Alibaba to Stop Sales of E-Cigarettes to U.S. Buyers

https://www.wsj.com/articles/alibaba-to-stop-sales-of-e-cigarettes-to-u-s-buyers-11570632981?mod=rsswn

48 56 7 years ago

guanzo• 7 years ago

I'm bothered by the fact that most if not all news websites don't differentiate between nicotine and THC vapes. They're completely different. Illicit THC vapes are what's killing people.

grawprog3• 7 years ago

Yeah as far as I read the problems were linked to illicit THC cartridges purchased on the streets tainted with hydrogen cyanide. A recent hacker news discussion about it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21092770

Street drugs have always had problems with contaminants, whatever kinds of drugs they are. Unfortunately prohibition and black markets tend to lead to this sort of problem.

bitcoinmoney• 7 years ago

Why would you add cyanide to a product you’re selling?

cactus2093• 7 years ago

The latest CDC statements have still been that there hasn't been a single common ingredient found in all the cases. And there have been something like 10% of the cases that claim to have only used tobacco and not any THC vapes.

The guy that died in Oregon was using a legal vape from a regulated dispensary.

News publications do a disservice by over-playing the danger, and not differentiating between thc and tobacco, or street products and regulated thc and large nationwide brands like juul. But I don't think you can fully write this off yet either. I'm personally still avoiding vaping for the time being.

stronglikedan• 7 years ago

I may be a conspiracy theorist, but I think it's a deliberate misinformation campaign.

rolltiide3• 7 years ago

It is a deliberate misinformation campaign.

There are multiple issues being conflated (flavored vapes advertised to minors, vapes causing deaths) and kneejerk reactions from governments are occurring because they are not being paid off enough by the companies selling similar products.

deelowe• 7 years ago

It's almost like there might be other motivations at play here.

avocado4• 7 years ago

Nicotine vapes are a problem too. They were meant to help people quit smoking, but instead introduced a lot of people who haven't smoked before.

I wonder if we could do some sort of blood test to make sure non-smokers don't get easy access to nicotine vapes.

qzx_pierri2• 7 years ago

Big Tobacco is behind all of this. Vaping would destabilize the farm grown tobacco industry, and it was just a matter of time...... Call me crazy, but it makes sense. Anyone can create their own vape juice, but how many people are willing to cultivate tobacco?

anon1m0us• 7 years ago

Does the nicotine in the vapes not come from tobacco? Is tobacco not involved in vapes at all? Why can't the tobacco companies make vapes?

tmb• 7 years ago

Vaping just reopened generations of customers for business to a myriad of tobacco products, why would they choose to go back to their previous shrinking pool of poor or old cigarette buyers?

hello_tyler• 7 years ago

It's both, actually. People have been counterfeiting Juul pods and they have the bad chemicals in them as well. Pretty nasty problem actually.

thrower1232• 7 years ago

I'm blown away at how quickly this e-cig prohibition movement is taking root. As far as I can tell, all the horror stories have been from bootleg THC cartridges, rather than legitimate Juul pods. So banning sales of the legitimate product seems... counter-productive.

I suppose high school kids will just go back to smoking Swisher Sweets and chewing flavored Skoal pouches...

I don't really see how any of this is a positive direction.

mc324• 7 years ago

Thing is I haven’t read where someone can say whether it’s contamination or whether it’s the high heat vaporization or the combo or something else which is causing this. So given they don’t have strong evidence, it would be negligent not to pull a product.

thrower1232• 7 years ago

People have been vaping tobacco products for years, and people didn't particularly like it, because it's the evil nicotine, and it gives some people a small amount of pleasure, but there were never any of these health problems.

Stopping the sale of the legitimate product, that does go through testing and quality control, because there is counterfeit and black market product out there fucking people up, is not going to reduce the supply of the questionable off-brand product.

We've done this enough times now, we should know what is going to happen.

AmericanChopper• 7 years ago

So due to lack of evidence proving a negative, and whole industry should shutdown until such evidence is found?

CodeWriter23• 7 years ago

Thing is I haven’t read where someone can say whether it’s contamination or whether it’s the high heat vaporization or the combo or something else which is causing this.

You can start here, this WaPo article talks about the contaminant, Vitamin E Acetate aka alpha-Tocopherol acetate, an ester of Vitamin E and acetic acid.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2019/09/05/contaminant...

The PubChem article on this compound, first aid section recommends inhalation should be ceased ASAP. Also scroll down to the firefighting section, which recommends a respirator with an organic vapor/acid gas cartridge. This is because of the caustic nature of the compound when vaporized.

https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/compound/alpha-Tocopherol-a...

This article details finding from The Mayo Clinic that the lung tissue studies revealed chemical burns.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/lung-damage-from-vaping-re...

Obviously not conclusive, but also not a completely bizarre supposition that inhaling a substance that breaks down into a mild acid when vaporized might cause chemical burns.

ineedasername2• 7 years ago

Kids simply don't smoke swisher sweets or chew Skoal in anyhing anywhere at all approaching the numbers that have been vaping. Presenting that as some equivalent behavior that will dramatically increase vastly misses the mark.

npo92• 7 years ago

We don’t really know how many kids are using any nicotine products. Its an emotional argument more than a statistical argument.

“Think of the children” has been used to justify so many things from alcohol prohibition to prohibition of short selling stocks.

grandmczeb• 7 years ago

It reminds me a lot of the moral panic around Four Loco when I was in high school, albeit on a seemingly larger scale.

mrfusion• 7 years ago

It’s kind of odd all of these sort of comments are being downvoted. They seem like legitimate observations but they’re downvoted wholesale.

p1necone• 7 years ago

Yeah, I'm actually kind of shocked that even the hacker news community is so susceptible to this kind of moral panic.

robotstate• 7 years ago

Cheap Chinese products have been causing issues in the vape industry for years. It used to be knockoff batteries exploding, now we're seeing the harmful health effects of whatever cheap materials they're using to manufacture the coils.

The industry needs to be regulated, not outright banned.

mc324• 7 years ago

The bans are temporary to allow investigation into cause —I think that’s prudent. If you go buy anyway despite the ban, that’s on you, it’s not happening with government imprimatur.

grawprog3• 7 years ago

The problem with bans is as I'm currently experiencing with the mass dispensary shut down in Vancouver over the last few weeks, they don't stop dedicated people, they just push you to sketchier, less reliable and more questionable options.

dsfyu404ed• 7 years ago

The bans are temporary to allow investigation into cause

If by investigate into cause" you mean "wait for the legislature to figure out a way to tax them to bring in the kind of money we're used to getting from cigarette taxes"

If it were primarily about safety they would be talking about manufacturing standards and regulations and testing (like it is with every other product consumers want), not about banning.

TylerE• 7 years ago

Whens the last time the US government unbanned something?

chrisweekly• 7 years ago

kudos for use of "imprimatur"

skokage• 7 years ago

now we're seeing the harmful health effects of whatever cheap materials they're using to manufacture the coils.

This is the main part that I'm concerned about personally. There is a local place i go to back when i lived in the states where they would craft the juice for me on the spot, so I had peace of mind the juice was ok. But all of the coils were manufactured in china, and if manufacturers there were fine with tainted baby formula that killed infants, then nothing else has the guarantee of being safe.

Nas808• 7 years ago

I smoked for 15 years but quit last August when I started vaping. I certainly feel a lot better, my senses of taste and smell are much stronger and I don’t get short of breath running up the stairs anymore. It seems almost too good to be true, I’m waiting for the report saying it’s like liquid asbestos.

nyolfen• 7 years ago

the good news is that it's easier to quit vaping than smoking

seamyb88• 7 years ago

I quit smoking for the vape. I had a cigarette the other day and there was a deeper buzz to it than the usual nicotine from the vape. So, I am inclined to agree.

seventhtiger• 7 years ago

I smoked for 5 years up to a pack and a half a day of max nicotine cigs. One day it's like a switch flipped in my brain and I couldn't stand the smell of cigarettes on myself and my clothes. That day I went out to get a vape.

After trying a bunch of flavors I got high, low, and no nicotine juices of the same flavor. Then over the course of a year an a half I mixed in less and less nicotine. Substituting around two drops of the higher for the lower every week.

One day I just put it down because it was a hassle and most importantly I wasn't addicted any more. It was that easy.

I still smoke 1 or 2 cigarettes a month when the mood is right in a social setting, but I will never buy a pack of cigarettes again.

crb002• 7 years ago

Curious how much of this is a trade war, screw the U.S. If vape supply dries up there could be a spike in tobacco use.

waste_monk• 7 years ago

Even the things they supposedly police e.g. name brand sunglasses, disney / lego stuff, etc. are very easy to find on Alibaba/Aliexpress.

They might bust a couple of stores as an example, but give it a few days at most and you'll be able to get the under the description "personal steam heater" or something similar (e.g. the "interlocking block toy" lego knockoffs) - there are indices mapping keywords to brands to help facilitate this [0].

[0] https://www.alimaniac.com/aliexpress-articles/brand-codes-co...

Alibaba to Stop Sales of E-Cigarettes to U.S. Buyers

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