More Evidence That Vaping Is Not a Gateway to Smoking
From: Reason
Very few nonsmoking teenagers vape regularly, and even fewer vape nicotine.
Three years ago, Thomas Frieden, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC),warned that “many kids are starting out with e-cigarettes and then going on to smoke conventional cigarettes.” That fear is one of the main justifications for the CDC’s hostility toward vaping and the Food and Drug Administration’s onerous new e-cigarette regulations, which are expected to cripple the industry. Yet there is no evidence that Frieden’s claim is true and considerable evidence that it’s not, especially since smoking rates among teenagers have fallen to record lows even as more and more of them experiment with vaping. Two new studies cast further doubt on the idea that e-cigarettes are a “gateway” to the real thing.
Frieden and other e-cigarette alarmists make much of the fact that the percentage of teenagers who report vaping has risen dramatically in recent years. They like to focus on the percentage of teenagers who have ever tried e-cigarettes and the percentage who have used them in the last month, without asking how many are experimenters or occasional users and how many are daily vapers—the sort who might get hooked on nicotine and eventually progress to conventional cigarettes. It turns out there’s a good reason for the CDC’s lack of curiosity on this point: Survey data show that few teenagers who have never smoked use e-cigarettes and that even fewer do so on a regular basis.
