It’s a matter of causations vs correlation. The authors of
these studies and countless others see similarities between
two variables that lead them to conclude that young vapers
will develop into smokers. Going by that logic, you could
also say that playing with Lego or eating ice cream as
a child will lead to a smoking habit later in life. But really
the two are independent of each other. Surely, if vaping
easily led to smoking, wouldn’t the number of vapers be
going down and the number of smokers going up, or at
least plateauing? Vapers would be slipping back into old
habits all the time if vaping was a ‘gateway’. Smoking is a
gateway to vaping, not visa versa.
E-cigarette use among teenagers
appears to be lower in the UK, but
there’s still plenty of research into
the issue on this side of the Atlantic.
Last year was the first year that vaping was included in
the study, which revealed that students were more likely
to vape ‘just flavouring’ than nicotine-containing e-liquid.
If nicotine is removed from the equation, so is one of the
key properties that makes cigarettes so appealing.
Teenagers should not be vaping. Full stop. But rather than
ignoring the fact that some do or stoking unfounded fears
about a reversal of decades of smoking decline, we should
see it for what it is: experimentation. Few, if any, of those
non-smokers who pick up an e-cigarette will develop a
habit and fewer still will walk through the mythical gateway
and become smokers.
In ‘Young People’s Use of E-Cigarettes across the United
Kingdom: Findings from Five Surveys 2015–2017’,
Lead author Linda Bauld, professor of health policy
at the University of Stirling, said, “Recent studies have
generated alarming headlines that e-cigarettes are leading
to smoking. Our analysis of the latest surveys from all parts
of the United Kingdom, involving thousands of teenagers,
shows clearly that for those teens who don’t smoke, e-cig
experimentation is simply not translating into regular use.”
In Monitoring the Future Survey: High School and Youth
Trends, the National Institute on Drug Abuse in the
US reported that student use of illicit drugs other than
marijuana remained at its lowest level in the past
20 years.
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