U.S. government is killing Americans by vilifying vaping

OPINION:

Last month, the United Kingdom introduced a program to help people stop smoking that will likely come as a shock to many Americans. Under “Swap to Stop,” the U.K. government will offer free vaping starter kits to 1 million smokers to encourage them to switch from traditional cigarettes to e-cigarettes.

If you’ve heard e-cigarettes are just as dangerous as old-school smoking and vaping is now at crisis levels among American youth, you’re hardly alone. But you’ve been terribly misinformed.

The science supports the U.K. Studies show e-cigarettes are at least 95% safer than cigarettes, and they are a powerful tool to help people stop smoking.

Meanwhile, the supposed youth vaping crisis in the United States is wildly overstated. From 2020 to 2022, vaping among U.S. adolescents declined sharply — a reduction that held steady during the post-pandemic period from 2021 to 2022. Far from spinning out of control, vaping among eighth graders has declined nearly to 2014 levels — that is, before the 2015 introduction of the popular e-cigarette Juul.

What’s more, the earlier rise of vaping also coincided with a marked decline in adolescent cigarette smoking. The former cancer science director at the American Cancer Society called that trade-off “an astounding accomplishment in public health.”

The recognition that vaping is safer than smoking is driving the U.K. Swap to Stop program. Unlike U.S. health leaders, U.K. researchers and policy officials have followed the science. They’ve taken note of studies showing that vaping leads to fewer toxins in the blood and breath than traditional cigarettes.

E-cigarettes also prevent exposure to the poisonous tar and carbon monoxide of tobacco smoke.

“Expert consensus is that, though not risk-free, e-cigarettes are considerably safer than combustible cigarettes,” one of the U.K’.s top research institutes concluded.

In 2018, the U.K. conducted a test of the efficacy of e-cigarettes as a tool to quit smoking. The government-funded a three-month pilot program in Salford, England, involving more than 1,000 smokers. Over 60% of participants who participated until the end of Salford’s Swap-to-Stop program were free of traditional cigarettes after four weeks.

Importantly, e-cigarettes proved more effective and more popular than other smoking cessation tools such as nicotine patches or gum.

“People who use e-cigarettes to quit smoking may use them longer than if they were to use other treatments, like nicotine patches,” concluded Oxford University’s Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine.

Adherence matters in the fight against addiction, and in another study, researchers found that more than 70% of people successfully using e-cigarettes to quit smoking were still using e-cigarettes six months later.

U.K. public policy leaders also noted the inequitable distribution of harm from traditional cigarettes. Just as in the United States, low-income and minority populations in the U.K. exhibit the highest smoking rates and stand to benefit most from e-cigarettes.

“The more disadvantaged someone is,” the U.K.’s Royal College of Physicians said, “the more likely they are to smoke and to suffer from smoking-related disease and premature death.”

Yet researchers found that lower-income populations were also most likely to have misconceptions about the relative safety of e-cigarettes, thus dissuading them from a safer alternative to combustible cigarettes.

One of Britain’s most distinguished researchers has dubbed e-cigarettes “the most effective tool to help smokers quit” and urged the government to allow health practitioners to prescribe them. An American researcher studying the U.K.’s approach offered a bracing conclusion to a recent commentary in Nature: “Vaping will avoid large numbers of premature deaths over time.”

Such clarity about the utility of vaping in smoking harm reduction has yet to take hold in policy circles on this side of the pond, however. In the wake of alarmist media reports about adolescent vaping, the Food and Drug Administration in 2020 announced sweeping bans on flavored e-cigarettes.

In doing so, the policy ignored powerful evidence that adults preferred flavored products, too. That included studies demonstrating that adults “used e-cigarettes as a means to quit smoking or avoid relapse, and these flavors may be part of the reason why they end up using e-cigarettes in the long term.”

Every year, half a million Americans lose their lives to cigarette smoking, making it the nation’s leading cause of preventable death. But unlike in the U.K., U.S. public policymakers are making an awful public health problem worse.

Over the past five years, the FDA rejected 99% of applications for e-cigarettes. Over the same period, the bureaucracy approved nearly 900 new cigarette products for sale in the last five years, according to a recent report by the Vapor Technology Association.

These statistics highlight a glaring contradiction in this country’s public health policies. American officials have a chance to prioritize effective harm reduction strategies and help millions quit smoking — but they’re choosing to kill Americans instead.

• Drew Johnson is an economist and public policy expert who is a candidate for Congress in Nevada’s 3rd Congressional District.