A paper that claimed vapes are a gateway to cigarettes relied on faulty methodology, experts say.
Three weeks after the American Heart Association’s journal retracted a vaping study that led to heightened panic last summer, academics and health experts are pushing for another influential peer-reviewed medical journal to retract a vaping report of its own.
The collection of concerned scholars and scientists think that a paper published in Pediatrics in 2018 incorrectly and dangerously argued that people who vape are more likely to become smokers. The Pediatrics research pulls from the “gateway” theory, a once-popular and now oft-lambasted idea that smoking cannabis could lead to more serious and potentially addictive substance use.
“It should have been retracted,” said Brad Rodu, a professor of medicine and the endowed chair in tobacco harm-reduction research at the University of Louisville.
The research was co-authored by Stanton Glantz, a professor at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) who until recently led the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education.
Alex Norcia – Vice – March 11, 2020.
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