I don't know what the facts are regarding whether e-cigarettes are some kind of "gateway" to real ones. It doesn't seem realistic to me but it's the kind of thing that should be studied properly before jumping to conclusions.
Having said that, the concept does seem very strange to me as someone who used to smoke and switched to vaping because it's better in every way. It tastes better (with so much more variety in flavors), it's not as harsh on your throat and it doesn't leave an embarrassing odor on your body that non-smokers will judge you for.
The only reasonable conclusion I personally could come to is that people are more likely to switch from smoking to vaping and very rarely the other way around.
Again, this isn't scientific. Also, kids shouldn't vape or smoke. Period.
_But_, if they do vape and get addicted to nicotine at a young age, I personally find it preposterous that they would switch to cigarettes for their nicotine in large numbers.
What these studies show is that kids who are likely to try smoking are also more likely to try vaping. That's it. That's the whole thing. It's correlation, and doesn't speak in any way to anything like a "gateway drug" phenomenon - and that has also been recognised in studies that bother to consider the possibility.
Granted, being a kid in the 1980s strongly biases me, but this looks a lot like several moral panics from when I was a kid.
> IRC smoking was at a very low rate for youth after decades of improvements and then vaping has seen nicotine use rise in this demographic.
Okay, but smoking and nicotine use are very different metrics. Looking at number of smokers + number of vapers is a bit like looking at the number of drunk drivers + number of people biking without helmets. There's a heavy relative harm weighting factor missing if you just sum the numbers, especially if kids aren't vaping tocopheryl acetate or diacetyl.
Some parties strongly suspect that vaping is a gateway to smoking, but the studies I've seen are contradictory (granted, I haven't looked in depth). After all I was told about marijuana leading to crack cocaine use as a kid, I'm strongly skeptical of any gateway hypothesis that's not supported by rigorous studies. Rebellious kids tend to do all kinds of things, generally starting with less risky things, and if your study doesn't control for this, your study is going to show a causative link between stepping on sidewalk cracks at age 5 and using crack cocaine at age 17.
On the one hand, we do want to protect people from stupid decisions in their wild youth. On the other hand, the gateway hypothesis is the best argument I've seen against vaping, and it doesn't look like a good argument from where I'm sitting.
I think there's also a lot of hysteria that fruity vapes are targeted at kids. There must be tons of people over 21 who secretly like wine coolers and secretly like fruity vapes.
I've never been a cigarette smoker, and have only smoked a handful of cigars, but I've tried vaping a few times and found it pleasant. If, in another decade, vaping turns out to be no more harmful than my occasional single malt habit or my grilled red meat habit, I might take up vaping regularly at the age of 50. I get plenty of exercise, watch my weight, practice intermittent fasting, and spend a bit of my health budget on a small number of vices.
My younger son (high school freshman) would agree. He informed me that it is very addictive. Some kids try it out of curiosity and then become very addicted. It is easy to hide at school. He calls their bathroom the vape lounge. Kids can vape at home without their parents becoming aware if they have enough spending allowance. I thought E-cig was going to help people addicted to cigarettes quit smoking. I didn't imagine it may become a new plague itself.
I remain skeptical. I did some research, and the reports I found suggest that e-cig usage among teenagers is rare relative to cigarettes, and that most teenage e-cig users are former cigarette smokers. And again, as a parent of two children in roughly this age group, what you're saying you see every day conflicts with my own experience.
I think you're wrong about the general argument you're trying to make about e-cigarettes.
> 28% of high school students this year said they had used an e-cigarette at least once in the past 30 days
Holy smokes! If you look at data from a few years ago [1] that's more than double what you'd see for cigarette smoking (eyeballing the numbers here, the data is more granular).
Is it easier for kids to get e-cigs than cigarettes? Or do they just want them more?
I agree switching delivery mechanism from smoking to vaping is good, but in the case of this article the issue here is youth becoming nicotine addicts by going straight to vaping.
This phenomena will likely increase as Altria brings there centuries of proven addiction expertese and research to JUUL.
E-cigs didn't destroy the kid's market for traditional cigarettes, though. When I was in high school (right before vaping took off), smoking was only "cool" for a small subsection of the school. For everyone else, it was a stupid thing and kinda trashy. I'm guessing that the set of high school aged kids who would have picked up cigarette smoking if not for vaping is really quite small.
So, we worked for decades to eliminate cigarette dependency, made huge progress, and now kids largely don't smoke. And then vaping came along, and a company is receiving billions from investors to get kids addicted to nicotine.
Vaping is healthier, but I can't think of a conceivable reason why this is a good idea.
Can you present data to back this up? I would be surprised to learn that it was true. Middle schoolers, for instance, can get cigarettes even more easily than they can e-cigs†, and while vaping indoors was pretty common a couple years ago, it's been more than a year since I saw anyone do it in Chicago.
I guess I'm saying: I'm really skeptical of your claim that e-cigarettes are introducing more people to smoking. Cigarettes already do a pretty amazing job of introducing people to smoking.
† As the parent of someone who was a middle schooler just last year, let me add that I would be flabbergasted to see one of them vaping, but not entirely surprised to see them with a cigarette. If I saw a teenager vaping, "tobacco" would not be my first guess as to the intoxicant involved.
Even if vaping were 100% risk free (which I doubt) I think it's certainly better that we don't get kids addicted to nicotine (or any substance). The misinformation doesn't help things though, if kids are going to vape/smoke I'd much rather see them take up nicotine free varieties, I'm not sure why a non-smoker would take up the nicotine ones at all, maybe because companies like juul don't sell them. As someone silly enough to take up smoking as a teenager I think a non-nicotine variety would have had a huge change on my life.
I've seen some strange reactions from family about my vaping (which I've used to cut down smoking significantly). The hypocrisy award goes to my sister claiming it was dangerous and targeted at kids (due to the flavors), she said this while downing an alcopop drink and running one of those essential oil vapour machines in the house.
Adults use flavored vapes, too. In fact, almost all the adults I know who vape use flavored vapes; adults ranging in age in from 30-70. And all those adults switched from cigarettes to vaping.
The war on cigarettes has gone on so long that we've lost perspective. Part of the strategy of that war was to make nicotine out to be some horrendous and horrendously addictive poison, which was an easier sell for some people than explaining the varied and complicated effects from smoking combustible tobacco.
Kids shouldn't be using nicotine because of their developing brains. Kids experimenting with vaping out of ignorance should be educated.
But let's not lose sight of the fact that cigarette smoking is unfathomably more harmful for society. From an epidemiological perspective, if this was a zero-sum game it would make perfect sense to trade vaping for cigarettes, even if that meant teens were vaping at the same rate as they were smoking cigarettes at the peak.
If people want to obsess over flavored poisons, we should start by banning wine coolers (if not all wine!), alcoholic cider, and the myriad brands of flavored hard liquor.
I have. And besides the anecdotes, you can just look at the fact that vaping became a super hype amongst kids, kids that at least in my country were not smokers and couldn't have been because cigarettes are taxed to be totally unaffordable for kids, and even if they can afford them they're hard to buy because it's illegal to sell them to kids.
Vaping plus flavored nicotine is marketed at kids. If vaping were strictly an alternative to cigarettes, marketed at existing smokers, as a harm reduction alternative then it would be fine. But it's not, it's marketed as a hip new thing, getting kids hooked on nicotine that would have otherwise never touched a cigarette.
Also, that flavored nicotine smoke smells nasty. Most smokers tend to be aware that people don't like their smoke and they make some effort to keep it out of people's faces, but vaping isn't smoking, it's vaping, and cool and less harmful than cigarettes, so who could possibly object to vape smoke filling the air? /s
As a parent with young teenagers this really worries me. Vaping looks to be a lot more effective way of delivering high doses of nicotine than cigarettes. Do we want a generation of kids addicted to vaping because we thought it harmless?
Kids are better today than we were as kids. They drink less, they smoke less, they take drugs less often, they have fewer unplanned pregnancies, etc etc.
At the moment we don't think vaping turns non-smokers into smokers. But it's complicated, especially if there are companies that are marketing vaping to young non-smokers.
I personally think vaping is a useful public health measure, but I recognise the very many years of terrible behaviour from tobacco companies and it feels like light-touch regulation doesn't work.
The addictive part is the main issue. People don’t smoke for 30 years because it tastes good, and I don’t think vapes are any different.
I don’t think kids would ever DIY non-nicotine vapes enough to cause a public health crisis. Kids could have huffed Halloween fog machines in the 90s but they didn’t.
Every day in the US 2000 children under the age of 18 smoke their first cigarette.
It's important to switch those children to vaping or not smoking.
But all those other children who aren't smoking? There's almost no benefit to them from vaping, and there are disadvantages and risks. Vaping costs money, it's potentially addictive, some of the flavours can be harmful, the devices can be low quality and catch fire etc. These might be small quantities of risk, but across a population of 350m people it adds up to a bunch of people harmed for no benefit.
Having said that, the concept does seem very strange to me as someone who used to smoke and switched to vaping because it's better in every way. It tastes better (with so much more variety in flavors), it's not as harsh on your throat and it doesn't leave an embarrassing odor on your body that non-smokers will judge you for.
The only reasonable conclusion I personally could come to is that people are more likely to switch from smoking to vaping and very rarely the other way around.
Again, this isn't scientific. Also, kids shouldn't vape or smoke. Period.
_But_, if they do vape and get addicted to nicotine at a young age, I personally find it preposterous that they would switch to cigarettes for their nicotine in large numbers.
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