Vaping is under attack. Around the world there have been calls to have it banned, aided as usual by an irresponsible media. As Steve Forbes (yes, that Steve Forbes) reports, these calls are profoundly wrong.
You’d never know it from all the lurid headlines in recent months about the seeming epidemic of deaths from “smoking” e-cigarettes, but vaping is actually a public-health godsend for smokers. The hysteria surrounding vaping says more about the peculiar fevers of our times than about the realities of puffing e-cigarettes.
Those deaths we hear about didn’t result from normal e-cigarettes but from tainted contents, particularly the active ingredient found in cannabis. The cries for prohibiting vaping make no more sense than banning milk because a few bad characters peddled adulterated versions.
Dodgy cartridges containing Vitamin E acetate to be precise. There have been no deaths caused by legit vaporisers.
The truth is that vaping is 95% less harmful than smoking. It lets users get nicotine without all the other carcinogenic contents and carbon monoxide that come from smoking cigarettes. Vaping is far more effective in helping people quit inhaling tobacco than are all the other props, including nicotine patches. Moreover, with many vaping devices, users can choose the level of nicotine they vape, including none at all. Vaping has enabled countless numbers of smokers to give up cigarettes and countless others not to take them up in the first place, thereby saving millions of lives.
Also, only a tiny fraction of vape users aren’t smokers or former smokers.
[…[As for an “epidemic” in teenage vaping, there is little evidence e-cigarettes have become a gateway to cigarette smoking. Smoking among teenagers has, in fact, declined dramatically since the 1990s.
Likewise, there is little if any evidence that vape flavours encourage young people.
I can’t begin to describe just how stupid the idea of banning vaping is. It is throwing yourself off a building because the world is too dumb to live in level stupid. Vaping is the definition of harm reduction. Nicotine isn’t the problem, it’s the way it’s delivered. Vaping allows users to get a hit in a way that is much, much, safer and less harmful than smoking a cigarette.
If anything the deaths from dodgy cartridges show what will happen if vaping is outlawed. More dodgy cartridges, more deaths.
The government may be dithering on this issue but I’d rather the government do nothing than make a complete hash of it, or worse.