Public-health experts say that e-cigarettes play an important role in getting people to stop smoking.
In September 2019, Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire philanthropist, and Matthew Myers, president of the nonprofit Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, unveiled a $160 million, three-year campaign to end what they described as an epidemic of e-cigarette use among kids.
In a New York Times op-ed, Bloomberg and Myers attacked Big Tobacco for putting young people in serious danger by hooking them on addictive e-cigarettes, which are sold in kid-friendly flavors like cotton candy and gummy bear.
Backed by a coalition of influential nonprofits, including the anti-tobacco Truth Initiative, American Cancer Society, American Heart Association, and American Lung Association, they called for a national ban on flavored e-cigarettes.
Bloomberg lamented: “All the progress that we’ve made in reducing teen smoking is being turned around.”
Their timing was propitious. A year earlier, the FDA and the U.S. Surgeon General declared youth e-cigarette use an epidemic. Fears were mounting about unexplained deaths linked to vaping. A few cities, including San Francisco, had banned flavored e-cigarettes. Michigan had just become the first state to do so.
Bloomberg Philanthropies used its money and influence to curb vaping, to be sure. But others who have worked for decades to reduce deaths from smoking say the ongoing campaign against e-cigarettes is misguided, built on unsound science and likely to do more harm than good.
Marc Gunther – Philanthropy.com – March 23, 2021.
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