Article from Reason by Jacob Sullum.
Scott Gottlieb, the head of the Food and Drug Administration, says he still believes in the harm-reducing potential of e-cigarettes, which are far less hazardous than their combustible competitors. But by threatening to restrict e-cigarettes in the name of preventing underage vaping, he is knowingly setting a course that leads to more smoking-related deaths than would occur if the government let the market thrive.
“In closing the on-ramp to kids,” Gottlieb said in a speech last week, “we’re going to have to narrow the off-ramp for adults who want to migrate off combustible tobacco and onto e-cigs.” That “unfortunate tradeoff,” as he calls it, is not necessary, scientifically sensible, or morally justifiable.
Gottlieb is responding to “an epidemic of e-cigarette use among teenagers,” which he erroneously equates with an “epidemic of addiction” and even “a whole generation of young people becoming addicted to nicotine.” According to the National Youth Tobacco Survey (NYTS), the share of high school students who reported vaping during the previous month peaked at 16 percent in 2015, fell to about 11 percent in 2016 and remained roughly the same last year.
The percentage of teenagers who vape often enough to become addicted to nicotine is much smaller. In the 2015 NYTS, for example, just 2.5 percent of high school students (16 percent of “current” users) reported vaping on 20 or more days in the previous month, and almost all of them were current or former smokers.
Read the entire article at Reason.
Image Credit: By TBEC Review [CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
Image Credit: Do Follow: http://vaping360.com/
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GIVE me a break here! Bubblegum flavored vape nicotine is NOT aimed at adults, it’s AIMED at drawing kids; and so are many of the other flavors! Regulating those out of existence needs to be done. The tobacco industry is sure not going to do so on their own; look how long they lied about the connection between their product and cancer to start with. IF they don’t attract young smokers their business dries up and goes away; so of course they’re trying to attract young people.
This is similar to the Opiod epidemic made possible by big pharma’s greed.
For more on this, read “Dopesick” by Beth Macy.
Gottlieb is responding to “an epidemic of e-cigarette use among teenagers,” which he erroneously equates with an “epidemic of addiction” and even “a whole generation of young people becoming addicted to nicotine.”
OMG, a whole generation has no self control over what they might do. This is serious. We apparently have a “whole generation” of walking talking zombies.
Gotlieb is casting a wide net to make a specious point. But in doing so he loses credibility by his hyperbolic exclamations. He is someone to which no attention should be paid.