E-Cigarettes Are Bad Because They Look Like Cigarettes. E-Hookahs Are Bad Because They Don’t.

The
main rap against e-cigarettes, as
summarized by the Los Angeles Times in its story
about that city’s
brand-new ban on vaping in public, is that they look so
much like the real thing that they could “make smoking socially
acceptable after years of public opinion campaigns to discourage
the habit,” thereby “undermining a half-century of successful
tobacco control.” By contrast, the main rap against e-hookahs, as

explained by The New York Times today, is that
they are “shrewdly marketed to avoid the stigma associated with
cigarettes of any kind.” They do not look like hookahs, but neither
do they resemble conventional cigarettes, since these
vapor-emitting cylinders “come in a rainbow of colors and
candy-sweet flavors.” In fact, they are so distinctive in
appearance and branding that people who buy them do not necessarily
identify themselves as e-cigarette users.

Why is that a problem? Apparently because this fuzziness about
the name of the product makes life more complicated for social
scientists:

The emergence of e-hookahs and their ilk is frustrating public
health officials who are already struggling to measure the spread
of e-cigarettes, particularly among young people. The new products
and new names have health authorities wondering if they are
significantly underestimating use because they are asking the wrong
questions when they survey people about e-cigarettes.

Is there any other objection to e-hookahs? “Beneath the
surface,” the Times warns, “they are often virtually
identical to e-cigarettes, right down to their addictive nicotine
and unregulated swirl of other chemicals.” That “unregulated swirl”
sounds scary, but the components
of e-cigarette vapor—mainly propylene glycol and water, plus
nicotine and flavoring—are vastly preferable to the complicated
mixture of toxins and carcinogens generated by burning tobacco. The
Times offers no evidence that e-cigarettes, by
whatever name they are called, pose a significant hazard to
consumers or bystanders.

So what are those “public health officials” worried about, aside
from the need to revise their survey questions? The Times
says they worry that calling e-cigarettes “e-hookahs,” “vape
pipes,” “vape pens,” or “hookah pens” instead of e-cigarettes
“will lead to increased nicotine use and, possibly, prompt some
people to graduate to cigarettes.” The logic here eludes me: People
who are attracted to e-hookahs because they want nothing to do with
smoking will change their minds because…?

Although many smokers have switched to vaping, the
Times, which is running a series on e-cigarettes, does not
seem to have located a single example of a vaper who switched to
smoking. As far as I know, neither has any other news outlet.
Although that transition is theoretically possible, the evidence
suggests it is not very common. The recent increase in vaping among
teenagers has been accompanied by a
continued decline in smoking, and in a 2013
survey of 1,300 college students, only one respondent reported
vaping before he started smoking. The lead researcher said “it
didn’t seem as though it really proved to be a gateway to
anything.”

To sum up: E-cigarettes are bad because they look like
cigarettes. E-hookahs are bad because they don’t. Using either of
them might lead to smoking, although we can’t find any real-life
examples of that. Fruity flavors show these products are aimed at
children—or maybe at young
women,
middle-aged actresses, or old
Arab men. But the point is, they are aimed at somebody, and the
companies selling them clearly are trying to make them appealing,
which cannot be tolerated.