>The reason there was an uproar is that there's been a huge surge in vaping by kids... vaping spread through high schools like wildfire.

The article directly contradicts this statement and says it's a myth (number 5).

>Our latest report found no evidence so far to support the concern that e-cigarettes are a route into smoking among young people. UK surveys show that young people are experimenting with e-cigarettes, but regular use is rare and confined almost entirely to those who already smoke. Meanwhile, smoking rates among young people in the UK continue to decline.

The article is denying that e-cig leads to traditional smoking. That isn't the same as e-cig usage going up among young people which is virtually undeniable. That also means the comparisons of e-cig being safer than cigarettes is less important for this group since they were unlikely to smoke without the existence of e-cigarettes.

Your argument is that vape using teenagers were unlikely to have smoked. I think it's hard to tell if vaping is diverting teenagers who otherwise would have smoked, or simply creating a new habit.

There are some intertwingled effects where increased vape use (and decreased smoker population) might be contributing to the unfashionability of smoking, both among teenagers and in society at large.

Perhaps we could compare teenage smoking rates in countries where e-cigarettes are banned / unavailable versus countries where they are available. I don't have this data or any studies to point to, but I would be interested to know more.

The evidence is pretty strong when you look at the data, https://www.motherjones.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/blog_...

I don't know what the facts are regarding whether e-cigarettes are some kind of "gateway" to real ones. It doesn't seem realistic to me but it's the kind of thing that should be studied properly before jumping to conclusions.

Having said that, the concept does seem very strange to me as someone who used to smoke and switched to vaping because it's better in every way. It tastes better (with so much more variety in flavors), it's not as harsh on your throat and it doesn't leave an embarrassing odor on your body that non-smokers will judge you for.

The only reasonable conclusion I personally could come to is that people are more likely to switch from smoking to vaping and very rarely the other way around.

Again, this isn't scientific. Also, kids shouldn't vape or smoke. Period.

_But_, if they do vape and get addicted to nicotine at a young age, I personally find it preposterous that they would switch to cigarettes for their nicotine in large numbers.

We actually have no long term evidence that vaping specific mixes is safe with regards to cancer and lung disease endpoints.

Maybe safer in a sense that normal bullets are safer to get shot with than depleted uranium rounds...

Even tobacco chewing is associated with (oral) cancer. Lower rates than smoking and lung cancer, but still. Could use some data on pure nicotine.

The submitted article is about the UK, where vaping seems to be limited to ex smokers.

That's not the case in the US where a bunch of non smokers, often young people, started vaping.

But if vaping isn't unhealthy, is it really necessary to reduce vaping by teens? The primary reason for reducing smoking is that it's a huge risk factor that leads to negative health outcomes and expensive treatments. If it's not unhealthy (in the sense of causing respiratory disease or cancer), while I would prefer teens not smoke, I'm not nearly as concerned about vaping (however, I don't think we have nearly enough data about the long-term safety of vaping to really say for sure).

We're talking about teenagers using and becoming addicted to nicotine. Nicotine is completely inessential to life. Nicotine addicts (smokers or vapers) don't show any benefit in life outcome from it. All it does is put a drain on their finances just to make them feel better every time they experience cravings, cravings which don't exist in non-addicts.

That may not actually be true:

https://www.tampabay.com/news/health/study-finds-nicotine-sa...

Did they weight it against coronary disease endpoints, of which we have numerous studies, some even with pure nicotine?

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4958544/

All case mortality is worse in nicotine users.

Even if vaping were 100% risk free (which I doubt) I think it's certainly better that we don't get kids addicted to nicotine (or any substance). The misinformation doesn't help things though, if kids are going to vape/smoke I'd much rather see them take up nicotine free varieties, I'm not sure why a non-smoker would take up the nicotine ones at all, maybe because companies like juul don't sell them. As someone silly enough to take up smoking as a teenager I think a non-nicotine variety would have had a huge change on my life.

I've seen some strange reactions from family about my vaping (which I've used to cut down smoking significantly). The hypocrisy award goes to my sister claiming it was dangerous and targeted at kids (due to the flavors), she said this while downing an alcopop drink and running one of those essential oil vapour machines in the house.

Nothing is risk free.

If you have a large population then any small risk means harm will be caused to a small number of people.

If people who start vaping are ex smokers we can balance that tiny risk against the huge benefits of smoking cessation.

We can't do that same balancing for young non smokers who start vaping, so from a public health point of view we'd want to avoid it.

The uproar surrounding vaping by kids was merited as I claimed at the bottom of my post. The surrounding hysteria and misinformation were not merited.

For instance - no kids shouldn't vape nicotine.

But parents also shouldn't be misinformed and think their kids could end up in the hospital and die after only a few weeks of vaping because they saw a headline about how vaping is killing people which conveniently leave out the fact that this was only a problem with black market THC vape juice.