Great news from Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids

Yesterday Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids published a press release claiming that a new study published Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) provides evidence that e-cigarettes are a gateway to smoking. Well of course the study proves no such thing, and there is (almost, I'll get back to that) no good news coming from Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids here. I'll leave it up to Dr. Farsalinos and Professor Michael Siegel to explain why.

Now you might say that my headline for this blog-post is highly misleading. Well, I agree, I did that on purpose, to kind of underline the fact that not only is the headline in Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids' press release highly misleading, but the whole thing is just a big fat pile of lies. For a bunch of reasons, as explained in detail by Farsalinos and Siegel, the study doesn't prove the gateway theory at all. In fact it doesn't really prove anything new, even the authors of the study acknowledge that. Professor Siegel explains this:

Ultimately, what this research demonstrates is that youth who experiment with electronic cigarettes represent a sub-population of youth which is at increased risk of tobacco product use. This is a natural finding that we expected to be true and which has been documented in other studies. The study does not show that e-cigarette use leads kids to start smoking or to become regular smokers. It does not demonstrate a gateway effect.
The study authors readily acknowledge this, with the lead author making it clear that: "we cannot conclude that e-cigarette use directly leads to smoking."

As you can see, nothing really new. The gateway theory has in no way been proven, and we're still waiting patiently for the first ex-vaper, current smoker to emerge from the shadows. Kind of strange that we haven't seen a single case in so many years, and with millions of people using e-cigarettes don't you think? Also, if a gateway effect existed... isn't it a bit strange that cigarette use keeps going down when e-cigarette use goes up? Actually it seems to start going down even faster when e-cigarette use really started going up, according to Tobacco Free Kids' own numbers:

Anyway, even if I gave this post a misleading headline on purpose, it's not actually as misleading as Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids' press release. Because there is actually some good news in there: Current e-cigarette use now exceeds current use of regular cigarettes. Of course the way they present this fact is also misleading, as they deliberately fail to mention how much current use of cigarettes have gone down. If you can't see that this is good news, not bad news as these guys claim, you can't be truly concerned with peoples health. There must be something else that's more important to you...

EDIT: Just saw Clive Bates also commenting on this. Recommended reading indeed.

Use discount code "vapingiraffe" for 5% off

Is this the official gateway theory debunking week?

I can't help but noticing that this week the gateway theory has been given
another couple of devastating wounds. This thing seems to be pretty hard to get rid of, it has already been dealt enough damage to kill it several times. Maybe this is because it was never based on reality or common sense in the first place, so real facts can't kill it cause it's supporters don't really care for those anyway?

Yesterday I wrote about the Penn State study that showed e-cigarettes are in fact less addictive than cigarettes. Today I saw that The Health Survey for England 2013 found that E-cigarette use rare in non-smokers. (Yeah, I'm a bit slow, I know it.) I don't really see the need to write a long comment on that, but I'll try to express my thoughts on this very briefly: Well, duh!?

I'd also like to recommend one of the most amusing comments of this week: Dick Puddlecote's comments on the survey that he published yesterday. Make sure you follow the last link in his post as well as it is also quite an amusing read. Have a nice weekend!

CDC's newest numbers debunks their own gateway theory

CDC's latest study released on Thursday this week (November 13th) shows that current e-cigarette use have doubled among middle school students and trippled among high school students from 2011/12 to 2013. During the same period smoking rates have been pretty heavily reduced. Dr. Siegel has taken the time to find the relevant numbers in the study and as usual given us the rest of the story on his blog:

During this time period, current e-cigarette use among middle-school students increased from 0.6% to 1.1%. At the same time, current cigarette smoking declined from 4.3% to 2.9%. 

Among high school students, current e-cigarette use increased from 1.5% to 4.5%. Concurrently, current cigarette smoking dropped from 15.8% to 12.7%.

Now if the gateway theory was in any way true, we would see more and more people starting to smoke as e-cigarette usage is going up. But, as CDC's numbers clearly shows, this is not the case. So, Tom Frieden and the CDC... can you please stop dragging out the gateway theory now? I know that common sense is not something you guys like to use, but now you got your numbers supporting it, so stop it please? I have another theory you could look into instead: The firewall theory.