Never 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 Office to San Francisco, from President Trump to his most fervent enemies.
Trump announced a Food and Drug Administration ban on flavored e-cigarettes, 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.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo just imposed a ban on flavored 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 after a brisk workout at your favorite Pilates studio.
Traditional smokers inhale a witch’s brew of carcinogens and carbon monoxide. Smoking accounts for 30% of all cancer deaths and 18% of all deaths. The founder of National Review, William F. Buckley, a longtime cigar smoker who suffered from emphysema at the end of his life and had seen too many family members and colleagues killed by smoking-related illnesses, said 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% less harmful than cigarettes.
The vaping-related illnesses that have garnered headlines and prompted the regulatory actions appear not to implicate standard vaping but rather the use of black-market liquids containing THC, the active ingredient in cannabis.
The problem with the flavor bans — and especially a San Francisco-style outright ban — is its effect 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 effective as other common nicotine replacements in getting smokers to quit. The flavors, according to surveys of users, are a big draw for smokers quitting traditional cigarettes.
It’s manifestly absurd to ban vaping products and leave cigarettes, including flavored cigarettes, on the market.
Another source of the current panic is that teen vaping is way up. In 2017, 11.7% of teens reported having vaped over the past 30 days; in 2019, 27.5% 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% from roughly 35% in the late 1990s.
Everyone would prefer that teens not develop a vaping habit, but this presents nothing close to the health issue presented by combustible cigarettes.
By all means, let’s crack down on retailers who are violating the prohibition against selling products to minors. 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 UK 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.
Twitter: @RichLowry