Meanwhile, in the REAL world, vaping kids don't move on to smoking

We've all seen the reports and research trying to prove that vaping is a horrible new trend among our children. Amazingly quite a few people still believes in the gateway theory so when seeing that the number of teens that have tried vaping is on the rise we get the inevitable shouting and screaming: "Think about the children!" I've argued earlier that this makes absolutely no sense and that it's more plausible that e-cigarettes acts as an internet firewall, a one way gateway out of smoking addiction not into it, rather than a gateway to smoking.

So not long ago, when my daily google news search for Norwegian articles about vaping returned an article in a local newspaper from up north titled "Smoking is out, but e-cigarettes are in" I thought... not again. And in a way, I was right. The article featured a doctor claiming e-cigarettes are just as dangerous as cigarettes and he is very concerned that the kids believe otherwise. Luckily the comments section below was filled with facts and quite a few calls for this guy to get another job. This is all the same crap that we've seen a million times by now so I'm not even going to bother to point out how completely incompetent and misinformed this guy is and why. Well on second thought, I can't help it... I mean the guy actually proclaims this: "... but it's still tobacco... ". Seriously... you call yourself a doctor?

What caught my interest in this article was what the interviewed students said about smoking... and e-cigarettes. First of all they say that there is virtually no social pressure to start smoking, it's just not cool any more. They're also very clear about that it is indeed not very good for you. And then:

"There are some who have started using them [e-cigarettes that is], especially e-cigarettes with strawberry flavour. They say that they taste so good. But why can't they just eat strawberries?", asks a couple of the girls.

Hmm... maybe e-cigarettes are a bit cooler than eating strawberries? Kids at this age do a lot of stuff to be cool! It has always been that way, and it will always be that way... period! Think about this... could it be that e-cigarettes have taken over the traditional cigarettes coolness? So the kids who would have started smoking are now trying e-cigs instead? That doesn't sound so bad does it? Then there is this:

"It's mostly in 8th grade [that would be 12-13 year olds] that they use e-cigarettes. It was popular in 9th grade earlier", the students explain. 

Then they get this question: What about 10th grade?

"They're done with e-cigarettes."

Oh... so they moved on to smoking then? It sure doesn't look that way when you look at the numbers: 100% of the boys claim to NOT smoke, as do 97% of the girls. So it looks like they've just stopped using e-cigarettes without moving on to smoking then? That is some gateway effect you have there. Whether or not these kids are using nicotine in their e-cigs the article says nothing about, but honestly I don't think that matters as not even Norway biggest Stanton Glantz fans managed to come up with a single strand of evidence that nicotine is addictive when tobacco is not present.

After reading this article I came to think about my own kids, who are now about to finish 10th grade. When I had just switched to vaping they were in 8th grade (well not long after at least) and I remember them telling me about kids in their class who had tried them... even used e-cigs quite often. So I asked them now if they knew of anyone who use them. "Nah... think they stopped". And do they smoke instead? "Nah... not many of the students smoke. It's not cool".

This all fits very well into all the statistics now showing us that e-cigarettes use among young people are increasing, but at the same time smoking onset rates are falling faster than ever. And when the kids are done experimenting with e-cigarettes, what do they do? Well it seems like they just stop. I've said it before and I don't really see any reason not to say it again: Vaping is not a gateway to smoking, if anything it is a firewall that saves kids from smoking. We've also seen how age restrictions on e-cigarettes actually drive teens to cigarette smoking, something that also fits quite well into the story these kids in the north of Norway tell us.

There is a lot of twisting and turning numbers going on in an effort to make us all believe that vaping will turn our kids into lifelong cigarette smokers. Meanwhile... in the REAL world, the kids themselves tell us another story, and it is a story that fits the numbers very well without bending them to fit reality. The discussion whether vaping leads to smoking should have been dead long time ago. Instead we should focus our attention to the somewhat unpleasant discussion on how age restrictions on vaping really affects smoking and vaping rates among teens. As you can read about in the link above we have seen numbers indicating that having the same age restrictions on e-cigarettes and tobacco cigarettes actually leads to more teens picking up smoking. Is this what we wanted?

photo credit: E-Cig + E-Scooter (Vaping on a Hoover Board) via photopin (license)

Vapers create vapers, smokers create smokers: Think of the children!

Would you rather see your kids smoking?
Photo credit: James Alby via photopin cc

Another one of the anti-e-cigarette movements favourite arguments at the moment is that we need to think of the children. They seem to be loosing a lot of sleep worrying about kids taking up vaping, believing this is a safer alternative to smoking. So let's do that for a moment shall we, think of the children I mean. First lets start with looking on the main reasons young people start smoking:

• Their parents are smoking
• Peer-pressure 
• Stress relief
• Rebellion and showing independence
• Mimicking the behaviour of people around them
• Smoking to look cool
• Smoking to look older
• Experimenting and adventure

How will the availability of e-cigarettes and vaping affect this? Well actually they can all be applied to vaping as well. So if parents are vaping, there is a chance their kids will, peer-pressure from other young vapers will exist, they might use vaping as stress relief, to rebel against parents and so on. So we will have young people that start vaping without smoking first. But think about this... if a teenager starts vaping because his or her parents are vaping, wouldn't the same teenager have started smoking if the parents were smoking? If stress relief was the main reason for starting to vape, wouldn't the alternative be smoking? If your kids wants to experiment, would you rather have them experiment with vaping or smoking? The point is that these reasons will not go away if you remove vaping, but vaping will be an alternative for young people that would otherwise start smoking. By demonizing vaping, young people would start smoking instead. Cause their parents would be smokers instead of vapers, their friends would experiment with smoking instead of vaping, they would use smoking to fit in socially instead of vaping or they would light up a cigarette to look cool instead of pulling out their e-cig.

The important point here, that seems to be missed by most anti e-cigarette advocates, is that e-cigarettes and vaping replaces smoking. Not only for smokers but also for young people that would otherwise have started smoking. If a teenager is mimicking other vapers around them, it is because there are less  smokers around them to mimic. So yes, we will have young people that starts vaping without smoking first, but most of these people would have gone straight to smoking instead if vaping wasn't an alternative. I say most people, because there might be people that wouldn't have started smoking, but starts vaping because of the reasons above combined with their belief that vaping is safe. But this won't kill them! However restricting e-cigarette use and advertising will kill a lot of people. So what is most important? Making sure that no-one picks up a relatively harmless habit of vaping unnecessarily or making sure that as few as possible picks up the deadly habit of smoking?

Not only does vaping replace smoking but in most cases it gives the user something more in addition. And that is what makes them more effective than any other smoking cessation product (read my post on this here: http://goo.gl/Sf0Cn6), but also what makes the gateway argument invalid. The reason people struggle to go from smoking to nicotine gum, is the same reason that people would "struggle" to go from vaping to smoking. It would take something away.

To all the e-cigarette sceptics out there: Vaping adults will lead to kids vaping, smoking adults will lead to kids smoking. What would you rather have your kid doing, vaping or smoking? Think of the children!