About Sensationalist Science and Rhetoric on E-Cigarettes

Last week the Louisville Courier-Journal published my plea to stop confusing the public with sensationalist rhetoric on e-cigarettes.  Read it here or on the Courier-Journal website.

The problem of misinformation is widespread. The public constantly receives alarmist misrepresentations about vaccinations, the food they eat, the household products they use, and now e-cigarettes and vaping. But hysterical rhetoric has consequences, because people act on what they are told. And health officials at all levels of government are misinforming Americans that e-cigarettes are as dangerous as cigarettes and pose an existential threat to their children. Unfortunately, this misinformation can be deadly.

Production of tobacco misinformation follows a formula, originating in “user fees” (read: taxes) Congress established in 2009, giving the FDA regulatory authority over tobacco (here).  Every year tobacco manufacturers consumers pony up over $700 million dollars in user fees to the FDA, which then transfers a big chunk of that money to the National Institutes of Health, which distributes it to thousands of researchers at the nation’s universities to study tobacco products.  This system, which has been operating for several years, isn’t set up to discover the truth about tobacco.  Instead, it generates only what the NIH, and others in the federal government, wants: bad news about all tobacco products.  Including tobacco-free, smoke-free, and vastly safer e-cigarettes.   

This bad news is then amplified by university media departments and our brave new world of social media, which makes it hard to see what’s true, and what’s exaggeration, distortion or pure fiction. Americans are exposed to a tsunami of fictitious “dangers” from vaping and of an e-cigarette “epidemic” that will put a generation of youth in danger. Of course, no policy measure is too strong when our kids are at risk.

But the result of this misinformation cycle is significant. A study last month in JAMA Network Open found that the percentage of American adults who perceive e-cigarettes as equally harmful as cigarettes more than tripled from 11.5 percent in 2012 to more than 36 percent in 2017; those who perceive e-cigarettes as more harmful also tripled from 1.3 percent to over 4 percent.

In short, Americans are listening to the alarmism about the “dangers” of e-cigarettes and the teen vaping “epidemic.”  They deserve better from our lawmakers and public health officials. The FDA knows that nicotine is the reason people smoke but it is not the reason that smokers die. Yet officials have not actively communicated this message to the public.

Even worse, the FDA has exaggerated the teen vaping problem by manipulating data and incorrectly blaming retailers, in order to justify onerous regulations that will give consumers fewer healthier choices.

Meanwhile, the real risks are forgotten. Smoking continues to prematurely kill 500,000 Americans every year, and smoking-related healthcare costs are nearly $300 billion. According to the CDC, more than 16 million people live with a smoking-attributable disease.

In recent decades, anti-tobacco crusaders have tried everything to kill cigarettes, including litigation, legislation, taxation and regulation. But their crusade lost its direction when it started to target all tobacco products – even those that don’t contain tobacco.  Officials in international health organizations and national governments know that “tobacco” is not synonymous with “smoking,” yet they purposefully conflate them.  In desperation, they have tried to kill e-cigarettes and vaping, an innovative, satisfying and vastly safer cigarette substitute. Ironically and tragically, their actions are sustaining and extending the cigarette market. 

E-cigarettes contain nicotine – which is addictive – but they lack the toxins in smoke that cause lung cancer, heart disease and other maladies. This substantial difference is what led prestigious British medical organizations like the Royal College of Physicians and Public Health England to deem e-cigarettes at least 95 percent safer than combustible cigarettes.  In fact, the British government’s Department of Health helps smokers switch from combustibles to vapor.

The good news is that even though misinformation is rampant, American smokers are still using e-cigarettes more frequently – and more successfully – than FDA-approved medicines to help them quit, according to a population-level study using the FDA’s national survey.  In February, British researchers reported in The New England Journal of Medicine that e-cigarettes are nearly twice as effective in helping smokers quit as FDA-approved nicotine medicines like patches and gum.

Free and open conversation about truthful information is essential to a healthy democracy. But it’s also critical to establishing sound public health policy. It’s time for Americans to have all the facts about e-cigarettes, so they can make educated choices in order to enjoy longer and healthier lives.

CDC Quit-Smoking Ads Lack Real-World Solutions

People regularly ask me why I’ve spent the last 25 years researching and advocating for tobacco harm reduction and related products.  While it’s difficult to provide a succinct answer, a powerful ad campaign from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention illustrates why I am dedicated to helping smokers. The campaign is called “Tips from Former Smokers”.

For the first 15 years of my career, I was on clinical staff at the Comprehensive Cancer Center of the University of Alabama at Birmingham.  As an oral pathologist I made microscopic diagnoses of hundreds of cancers.  But as a clinician and member of a multidisciplinary team treating countless patients with mouth, throat and lung cancer, leukemia and other serious smoking-related diseases, I was compelled to search for practical quitting options for smokers just like Terrie, the patient in the CDC public service ad above.  Click here to watch the entire ad.

Those smokers reminded me always of my maternal grandfather.  He had smoked for most of his 65 years, despite the onset of heart disease that led to his early retirement from operating a dragline excavator in the coal strip mines of Western Pennsylvania.  I remember my great-grandfather, an underground coal miner who chewed tobacco until he passed away at age 99, pleading with him: “Worthy, every cigarette is another nail in your coffin.” 

My grandfather never quit, and in 1965 he suffered a stroke that left him hospitalized for months before he died.  Every night, my parents drove us 25 miles to visit him. One memory from that sad period is still with me: my grandfather, on oxygen and barely able to move or talk, begging his nurse for a cigarette.

For many tobacco opponents, patients like these are only an abstraction, numbers to be wielded in a fight for absolute prohibition.  Most extremists have never worked with smokers suffering from a devastating disease.  If they had, they would care enough to ensure that smokers are offered every option to quit before it’s too late.

That’s the frustrating thing about the CDC advertising.  It doesn’t endorse the most frequently used, and most frequently successful quitting aids: e-cigarettes.  Instead, the CDC pitches telephone quit-lines and gives smokers trite advice: “keep your mouth busy…do something else…go for a walk or a jog…take slow deep breaths.”  These tips are worthless for most of those who are desperate for their next cigarette. 

What about children?  After my lectures, I am often asked by parents, “What if my child learns about you and your ideas, then starts using smokeless tobacco or e-cigarettes?”

My answer: “What if, despite all of your good intentions and nurturing, your child becomes a smoker?  And what if, after 10 or 15 years, they are unable or unwilling to quit?  As a parent, wouldn’t you want your child to know about safer tobacco products?”

We have to keep tobacco out of the hands of children, but safer cigarette alternatives must not be regulated out of reach of their parents and grandparents, whose smoking habit leaves them desperate to avoid fatal illness.

The California Crusade Against Tobacco Flavors: From Foolish to Dangerous

Today the California Globe published my oped on the foolish and dangerous legislative effort to ban flavored tobacco products.  Read it here or on the Globe website.

“Crusades typically start out by being admirable, proceed to being foolish, and end by being dangerous.” Russell Baker used these words in a 1994 New York Times column describing the anti-tobacco crusade, noting that the holy war was entering the last stage. Now, 25 years later, California legislators are fighting their own crusade—against the so-called teen vaping “epidemic”—with a proposed ban on flavored tobacco products.

First, let’s examine the “epidemic.” Authorities generously define “current use” of any drug by children as at least once in the past month. The FDA, using this definition in a national survey, reported that vaping among American high school students increased substantially in 2018. The FDA was only telling part of the story; about half of those kids had vaped five or fewer days, the equivalent of trying products at a party. And most frequent e-cigarette users are not virgins with respect to cigarette smoking; most of them have smoked in the past.

Drug use by underage children is a serious matter. That makes it entirely baffling that California legislators ignore higher rates of alcohol and marijuana use among high schoolers, facts that have been known for decades. These behaviors have nothing to do with flavors, but instead demonstrate that kids are attracted to adult behaviors and products.

The FDA promotes the myth that a teen vaping epidemic is caused by unscrupulous manufacturers and retailers. This isn’t true, especially in California, where the violation rate in FDA inspections was only 4% in 2018, one of the lowest in the country (here and here).

Since retailers aren’t the problem in California, a ban on flavored tobacco products isn’t the solution. This is harassment without reason. Even advocates of alcohol prohibition 100 years ago didn’t try to ban flavors.

A flavor ban is supposed to stop kids from using nicotine, but is that a worthwhile objective? Nicotine, while addictive, is not the cause of any diseases associated with smoking. It is as safe to consume as caffeine, another addictive drug used daily by millions of adults and teens.

Because nicotine is so safe, prohibitionists fabricate hazards. One frequent claim is that nicotine can harm teenage brains. That may be a legitimate argument – for laboratory mice. If it was true for humans, then 40 million current smokers – and even more former smokers – who started as teens and smoked for decades would have demonstrable brain damage. There is no scientific evidence of such injury, nor to support the claim of youth brain risk. If California legislators want to protect children’s brains, they should ban football, as there is unequivocal evidence linking concussion-producing sports activities to chronic traumatic encephalopathy (here, for example).

A flavor ban will not affect vapers who make their own vaping liquids. This segment of the market is already large and growing; a few examples can be found here, here and here. A ban might cause the current retail market to fracture in two: one segment selling concentrated, unflavored nicotine liquids, and another selling flavors. A high-tax jurisdiction like Chicago, where a prohibitively high per-milliliter tax is imposed on nicotine liquids, demonstrates what happens when the market is bifurcated.  Vape shops there sell 30 ml bottles of zero-nicotine e-liquids (no tax) and small concentrated bottles of high-strength nicotine that are taxed.  Flavor bans will simply encourage consumers to purchase flavorless e-liquids, and then buy flavoring that is widely available in grocery stores and online, such as here and here.

Unintended Consequences

A flavor ban would create unintended consequences. Flavors would no longer be supplied by legitimate companies. Instead, do-it-yourselfers would be adding flavors with unknown chemistry to concentrated nicotine solutions. It is worth noting that the only known death attributable to vapor products in the U.S. resulted from a young child accidentally ingesting pure nicotine.

Politicians routinely ignore another basic economic fact: bans drive black markets. Economists and legal scholars use the terms “bootleggers” (black market retailers) and “Baptists” (legislators and other misguided do-gooders), calling them “unlikely allies from the tobacco wars [who] try to fight off a game-changer [e-cigarettes].”

Two years ago, California was already the sixth biggest cigarette black-market state. Legislators should not create a bootlegger paradise for flavored tobacco, when they haven’t even solved the bootleg marijuana problem. The legislature legalized cannabis in 2016, but retained high taxes; the black market is now worth $3.7 billion, four times the legal market. The same rush to stigmatize vaping will doubtlessly create a black market in this category, as well.

The California crusade to ban flavors isn’t just foolish, it’s dangerous. With the exception of menthol, the ban will have the least impact on sales of cigarettes, the deadliest tobacco products. But it will remove from retail shelves many more smoke-free products – including e-cigarette liquids, dip, chew and snus. These products are vastly less hazardous than cigarettes. Imagine if alcohol opponents had only banned flavors during Prohibition. Beer, wine and other flavored spirits would have been eliminated, leaving only pure alcohol on retail shelves. That policy would have been an abject failure, as would any similar ban on flavored tobacco products.