Washington Post Attack on E-Cigarettes Deserves Emergency Room Treatment

 

Dr. Leana Wen, an emergency physician and Washington Post columnist, attacked tobacco harm reduction in a Post column last week, “The New Nicotine Product Replacing e‑Cigarettes to Addict Teens” (paywalled).  It dealt mainly with Zyn nicotine pouches, but it touched on the gamut of safer cigarette substitutes. 

Matt Holman, Ph.D., Chief Scientific and Regulatory Strategy Officer at U.S. Philip Morris International, has responded (here) with an accurate point-by-point rebuttal of Dr. Wen’s numerous misstatements. 

I’d like to focus on one especially egregious statement in Wen’s article: “Mitch Zeller, former director of the FDA’s Center for Tobacco Products, explained that as much as 70 percent of people who vape continue to smoke. He showed me industry data from two years ago that showed 84 percent of adult pouch users kept up cigarette use.”

I was astonished that Zeller would cite 70 percent, when he can readily access updated information from the gold standard CDC National Health Interview Survey (NHIS). In this chart of the smoking status of 17.8 million vapers estimated from the 2024 NHIS, the highest percentage were former smokers, while only 26 percent were current smokers.

While dual use is a transition period for many smokers, dual use has another, more ominous driver: misinformation from federal agencies and major medical organizations.  For example, Matt Holman noted: “under the helm of Mr. Zeller, [the FDA Center for Tobacco Products] authorized more than 2,800 cigarette products to be marketed while only authorizing 30 novel smoke-free products (heated tobacco products, Swedish snus, and vapes). These actions resulting in 100 times more authorizations for combusted tobacco than novel smoke-free products are in direct opposition of CTP’s stated mission ‘To protect the public health of the U.S. population from tobacco-related death and disease...’”

Additionally, in 2018, CTP director Zeller launched the FDA Real Cost E-Cigarette Campaign, which is a misinformation circus.  It ostensibly targets kids, but I calculated – using the FDA’s formula – that this campaign also dissuaded hundreds of thousands of smokers from switching to safer vape products (here).

The Washington Post should run a major correction for Dr. Wen’s article.

Washington Post Embraces the Flawed CDC Youth Vaping “Crisis” Narrative

 

The CDC’s latest report on youth vaping, based on the National Youth Tobacco Survey, showed that the vaping rate among U.S. high school students plummeted by half, from 28% in 2019, to 14% this year.  Still, the Washington Post editorial board on October 16 proclaimed the behavior “a public health crisis.”  Since their editorial is paywalled, I’ll give you the highlights.

The Post cited as evidence of a “public health crisis” the new findings released by the Food and Drug Administration and the CDC.  My readers know that these agencies don’t initially release unvarnished data; they issue spin on the data, keyed to supporting the crisis narrative.  The actual raw data will only be released after months of needless delay, when more thoughtful and balanced analysis will be ignored.

The editors focused on the news that “9.4 percent of middle and high schoolers — more than 2.5 million young people — reported using e-cigarettes in the month before taking the survey.”  Actually, from 2019 to 2022, the vaping rate among high schoolers was halved, a fact that should have lessened the editors’ fear of “lifelong health and behavioral risks associated with adolescent vaping.”  Additionally, the data show that youth smoking declined to record lows. 

While the number of youth vapers is still too high, it pales in comparison to the half-million adult smoking deaths that are recorded in the U.S. annually.  That’s the real crisis that is all but ignored by Washington elites.

The Post went on to repeat the vacuous claim that “nicotine… can harm adolescents’ cognitive development,” which would mean that a substantial number of today’s 89 million current and former adult smokers are brain damaged.  Kids should not vape, but the FDA knows there is no human research demonstrating that nicotine is detrimental to brain development or function.  Eschewing actual science, the agency is currently promoting a teen zombie social media campaign labeled “Real Costs.”

The influential Post is all-in on FDA action, urging it to “double down on getting illegal products off the shelves and streets.  Until most flavored products are taken off the market, teenagers will continue to consume them.”

The problem is that high school students engage in a wide range of harmful behaviors, and vaping is low on the risk chart above.  Marijuana use, which was totally illegal for most of the past 30 years, persists at 20% among high schoolers.  The chart shows that many other high school behaviors, from driving while distracted or intoxicated, to drinking and binge drinking, to bullying and carrying a weapon, are far more dangerous and virtually ignored by federal authorities who choose to focus on a drug that is no more dangerous than caffeine.