Very little is known about how e-cigarette marketing is being perceived by youth…
Very first sentence from the first link lol.
Of course PH wants young addicts. They always have.
I’m asking for advertisements aimed at kids because I have never seen any. None of those links show any ads. All they’re saying is that vapes were advertised and people bought vapes.
What even would meet your standards here? Only an ad that started “Hey, kids!”?
Juul was buying ads on Cartoon Network/Seventeen/Nickelodeon and youth education sites. They got sued for it. They then fired the ad firm that developed an adult-oriented campaign for them in favor of the vaporized campaign which I definitely see plainly targets teens – and the courts agreed, since they paid over $400 mil in fines because of it.
Companies do what they can to maintain plausible deniability. But it’s also an absolute fact that the fruit/candy-flavored vapes are vastly more popular among youths. The FDA has entire teams dedicated to “advising” producers on how not to market these things to kids based on expert advice.
Your position here is one where you default to giving the producers of harmful, addictive products the benefit of the doubt. When I see Puff Bar being ranked among the most popular vape brands for teens, my assumption is that there is actual malice leading to that position.
And to be clear, the youth vaping market did not exist until the era of Juul reinvented it through advertising. These were not particularly new products, just new ways of selling them. Smoking was solidly on the decline among teens. It was new sales strategies that reversed that trend.
That’s all I’m asking for. An advertisement for vapes directed at kids. That’s it. Just an example. Preferably two, but one is fine.
I’m not asking for essays about how it’s possible kids are attracted to bright colors or how ads cause sales to increase. Especially when those essays admit front and center that no one actually knows the answer.
Bright colors absolutely does count, but so do candy-like flavors. We’ve actually seen similar issues with cannabis edibles, selling the oil or butter is fine but selling cannacandy or brownies causes a big uptick in teen use and the health effects of heavy cannabis use during puberty aren’t well understood yet (mostly because America is a fucking asshole).
No, you can, but for a dangerous product like this it’d be more responsible for the company to sell the flavoring in a separate package that can be mixed with the actual vape juice and let consumers combine them.
With nicotine in particular, that would be a fatal idea. It doesn’t take much nicotine at all to kill a human, and it absorbs through your skin, so… Yeah. Pure nicotine shouldn’t be sold to just anyone.
Banning candy and such flavors was provably effective at reducing youth smoking rates in many studies, even knowing that other flavored tobacco/nicotine products were still available to absorb some of that demand. There’s no reason to think vaping would be different.
They absolutely are. Even the anti-vape ads seem to be made to promote it. They look super friendly and don’t show the actual harm it does like smoking ads used to.
In the same way everything is. It’s friendly and bright, and yes those are valid criteria.
Edit: I’m being downvoted, but how else do you advertise towards children? If your vape ad looks like the toy aisle then who is it marketing towards? Toys are marketed towards children by being bright, colorful, and friendly looking. They aren’t marketing towards the parents with that, right? If it’s valid to say that about toys then it must be valid about other products as well. Disagree? Give a counter argument. Can’t come up with one? Why do you disagree then?
Having bright colors makes it more appealing to everyone but is an especially effective marketing tactic for children. Of course it doesn’t only appeal to children, but it’s a provably effective way to get children’s attention.
Nicotine on its own is ballpark as addictive as caffeine, vapes lack the MAOIs contained in cigarettes which on their own are much more addictive (atypical antidepressants, hardly surprising) but in synergy with nicotine even more.
as evidenced by all the kids buying vapes.
They also bought fidget spinners. Also I’ve never seen a kid with a vape.
Nicotine by itself is less physically addicting than caffeine, and no more harmful. It’s the 9000 other chemicals in cigarette smoke that increase the addictive properties and cause cancer.
A large part of the reason smoking is so addictive is because it integrates into every part of your life. This is why vaping is by far the most successful method of quitting smoking.
Also, in the US it’s illegal to sell nicotine of any form to anyone under 21. But kids will always do the things we tell them not to do exactly because we tell them not to do them. I’d 100% prefer a kid vape than smoke.
Nicotine is absolutely addictive wtf are you talking about. I smoked cigarettes for 6 years and then used a vape to quit cigarettes, it took about 3 months to wean myself off cigarettes and get used to vaping full time. My original plan was to use a vape to get off nicotine completely by gradually lowering my nicotine from 24MG to 0MG of nicotine in my vape juice but that didn’t work.
Now here I am 8 years later, vaping my 3MG juice daily and just as additiced to the vape as I was to cigarettes. I have literally the exact same habits with my vape as I did with cigarettes, as soon as I finish eating I pull out my vape, I wake up and have coffee, I pull out my vape, I have some drinks I have a vape. Nicotine is nicotine regardless of how you get it. I’ve literally tried to quit by going to 0MG juice or going cold turkey 6 times over those 8 years and I just can’t do it. It’s to fucking hard. I’ve given up on trying to quit because life sucks and I have no good reason to quit anymore, getting lung cancer is basically my retirement plan at this point. (no clue what the actual health effects are regarding vapes, I’m just being hyperbolic)
Don’t get me wrong, vaping is definitely a MUCH better alternative than smoking cigarettes but don’t try and downplay just how addictive nicotine is. Nobody should touch nicotine vapes unless you’re using it to quit cigarettes.
I 100% agree that kids will get a hold of vapes or smokes regardless of whether it’s legal or not to sell it to underagers, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good thing. Vaping is definitely preferable to smoking, but not getting addicted to nicotine is WAY better than either of those options.
Former smoker here. Instead of trying to use zero nicotine juice. Take advantage of the fact that you can control how many drags you take per session. For me I hit a cig about 10 times. So when I vaped I was sure to only hit it 10 times. Then I lowered the hits from 10 to about 3 and from there I was able to cold turkey.
. I have literally the exact same habits with my vape as I did with cigarettes
And there you go, you’re not addicted to nicotine. You’re addicted to your habit. It’s why I can’t stop biting my nails, they don’t have any drugs in them at all, yet I’ve been doing it all my life and have tried to stop multiple times.
Dude that guy said very clearly his method was to lower the nicotine dose in his vape to ween down to 0mg/nicotine free vape. He isn’t trying to quit the habit, you didn’t even read his post.
Why did you reply again without reading either post?
The post said they are trying to vape and gradually reduce their nicotine intake to 0. I don’t know how it can be made any more clear in stating that their near term goal is not to stop vaping, but to reduce the nicotine dose in the vape to 0.
They are trying to reduce their nicotine dosage in their vape but due to their addiction, are having withdrawals and ultimately re-adding the dose. This is 100% due to nicotine, they are not trying to reduce how many times they inhale the vape.
I don’t think they’re intentionally downplaying how addictive nicotine is, I think you’re underestimating how addictive caffeine is. Caffeine is ridiculously addictive, it just doesn’t seem that way because its use is normalized. Try skipping caffeine for a full week and see how that goes for you. In my experience, going without caffeine is way more painful than going without nicotine. Going without nicotine makes me kinda groggy and irritable. Going without caffeine gives me headaches, makes me achey and feel mildly ill, and I don’t drink a lot of caffeine to begin with (I typically drink a single soda throughout the day, rarely coffee or energy drinks).
You’re talking out of your arse pal. Nicotine is the addictive substance in cigarettes and vape fluid. Furthermore, it is still toxic, but vaping is simply less harmful than smoking - not harmless.
From my own experience of quitting smoking, I can tell that you’re spreading lies.
I was on IQOS before I quit entirely and let me tell you, the addiction was real, I couldn’t think straight, I was extremely dizzy all the time and generally unusable for pretty much anything.
I had to take some meds to actually help me with the physical withdrawal symptoms, otherwise I would be of no use for 3-5 days (or so I’ve read) which I couldn’t really afford at that time.
IQOS is not a vape it’s a “heat not burn” product. Completely different category of product and very much not only nicotine when it comes to neurologically active substances, but the whole cigarette spectrum of stuff.
Our heated tobacco devices are electronic devices that heat real tobacco.
Sometimes these are also called “e-cigarettes”. But they’re definitely not vapes, which are devices which vaporise a mixture of (generally speaking) propylene glycol, glycerine, water, nicotine, and aroma, no plant matter, no tobacco, involved. You can even get nicotine that’s not derived from tobacco if you care (IIRC they use tomatoes but any nightshade has nicotine, you only need to extract and refine it).
Truly, I cannot fathom the mind of someone who sticks a literal stick of literal tobacco held together by literal paper, just like a literal cigarette, into their device and thinks that that’s the same as squirting liquid into a tank.
You where trying to break a physical habit. Nicotine is not a super addictive drug. It’s why pipe and cigar smokers aren’t addicted to smoking. Most of us quit in the winter months with no issues because we’ve not created a habit of smoking 5 cigars a day. It’s the same reason vaping has such a good track record of getting people to stop smoking and then quitting vaping, were the drugs the pharma companies sell that are NRT like patches and pills have like a %10 success rate and people relapse to the sticks constantly, even though they’re getting the same or more amount of nicotine from the patch or drug than from cigs.
I am having real difficulties deciphering your comment… the reason pipe and cigar smokers have an easier time quitting is due to lower intake of nicotine because it’s generally a more casual habit. Vapers tend to vape as often or more often than smokers smoke… and vaping is, itself, highly addictive. Your comment is full of quite a few logical statements tied together with giant unsubstantiated leaps of faith.
If you think cigars have lower amounts of nicotine in them vs cigs…I got bad news for you. Most cig smokers get sick from cigars. Snus and nasal snuff also carry a lot of nicotine in them, but easy to stop as well.
I don’t think that pipe tobacco or cigars are inherently more healthy… but most consumers smoke significantly less frequently than cigarettes. I agree that smoking twelve cigars a day is definitely worse than twelve cigarettes… I’m not familiar enough to know anything more precise than that though.
Just for a record: Dizziness is not a nicotine overdose. At low doses it excites, then it calms, then it makes you dizzy, and several parsecs beyond that you lose consciousness, and even more parsecs beyond that you die, which would be an actual overdose.
It’s actually quite hard to do. Trying it orally will make you puke as nicotine is a powerful emetic, via the skin you have to literally bathe in high concentrations. Intravenous would be easy but lots of things are fucking dangerous when you put them in a syringe with pointy end. Pretty much the only realistic variant is having high-purity nicotine (which isn’t available on the open market), taking enough of a whiff to directly lose consciousness, and then lie in the fumes for a while.
It’s actually much easier to overdose on caffeine.
…that might’ve taken a dark turn. In any case if you continue when you’re dizzy, when your mind isn’t actually enjoying the act, you aren’t serving your nicotine addiction but your habits. And withdrawal from habits can feel physical, that’s for sure.
Now of course the term “overdose” is kind of fuzzy, in a personal sense you might say “yo I ate too many cherries, now my stomach hurts”. But in a medical sense that’s not an overdose: You’re simply at a point where you get a clear-cut signal from your body that it’s time to stop, powerful enough to overpower “mmmh cherries, tasty”, you are nowhere close to having to have your stomach pumped.
Also on a more general note be careful about public health information about nicotine, much of it still hasn’t been corrected.
And yeah, the lethality of it is way over stated. Especially the “it can be super absorbed by the skin” stuff. I’ve spilt 250mg of nicotine on my hands and left it for a few minutes before washing it off, and all that happened was the spot was tingly for a minute or two.
But then there wouldn’t be a difference between a plain junkie and someone who overdoses on heroin. The medically recommended dose of diamorphine in both cases was zero.
What distinguishes those two cases is that one exceeded the effective dose. “Recommended dose” here doesn’t mean “what a doctor tells you” but “more than needed to achieve an intended effect”. For some getting past the boosting effect of nicotine into the depressing effect range might be an overdose. Yet others might enjoy some brief dizziness in an armchair.
Toxicologically speaking nicotine has quite low overdose toxicity because any serious symptoms happen way after any desirable symptom. Toxicity, though, is what pedestrians generally think of when they hear “overdose” so that is what I focussed on.
I thought vaping was fine because I didn’t know it had nicotine in it.
Super fucking addictive, it should absolutely be regulated because currently in most places it isn’t, as evidenced by all the kids buying vapes.
They’re regulated the same as cigarettes. Kids find ways to get cigarettes, alcohol, and drugs, too, despite how regulated they are.
It’s more to do with the fact that they’re intentionally marketed towards kids in a way cigarettes and alcohol aren’t so much anymore.
People say that but I’ve never seen a vape ad for kids.
In what way are they marketed towards kids?
Bright colors doesn’t count.
https://academic.oup.com/ntr/article/20/8/954/3926044
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0306460319305891
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/07439156231189181
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1054139X16301598
Just a few examples. I sure hope you don’t think Philip Morris is too ethical to use this kind of advertising science.
Very first sentence from the first link lol.
Of course PH wants young addicts. They always have.
I’m asking for advertisements aimed at kids because I have never seen any. None of those links show any ads. All they’re saying is that vapes were advertised and people bought vapes.
What even would meet your standards here? Only an ad that started “Hey, kids!”?
Juul was buying ads on Cartoon Network/Seventeen/Nickelodeon and youth education sites. They got sued for it. They then fired the ad firm that developed an adult-oriented campaign for them in favor of the vaporized campaign which I definitely see plainly targets teens – and the courts agreed, since they paid over $400 mil in fines because of it.
Companies do what they can to maintain plausible deniability. But it’s also an absolute fact that the fruit/candy-flavored vapes are vastly more popular among youths. The FDA has entire teams dedicated to “advising” producers on how not to market these things to kids based on expert advice.
Your position here is one where you default to giving the producers of harmful, addictive products the benefit of the doubt. When I see Puff Bar being ranked among the most popular vape brands for teens, my assumption is that there is actual malice leading to that position.
And to be clear, the youth vaping market did not exist until the era of Juul reinvented it through advertising. These were not particularly new products, just new ways of selling them. Smoking was solidly on the decline among teens. It was new sales strategies that reversed that trend.
An actual advertisement, for one.
That’s all I’m asking for. An advertisement for vapes directed at kids. That’s it. Just an example. Preferably two, but one is fine.
I’m not asking for essays about how it’s possible kids are attracted to bright colors or how ads cause sales to increase. Especially when those essays admit front and center that no one actually knows the answer.
Just link to an ad. Goddamn lol
… Already happened.
Bright colors absolutely does count, but so do candy-like flavors. We’ve actually seen similar issues with cannabis edibles, selling the oil or butter is fine but selling cannacandy or brownies causes a big uptick in teen use and the health effects of heavy cannabis use during puberty aren’t well understood yet (mostly because America is a fucking asshole).
So I can’t enjoy a candy taste as an adult? Just because children like it?
Yeah, me too. But I think the point was about ads, not usage.
No, you can, but for a dangerous product like this it’d be more responsible for the company to sell the flavoring in a separate package that can be mixed with the actual vape juice and let consumers combine them.
With nicotine in particular, that would be a fatal idea. It doesn’t take much nicotine at all to kill a human, and it absorbs through your skin, so… Yeah. Pure nicotine shouldn’t be sold to just anyone.
Only kids like candy. Got it
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0749379716306201
Banning candy and such flavors was provably effective at reducing youth smoking rates in many studies, even knowing that other flavored tobacco/nicotine products were still available to absorb some of that demand. There’s no reason to think vaping would be different.
And banning walking I’m sure would lead to fewer falls
They absolutely are. Even the anti-vape ads seem to be made to promote it. They look super friendly and don’t show the actual harm it does like smoking ads used to.
Edit: https://youtube.com/watch?v=bbV6I8VRMG8
And in what way are they marketed towards kids?
In the same way everything is. It’s friendly and bright, and yes those are valid criteria.
Edit: I’m being downvoted, but how else do you advertise towards children? If your vape ad looks like the toy aisle then who is it marketing towards? Toys are marketed towards children by being bright, colorful, and friendly looking. They aren’t marketing towards the parents with that, right? If it’s valid to say that about toys then it must be valid about other products as well. Disagree? Give a counter argument. Can’t come up with one? Why do you disagree then?
Idk but you’re probably being disagreed with because by that line of thought adult products can’t have any color on them.
Which is exactly what I mean. Just because something has brought colors it doesn’t make it for children.
Having bright colors makes it more appealing to everyone but is an especially effective marketing tactic for children. Of course it doesn’t only appeal to children, but it’s a provably effective way to get children’s attention.
Nicotine on its own is ballpark as addictive as caffeine, vapes lack the MAOIs contained in cigarettes which on their own are much more addictive (atypical antidepressants, hardly surprising) but in synergy with nicotine even more.
They also bought fidget spinners. Also I’ve never seen a kid with a vape.
Nicotine by itself is less physically addicting than caffeine, and no more harmful. It’s the 9000 other chemicals in cigarette smoke that increase the addictive properties and cause cancer.
A large part of the reason smoking is so addictive is because it integrates into every part of your life. This is why vaping is by far the most successful method of quitting smoking.
Also, in the US it’s illegal to sell nicotine of any form to anyone under 21. But kids will always do the things we tell them not to do exactly because we tell them not to do them. I’d 100% prefer a kid vape than smoke.
Nicotine is absolutely addictive wtf are you talking about. I smoked cigarettes for 6 years and then used a vape to quit cigarettes, it took about 3 months to wean myself off cigarettes and get used to vaping full time. My original plan was to use a vape to get off nicotine completely by gradually lowering my nicotine from 24MG to 0MG of nicotine in my vape juice but that didn’t work.
Now here I am 8 years later, vaping my 3MG juice daily and just as additiced to the vape as I was to cigarettes. I have literally the exact same habits with my vape as I did with cigarettes, as soon as I finish eating I pull out my vape, I wake up and have coffee, I pull out my vape, I have some drinks I have a vape. Nicotine is nicotine regardless of how you get it. I’ve literally tried to quit by going to 0MG juice or going cold turkey 6 times over those 8 years and I just can’t do it. It’s to fucking hard. I’ve given up on trying to quit because life sucks and I have no good reason to quit anymore, getting lung cancer is basically my retirement plan at this point. (no clue what the actual health effects are regarding vapes, I’m just being hyperbolic)
Don’t get me wrong, vaping is definitely a MUCH better alternative than smoking cigarettes but don’t try and downplay just how addictive nicotine is. Nobody should touch nicotine vapes unless you’re using it to quit cigarettes.
I 100% agree that kids will get a hold of vapes or smokes regardless of whether it’s legal or not to sell it to underagers, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good thing. Vaping is definitely preferable to smoking, but not getting addicted to nicotine is WAY better than either of those options.
Don’t downplay how addictive nicotine is.
Former smoker here. Instead of trying to use zero nicotine juice. Take advantage of the fact that you can control how many drags you take per session. For me I hit a cig about 10 times. So when I vaped I was sure to only hit it 10 times. Then I lowered the hits from 10 to about 3 and from there I was able to cold turkey.
And there you go, you’re not addicted to nicotine. You’re addicted to your habit. It’s why I can’t stop biting my nails, they don’t have any drugs in them at all, yet I’ve been doing it all my life and have tried to stop multiple times.
Habits easy to form and super hard to break.
Dude that guy said very clearly his method was to lower the nicotine dose in his vape to ween down to 0mg/nicotine free vape. He isn’t trying to quit the habit, you didn’t even read his post.
You might want to understand what a habit is. The nicotine isn’t what kept him hooked, the habit of it is.
Why did you reply again without reading either post?
The post said they are trying to vape and gradually reduce their nicotine intake to 0. I don’t know how it can be made any more clear in stating that their near term goal is not to stop vaping, but to reduce the nicotine dose in the vape to 0.
They are trying to reduce their nicotine dosage in their vape but due to their addiction, are having withdrawals and ultimately re-adding the dose. This is 100% due to nicotine, they are not trying to reduce how many times they inhale the vape.
I don’t think they’re intentionally downplaying how addictive nicotine is, I think you’re underestimating how addictive caffeine is. Caffeine is ridiculously addictive, it just doesn’t seem that way because its use is normalized. Try skipping caffeine for a full week and see how that goes for you. In my experience, going without caffeine is way more painful than going without nicotine. Going without nicotine makes me kinda groggy and irritable. Going without caffeine gives me headaches, makes me achey and feel mildly ill, and I don’t drink a lot of caffeine to begin with (I typically drink a single soda throughout the day, rarely coffee or energy drinks).
Re-read what I said. I said physically addictive, not mentally.
You’re talking out of your arse pal. Nicotine is the addictive substance in cigarettes and vape fluid. Furthermore, it is still toxic, but vaping is simply less harmful than smoking - not harmless.
From my own experience of quitting smoking, I can tell that you’re spreading lies.
I was on IQOS before I quit entirely and let me tell you, the addiction was real, I couldn’t think straight, I was extremely dizzy all the time and generally unusable for pretty much anything.
I had to take some meds to actually help me with the physical withdrawal symptoms, otherwise I would be of no use for 3-5 days (or so I’ve read) which I couldn’t really afford at that time.
IQOS is not a vape it’s a “heat not burn” product. Completely different category of product and very much not only nicotine when it comes to neurologically active substances, but the whole cigarette spectrum of stuff.
Yeah, that’s nonsense.
Quoth their own site:
Sometimes these are also called “e-cigarettes”. But they’re definitely not vapes, which are devices which vaporise a mixture of (generally speaking) propylene glycol, glycerine, water, nicotine, and aroma, no plant matter, no tobacco, involved. You can even get nicotine that’s not derived from tobacco if you care (IIRC they use tomatoes but any nightshade has nicotine, you only need to extract and refine it).
Truly, I cannot fathom the mind of someone who sticks a literal stick of literal tobacco held together by literal paper, just like a literal cigarette, into their device and thinks that that’s the same as squirting liquid into a tank.
You where trying to break a physical habit. Nicotine is not a super addictive drug. It’s why pipe and cigar smokers aren’t addicted to smoking. Most of us quit in the winter months with no issues because we’ve not created a habit of smoking 5 cigars a day. It’s the same reason vaping has such a good track record of getting people to stop smoking and then quitting vaping, were the drugs the pharma companies sell that are NRT like patches and pills have like a %10 success rate and people relapse to the sticks constantly, even though they’re getting the same or more amount of nicotine from the patch or drug than from cigs.
I broke my addiction to nicotine, which is indeed very addictive. Not sure what your half-truths really are good for.
I am having real difficulties deciphering your comment… the reason pipe and cigar smokers have an easier time quitting is due to lower intake of nicotine because it’s generally a more casual habit. Vapers tend to vape as often or more often than smokers smoke… and vaping is, itself, highly addictive. Your comment is full of quite a few logical statements tied together with giant unsubstantiated leaps of faith.
If you think cigars have lower amounts of nicotine in them vs cigs…I got bad news for you. Most cig smokers get sick from cigars. Snus and nasal snuff also carry a lot of nicotine in them, but easy to stop as well.
I don’t think that pipe tobacco or cigars are inherently more healthy… but most consumers smoke significantly less frequently than cigarettes. I agree that smoking twelve cigars a day is definitely worse than twelve cigarettes… I’m not familiar enough to know anything more precise than that though.
IQOS is still not nicotine on its own, and if the symptoms you described were while you were using the IQOS, it sounds like a nicotine overdose.
Just for a record: Dizziness is not a nicotine overdose. At low doses it excites, then it calms, then it makes you dizzy, and several parsecs beyond that you lose consciousness, and even more parsecs beyond that you die, which would be an actual overdose.
It’s actually quite hard to do. Trying it orally will make you puke as nicotine is a powerful emetic, via the skin you have to literally bathe in high concentrations. Intravenous would be easy but lots of things are fucking dangerous when you put them in a syringe with pointy end. Pretty much the only realistic variant is having high-purity nicotine (which isn’t available on the open market), taking enough of a whiff to directly lose consciousness, and then lie in the fumes for a while.
It’s actually much easier to overdose on caffeine.
…that might’ve taken a dark turn. In any case if you continue when you’re dizzy, when your mind isn’t actually enjoying the act, you aren’t serving your nicotine addiction but your habits. And withdrawal from habits can feel physical, that’s for sure.
https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/21582-nicotine-poisoning#symptoms-and-causes
Dizziness is absolutely a symptom of a nicotine overdose.
Note how it says “early phase symptoms”?
Now of course the term “overdose” is kind of fuzzy, in a personal sense you might say “yo I ate too many cherries, now my stomach hurts”. But in a medical sense that’s not an overdose: You’re simply at a point where you get a clear-cut signal from your body that it’s time to stop, powerful enough to overpower “mmmh cherries, tasty”, you are nowhere close to having to have your stomach pumped.
Also on a more general note be careful about public health information about nicotine, much of it still hasn’t been corrected.
In a medical sense an overdose is just taking more than the recommended dose. That clear cut signal from your body is a symptom of an overdose.
And yeah, the lethality of it is way over stated. Especially the “it can be super absorbed by the skin” stuff. I’ve spilt 250mg of nicotine on my hands and left it for a few minutes before washing it off, and all that happened was the spot was tingly for a minute or two.
But then there wouldn’t be a difference between a plain junkie and someone who overdoses on heroin. The medically recommended dose of diamorphine in both cases was zero.
What distinguishes those two cases is that one exceeded the effective dose. “Recommended dose” here doesn’t mean “what a doctor tells you” but “more than needed to achieve an intended effect”. For some getting past the boosting effect of nicotine into the depressing effect range might be an overdose. Yet others might enjoy some brief dizziness in an armchair.
Toxicologically speaking nicotine has quite low overdose toxicity because any serious symptoms happen way after any desirable symptom. Toxicity, though, is what pedestrians generally think of when they hear “overdose” so that is what I focussed on.