Smoking by Teenagers Continues to Fall As Vaping Continues to Rise

Yesterday the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
(CDC) released
survey data that show cigarette smoking by teenagers continued
to fall last year even as their use of electronic cigarettes
continued to rise. Between 2011 and 2013, according to the National
Youth Tobacco Survey, the prevalence of “current” (past-month)
cigarette smoking among high school students fell from 15.8 percent
to 12.7 percent, while the prevalence of current e-cigarette use
tripled from 1.5 percent to 4.5 percent. This is not what you would
expect to see if the rising popularity of e-cigarettes stimulated
demand for the conventional kind, as CDC officials repeatedly have
warned might happen.   

Last year, for instance, CDC Director Tom Frieden
said “many teens who start with e-cigarettes may be condemned
to struggling with a lifelong addiction to nicotine and
conventional cigarettes.” In April he
worried that e-cigarettes will “get another generation of kids
more hooked on nicotine and more likely to smoke cigarettes.” A
month later Tim McAfee, director of the CDC’s Office on Smoking and
Health,
condemned the marketing of e-cigarettes as an “egregious
experiment” on “our children.”

The CDC’s discussion of the latest data is a bit more
restrained. “Although the long-term impact of e-cigarette use on
public health overall remains uncertain,” says an
article in the agency’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly
Report, “the 2014 Surgeon General’s report found that
nicotine use can have adverse effects on adolescent brain
development; therefore, nicotine use by youths in any form (whether
combustible, smokeless, or electronic) is unsafe.” Maybe so, but
some forms of nicotine—in particular, the ones that involve
inhaling tobacco smoke—are decidely more unsafe than others. If
teenagers who otherwise would be smoking are vaping instead, that
should count as a public health improvement. In any case, the
unverified risk that e-cigarettes might serve as a “gateway” to
smoking should not be accepted as a valid reason for restricting
adult smokers’ access to a product that can dramatically reduce the
health hazards they face.