The Los Angeles Times has their knives out for the president, but shockingly enough, their target today isn’t President Trump. It’s Barack Obama.
Years before the “vaping outbreak,” they write, the Obama administration struck down a proposed “ban for fluids for e-cigarettes” and “much of the evidence supporting it.”
Seeing as dozens of people have recently died after illegal THC pods caused curious illnesses, the piece went viral on Twitter as a charge that the Obama administration knew that black market vaping could cause pulmonary problems and did nothing to halt it.
But that’s not the “crisis” the Times refers to. Instead, the “crisis” is an uptick in the number of people vaping, a figure largely attributable to former smokers using e-cigarettes to quit the habit that kills half its lifelong users.
The way the Times writes the narrative, the Obama administration was bought over by vaping lobbyists and, I kid you not, the deeply nefarious cabal of “small business advocates” into rejecting a ban that would have saved the people getting sick. But most damning is supposedly that the administration “nixed” evidence. From the reporter of the article:
8/ Obama officials told @latimes there wasn’t enough scientific evidence at the time to outweigh economic burden of the ban. But, docs show that, when they nixed the ban, they also deleted 15 pages of evidence showing that a vaping crisis was coming fast.
1 in 4 teens now vape.
— Emily Baumgaertner (@Emily_Baum) October 1, 2019
But the Times never elucidates a key detail in the entire story: The “crisis” that’s killing people isn’t likely coming from a single legally purchased e-cigarette. The overwhelming majority of vaping lung illness cases are linked to illegal vape pens with THC, and it’s fully possible that not one legal product and pod have been responsible.
Furthermore, the crisis the Times refers to, the one of kids Juuling once a month rather than the real catastrophe of people dying thanks to black market pods, is largely an invention of paternalistic pansies keen to regulate yet another domain of the market.
Sure, some 1 in 5 high schoolers have vaped in the past month. But teenage cigarette use has fallen by half as a result. Overall, cigarette use among adults has plummeted to its lowest recorded rate, a success primarily attributable to vaping.
The Obama administration made the right call to listen to the concerns of our nation’s business owners, follow the science, and then reject anti-e-cigarette regulation. There’s not a shred of evidence backing the absurd notion that banning “kid-appealing” flavors would do anything but push people to dangerous, black market vapes. The Trump administration ought to take note and do the same.
