approach to cigarettes.
Making cigarette manufacture and sale illegal but allowing personal use will just create more costs in dealing with crime around the above.
Lastly, nicotine is the highly addictive substance in cigarettes that makes people want to smoke them. But we can see that making class A addictive drugs forbidden just creates the most awful crime worlds around these products that people want.