A new study suggests that smokers who take up vaping may "relapse" to cigarettes. But this is more a problem of definitions than evidence that e-cigarettes don't promote smoking cessation.
tobacco
Many tobacco control advocates have attacked vaping by emphasizing the risk it poses to teenagers. While children should never use any nicotine product, there's a strong case to be made that the campaign against teen vaping has distracted us from tackling a critical public health threat: adult smoking.
Anti-tobacco group the Truth Initiative claims vaping contributes to depression in teenagers. Its argument is based on a shallow reading of the evidence.
The FDA just took a significant step toward killing the vaping industry. While ostensibly acting to "protect public health," the agency has effectively banned millions of products and made it harder for smokers to give up their deadly habit.
A recent vaping-related lawsuit in North Carolina illustrates the problem with public health's black-or-white thinking about the effects of electronic cigarettes.
The COVID-19 pandemic has intensified calls to ban flavored e-liquids used in electronic cigarettes. One physician says there's good evidence that vaping increases the risk of infection for teenagers. Do her claims stand up to scrutiny?
Clickbait – provocative and intentionally misleading headlines online, designed to draw in newspaper or magazine readers – are nothing new to ACSH, or one of our trusted advisors. Have things gotten worse? That advisor, Dr. Jeffrey Singer (pictured), wonders whether scientific studies have stooped to an extremely low level.
The mainstream media would have us believe that vaping, especially among our children, is the gateway to smoking tobacco. A new study suggests otherwise.
From a public health perspective, what's the biggest preventable cause of cancer? Pesticides? Poor diet? Pollution? UV light? No, no, no, and nope. It's tobacco, by far. Obesity and infectious diseases are #2 and #3.
Fuzzy math rears its head in a new report on smoking and healthcare costs. Smoking is a big health risk, and we don't need fuzzy math to see that greatly reducing this health hazard will reduce tobacco-related costs.
The CDC says "tobacco use by youth is rising." If that were to be true, it'd be horrible -- but it's not. Cigarette use is down. The only reason the CDC can make this claim is because the agency considers e-cigarettes and vaping devices -- which only contain nicotine -- to be tobacco products. This is misleading and undermines public health.
In service of their ideological agenda, the "abstinence-only" nicotine religion is perfectly happy to withhold potentially life-saving e-cigarettes from smokers. If a few million smokers have to die along the way, those are casualties they're willing to accept in pursuit of their nicotine-free utopia.