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The ridiculous campaign against vaping
N
ever before has a boon to
public health been met
with such hysteria and
ingratitude.
Vaping is almost all upside
in comparison with traditional
smoking, a wanton destroyer
of health and lives, and yet the
nation is in the grips of a panic
about e-cigarettes.
In a rarity for the Trump era,
the anti-vaping sentiment jumps
traditional geographic and
political bounds, running from
the Oval Offi ce to San Francisco,
from President Donald Trump to
his most fervent enemies.
Trump announced a Food and
Drug Administration ban on
fl avored e-cigarettes last week,
while not too long ago the San
Francisco Board of Supervisors
banned the sale of vaping
products at retail outlets and
— seemingly more persnickety
about this than, say, the use
of heroin or public defecation
— prohibited their delivery to
addresses in the city.
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo
just imposed a ban on fl avored
e-cigarettes on an “emergency”
basis. “Vaping is dangerous,
period,” Cuomo pronounced,
citing, like the president, teenage
use in particular.
Actually, there’s little evidence
that vaping, as a general matter,
is hazardous, and compared
with traditional cigarettes it’s
a refreshing kale and spinach
smoothie aft er a brisk workout at
your favorite Pilates studio.
Traditional smokers inhale
a witch’s brew of carcinogens
and carbon monoxide. Smoking
accounts for 30 percent of all
cancer deaths, and 18 percent
of all deaths. The founder of my
magazine, William F. Buckley,
a longtime cigar smoker who
suff ered from emphysema at
the end of his life and had seen
too many family members and
colleagues killed by smoking-
related illnesses, said in one of
his last columns that he’d ban
cigarettes if he could.
A credible estimate is that
e-cigarettes, which involve
inhaling a nicotine-infused
vapor rather than smoke, are
about 95 percent less harmful
than cigarettes.
The vaping-related illnesses
that have recently garnered
headlines and prompted the
regulatory actions appear not
to implicate standard vaping —
despite loose statements to the
contrary by politicians and in the
press. Early evidence suggests
the use of black-market liquids
containing THC, the activeingredient in cannabis. It’s
possible that an acetate, added to
thicken the THC oil, may be the
cause. The New York Department
of Health found “very high levels
of vitamin E acetate in nearly all
cannabis-containing samples
analyzed.”
In announcing his fl avored
vaping ban, Cuomo said
that “many of these other
products have no control on
them whatsoever,” which is by
defi nition true because they are
black-market products. We could
make the risky products involvedillegal, if they weren’t already
illegal.
The problem with the fl avor
bans — and especially a San
Francisco-style outright ban —
is its eff ect on adult e-cigarette
users.
About 11 million adults vape,
and some percentage of them
are former smokers or would
be smoking in the absence of
e-cigarettes. A robust study
in the United Kingdom found
that vaping is twice as eff ective
as other common nicotine
replacements in getting smokers
to quit. The fl avors, according to
surveys of users, are a big draw
for smokers quitting traditional
cigarettes.
Anything that pushes
e-cigarette users back into
conventional smoking (now at a
new low of 14 percent of adults)
is bad for public health. It’s
manifestly absurd to ban vaping
products and leave cigarettes,
including fl avored cigarettes, on
the market.
Another source of the current
panic is that teen vaping is way
up. In 2017, 11.7 percent of teens
reported having vaped over the
past 30 days; in 2019, 27.5 percent
did. There’s nothing to suggest
that this increase in vaping is
encouraging real teen smoking,
which continues to decline and
has fallen to less than 6 percent
from roughly 35 percent in thelate 1990s.
Everyone would prefer that
teens not develop a vaping habit,
but this presents nothing close
to the health issue presented by
combustible cigarettes.
It’s already illegal, by the way,
to sell vaping products to minors.
By all means, let’s crack down
on retailers who are violating this
prohibition. But exaggerating the
harms of vaping and prohibiting
the products is a formula for
giving back some of the gains
against traditional smoking.
The libertarian publication
Reason points to one study
that, insanely, shows more
people beginning to consider
e-cigarettes as dangerous as
regular cigarettes.
The U.K. has adopted a much
more sensible approach that
welcomes e-cigarettes as an
important harm-reduction
measure. According to a report
in The Guardian, a couple of
National Health Service hospitals
have even allowed vape shops to
open on their premises.
That would cause a hue and
cry in the United States, where
we can’t agree on anything
except, apparently, our irrational
hostility to a product that is an
alternative to a terrible public
health scourge.Rich Lowry is editor of National
Review.RICH
LOWRYJUSTIN SULLIVAN/GETTY IMAGES
A credible estimate is that
e-cigarettes are about 95 percent
less harmful than cigarettes.