The new tobacco war
“We now have established a pretty good body of literature showing that e-cigarettes do not attract non-smokers. They simply don’t. Virtually every e-cigarette user is a smoker who switched,” said Dr. Joel Nitzkin, a public health physician who now consults for R Street, a conservative think tank in Washingon, D.C. “There are lots of non-smokers, especially kids, who are tempted to try e-cigarettes, to sample them. But it’s hard to find even a single kid who is started off as a non-smoker, sampled them and continued its use.”
He points to two studies conducted by public health groups as proof. A U.S. survey of 3,240 adults found only six nonsmokers who had ever used an e-cigarette, and a 2013 UK survey of more than 12,000 adults and 2,000 children was not able to identify a single nonsmoker who used e-cigarettes regularly.
CDC data, he said, could be interpreted in the same way, showing a rapid increase in teens trying e-cigarette use, but a continued decline in teen smoking rates.
“The best path from where we are to a tobacco-free society is to adopt tobacco harm reduction elements in the public health programs and have people switch to products that are a whole lot easier to quit,” Nitzkin said. “Not only are they easier to quit, they cut the risk of potentially fatal tobacco related illness by 99 percent or more. I think we have good solid scientific evidence to point that out.”
