We’ll see soon enough.
or over six months US health agencies have warned of the dangers of vaping e-cigarettes. According to one leading expert, the CDC (and to a lesser extent the FDA) has misled the public into thinking vaping e-cigarettes was leading to deaths from lung disease when the real cause was cannabis vaping (one example here, but there are many on this site).
The reason for the misleading rhetoric is the concern about youth vaping. And while no parent wants their kid to vape, it is a lot safer than smoking. As Britain’s Royal Society of Public Health explains with some exasperation, vaping nicotine is no more dangerous than caffeine. It is when tobacco is smoked that the real risks of cancer and heart disease arise, not from the nicotine it contains.
Vaping might be a gateway to smoking and so there are reasons to be concerned about youth vaping in this regard. But kids smoke traditional cigarettes too and the accumulated evidence on vaping show that e-cigarettes are far safer than traditional smoking and can help smokers quit. And while vaping has gone up, Brad Rodu shows that the real number of kids routinely vaping who do not smoke is under 100,000, which is not remotely close to an epidemic.
While the CDC finally admitted that they had been incorrect about the dangers of e-cigarettes, the damage was done, with states such as Massachusetts banning all types of vaping products and possibly seeing increases in traditional smoking.
As a recent paper by Michelle Minton put it:
Roger Bate – National Interest – Feb 8, 2020.
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