# Media Misrepresenting the Science and facts around Harm Reduction.



## Alex (21/12/17)

*




Financial Post*
December 20, 2017

*Here comes another unhealthy government attack on the e-cigarette that saves lives*
*Jesse Kline: Those intent on scaring the public are misrepresenting what the science on e-cigarettes actually says*




E-cigarettes have become an exploding industry, worth nearly $2-billion in the U.S. alone, a market that some analysts project will eventually surpass that of traditional cigarettes.
Electronic-cigarette users and retailers are up in arms over legislation recently passed by the Ontario Liberals that will, among other things, give the government the ability to ban certain flavours of liquid for e-cigs or “vaping.” The government says it will help make the products less attractive to young people, but it could end up making it harder for adult smokers to kick the habit.

Despite the fact that researchers almost unanimously agree that e-cigarettes are far less harmful than tobacco, many government officials and public health advocates remain wary about harm-reduction strategies in general, and vaping as a safer alternative to smoking in particular. One common refrain is that vaping is a “gateway” to smoking.

This is just a variation of the same failed argument that anti-drug warriors made for decades: that marijuana is a gateway drug to harder narcotics. That’s now been shown to be a myth. Opioid overdoses in Colorado increased every year for 14 years before pot legalization, but have fallen by six per cent since. That hasn’t stopped people from recycling the fallacy for e-cigarettes.

Unfortunately, those intent on scaring the public into believing that e-cigarettes will re-normalize smoking among youths often misrepresent what the science is actually saying. Following a study published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal (CMAJ) in the fall, one Daily Mail headline reported that, “E-cigarettes ARE a gateway to teenage tobacco smoking: Youngsters are twice as likely to go on to regular smoking after using the devices.” And Keith Beecroft, a public health official in Peterborough, Ont., cited the CMAJ study in the Ontario newspaper, Peterborough This Week, to assert that “We know young people who start vaping because it’s cool will move on to smoking conventional cigarettes.”

This is just a variation of an old, failed argument

That study was conducted by researchers at the University of Waterloo and was based on a survey of students grades 9 through 12 at schools in Alberta and Ontario in the 2013–14 and 2014–15 school years. Students were asked about their past tobacco and e-cigarette use, as well as the likelihood that they would try such products in the future. While the researchers did find that the “use of e-cigarettes was strongly associated with cigarette smoking,” they did not find a causal link between the two.

“It is unclear the extent to which this association is causal,” they wrote. “In fact, the findings from our study provide support for both sides of the debate. It is highly plausible that ‘common factors’ account for a substantial proportion of increased cigarette-smoking initiation among e-cigarette users.”

In other words, it’s entirely possible that young people who are predisposed to trying cigarettes — perhaps out of rebelliousness, or a disregard of risk (and perhaps drugs and alcohol, too) — are also likely to try e-cigarettes. The real question is not whether teenagers experiment with both tobacco products and e-cigarettes, but whether the advent of e-cigarettes is causing an increase in smoking rates among youth. And the research has consistently shown that this is not the case.

In a perfect world, teens would not experiment with either product

Indeed, while the aforementioned study did find that the number of young people who had tried e-cigarettes in the past 30 days increased during the period in question, it also found that the overall number of youths who had smoked a cigarette in the past month decreased. The latest National Youth Tobacco Survey, conducted by the U.S. Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, also found that the number of American high-school students who had smoked a cigarette in the month prior to the survey decreased from 16 per cent in 2011, to eight per cent in 2016. At the same time, students who had tried vaping increased from 1.5 per cent in 2011, to 16 per cent in 2015, but fell to 11 per cent in 2016.

Although we have no way of knowing how much smoking rates would have decreased if vaping was not an option, it’s fairly clear that e-cigarettes have not caused an increase in tobacco use. As tobacco researcher Riccardo Polosa and his co-authors wrote in Harm Reduction Journal in June, “the increasing prevalence of e-cigarette use between 2010 and 2015 has coincided with the sharpest declines in the smoking rate among U.S. youth and young adults on record.” That’s something to celebrate.

In a perfect world, those who are under the legal age would not experiment with tobacco or e-cigarettes, and reasonable steps should be taken to make it harder for them to access these products. But we’re never going to completely prevent teenagers from experimenting with things they shouldn’t. So as governments across Canada continue trying to place additional restrictions on the sale and use of electronic cigarettes, they would be wiser to consider the harm these rules can cause. Over-regulating electronic nicotine products could push people, both young and old, back to far-more-dangerous tobacco smoking.

_Jesse Kline is a communications consultant with the Canadian Vaping Association (canadianvapingassociation.org)._


source: http://business.financialpost.com/o...nt-attack-on-the-e-cigarette-that-saves-lives

Reactions: Like 2 | Thanks 1 | Informative 4


----------

