My teenage daughter vapes. She half-heartedly tries to hide it from me, but parents are rarely as slow-witted as their 17-year-olds think. Not that I especially mind. At her age, I was smoking actual, you know, cigarettes. So were most of my friends.
The shift among young people from tobacco to nicotine-infused water is one of the many ways in which her generation is healthier than mine.
In Britain, vaping is recognized as a welcome way to cut tobacco-related deaths. Studies show that switching to e-cigarettes is twice as likely to make smokers quit as the next most effective method (nicotine patches). Even our killjoy public health agencies, after some initial harrumphing, accepted the logic. Sure, vaping is mildly deleterious to your health. But its spread has already saved thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of people from the slow asphyxiation of emphysema or lung cancer.
The United States, uniquely, is going in the opposite direction. The Trump administration has announced that it will ban the sale of flavored cartridges, supposedly to tackle what the health secretary calls “the epidemic of youth e-cigarette use that is impacting children, families, schools and communities.” Melania Trump says she wants to “prevent e-cigarettes from becoming an on-ramp to nicotine addiction for a generation of youth.”
Politicians from all sides are rushing to join the moral panic. Sen. Mitt Romney frets that “a generation of young people has been deceived into thinking e-cigarettes are safe.” Sen. Dick Durbin has told the head of the Food and Drug Administration to resign unless he can get on top of the “vaping epidemic.”
Epidemic? It is certainly true that e-cigarettes have become far more common over the past decade — for the same reason that Uber and Airbnb have, namely that they didn’t exist before. One in 5 high school students admits to having sucked on an e-cigarette in the past month. But over that same decade, the use of traditional cigarettes has halved. Only 8% of students now smoke.
I cannot prove direct causation, as smoking has been in decline for some time. But I am pretty sure that my daughter and her friends started vaping for the same reason that I and my friends took up smoking at the same age: because it was against the rules. She and her friends have found a less unhealthy way to rebel than her parents, grandparents, or great-grandparents did. Sure, nicotine is bad for her. But she is not inhaling smoke and coating her lungs with tar.
The supposed justification for the clampdown is absurd. A number of Americans have become ill, and a few have actually died, as a result of vaping illegal substances. That’s right, illegal. As far as I can make out, in every case, the problem was not with capsules that you can buy across the counter, but with black-market tetrahydrocannabinol oil cut with a thickening agent.
Incredibly, the president, Congress, and the public health puritans who still dominate America’s administrative state are arguing that because illegal vape juice can kill, legal vape juice should be outlawed and driven underground. In order to keep up this doublethink, they have to maintain that normal vape capsules suddenly became lethal in mid-2019 after years of being consumed worldwide.
Bureaucrats love banning things, partly because they want to justify their salaries and partly because they have a sour and censorious streak. As my favorite British historian Lord Macaulay observed of their ideological forebears, “The puritan hated bear baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators.” The idea that people might be enjoying themselves too much makes our modern puritans resent fries, soda, alcohol, and pizza.
But wasn’t the whole point of President Trump, that he was going to tame the administrative state? Why does he want to turn the full force of the government against vaping when nearly half a million Americans die every year from smoking? Yes, vaping is mildly unhealthy, just as the glass of Rioja I sipped while writing this column was mildly unhealthy. But how does that justify mobilizing the federal authorities?
Apart from anything else, the question of regulating e-cigarettes, if any regulation is needed, is surely a state prerogative. Even if the federal government somehow manages to elbow its way in, it would be a legislative rather than an executive issue.
I get that some Trump supporters, those who are elderly, authoritarian, and suspicious of change, like to see their guy taking decisive action, constitutional proprieties be damned. But isn’t this precisely the sort of heavy-handed ban that should have mainstream conservatives reaching for arguments about proportionality and personal freedom? Where are they all?
