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The District of Columbia Department of Health recently posted a message on “X” to get residents to abandon nicotine e‑cigarettes. The message stated:

1 Vape = 20 cigarettes. #dontbe1 #staysafe #vapefree

One #vape pod contains 20 cigarettes worth of nicotine. Call 800-QUITNOW (800–784-8669) to get help quitting. #dontbe1 #staysafe #vapefree

 

The people over at the DC Department of Health should have read the results of comprehensive ...

You know someone is losing an argument when they try to shift the topic of the debate. There is no better example than the public health establishment's foolish campaign against vaping. Case in point: a just-published research letter in JAMA has found that “e-cigarette use among adolescents may have countered” some of the benefits of the decades-long decline in teen smoking. The study was accompanied by the usually uncritical media coverage in major outlets like US News and World Report:

"Electronic cigarette use is driving a rise in the proportion of...

“People using e-cigarettes to quit smoking found them to be less helpful than more traditional smoking cessations aids,” CNN said of a paper published in BMJ Tobacco Control on February 7. “In fact, nearly 60% of recent former smokers who were daily e-cigarette users had resumed smoking by 2019, the new study found.”

At first glance, the study seems to undermine the case for e-cigarette use (“vaping”) as a smoking cessation tool. But first glances, as we all know, rarely tell the whole...

According to a slew of recent headlines, electronic cigarette users (vapers) are more likely than smokers to have a stroke earlier in life. “Adults who vape could suffer a stroke at least a decade younger than those who smoke tobacco,” MSN reported on Monday. “E-cigarette users have a 15% higher risk of stroke at a younger age than traditional tobacco smokers, according to preliminary findings.”

Relying on data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) from 2015 to 2018, the researchers identified 79,825 adults with a history of stroke who also smoke and/or vape: 7,756 (9.72%) used e-cigarettes; 48,625 (60.91%) used...

On the issue of vaping, it is quite easy to make either advocates or critics angry. What is difficult is to anger both simultaneously. Yet, the Trump Administration has found a way to do just that.

It shouldn't come as a surprise that the administration wanted to take some sort of action on vaping. Because of his brother's unsuccessful battle with alcoholism, President Trump is a teetotaler. Obviously, his family was deeply affected by addiction, and he wants to protect other families from it.

However, the issue of vaping is extremely tricky. On the one hand, e-cigarettes are an excellent public health tool in the fight against smoking. There are hospitals in the UK...

Teenagers have no business using electronic cigarettes. Public health officials, scientists and even companies that manufacturer and sell e-cigarettes should do all they can to prevent teen vaping. 

That said, there's a point at which judicious public health advocacy devolves into ideological activism that actually does more harm than good. We saw an example of this devolution in North Carolina recently, where the vaping company JUUL agreed to pay $40 million over six years to settle a lawsuit alleging it deliberately marketed its e-cigarettes to underage customers. North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein summed up the case against JUUL for CNN in May 2019:

'My...

“Adults can do what they want, even though there’s simply no evidence that vapes help them to quit smoking. But our kids are not for sale. Their lives deserve our protection.” So wrote US. Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, D-Illinois, the author of legislation that would drastically increase the taxes consumers pay for purchasing e-cigarettes and related vaping products. Krishnamoorthi penned that sentence in response to Reason Magazine senior editor Jacob Sullum, who argued in a recent Chicago Sun-Times...

Mounting evidence shows that e-cigarette use (vaping) can help smokers give up combustible tobacco for good, even if they have no intention to quit. According to a just-published study of 1,600 people in JAMA Open Network, daily smokers who used e-cigarettes every day were eight times more likely to quit cigarettes than smokers who didn't try vaping. The researchers utilized four waves of data collected between 2014 and 2019 as part of the Population Assessment of Tobacco and Health (PATH) study. Participants were asked in each of the waves whether they currently smoked, used any nicotine-containing e-...

Recent research has suggested that e-cigarette use is linked to bone damage, erectile dysfunction, smoking relapse, depression and heightened stroke risk. None of these associations is supported by good data, and it appears we may have to add a new malady to this list. A new study published March 2 in the American Journal of Preventative Medicine has supposedly linked vaping to an increased risk of prediabetes. The paper has all the hallmarks typical of research in the vaping-more-harmful-than-we-thought genre. And, as usual, the media has done nothing more than...

Federal regulators are deeply concerned about flavored tobacco, especially vaping products. “The United States has never seen an epidemic of substance use arise as quickly as our current epidemic of youth use of e-cigarettes,” former Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar announced in January 2020. Not to be outdone, then-FDA Commissioner Dr. Stephen Hahn added that his agency is committed to dramatically limiting “children’s access to certain flavored e-cigarette products we know are so appealing to them ...”

Azar's and Hahn's comments helpfully summarize the ongoing panic surrounding electronic...