Between Congress’s recent decision to raise the age to buy vaping products to 21, states imposing high taxes on e-cigarettes, and the Trump administration’s decision, announced Thursday, to go through with a partial ban of flavored vaping products, America’s war on vaping is in full swing. But when you consider the positive approach taken in the United Kingdom, the foolishness of this new conflict is laid bare.
The entire recent moral panic over vaping is baseless to begin with. Isolated instances of deaths from vaping-related lung illnesses have been used to paint a false picture that legal vaping products are dangerous. In fact, those reported deaths almost all involved the use of black-market products.
Vaping is much healthier than smoking traditional cigarettes. E-cigarettes do contain nicotine, but nicotine was never really the problem with traditional cigarettes in the first place — it’s essentially similar to caffeine. Rather, the enormous public health problem posed by cigarettes is due to the cancer-causing chemicals they contain, such as tar, for example. Vaping products do not contain similar chemicals, making them much, much less likely to cause cancer.
So it’s not a bad thing that more teenagers are vaping. If they’re not smoking cigarettes, then it’s actually a positive development! Previous generations of young people got hooked on traditional cigarettes, which led many to an early grave and a painful, slow death from lung cancer. Now, young people smoke mint Juul pods in the parking lot of their high schools. This is not ideal, but it is far from a crisis. There’s no real need for the nanny state to swoop in.
If the government is to do anything to address vaping, it should be to promote it as an alternative to smoking. This is what the U.K.’s government has done, to massive success.
Consider the following passage from the Wall Street Journal:
There are now 3.6 million vapers in the U.K. and 5.9 million smokers (some people are in both categories). Many British smokers have switched entirely to vaping, encouraged by the government, whose official position is that vaping is 95% safer than smoking, an assertion now backed by early studies of disease incidence. The organizations that have signed a statement saying that vaping is significantly less harmful than smoking include Public Health England, the Association of Directors of Public Health, the Royal College of Physicians and the Royal Society for Public Health.
There have been no deaths and few if any cases of lung illness directly attributed to vaping in the U.K. A recent study has concluded that vaping is now helping up to 70,000 people stop smoking every year by reaching those who failed to quit smoking by other means.
We should focus on the facts and ignore emotion-driven narratives. A sober analysis reveals that we are doing exactly the opposite of everything we should be doing. We are putting up more barriers and restrictions on vaping, and instead, we should embrace the U.K.’s approach. After all, it has worked out swimmingly for them.
