Ever since e-cigarettes became mainstream consumer products circa 2012, there has been a steady flow of anti-vaping scare stories. In the last 12 months, it has become a flood. The stories nearly always emerge from the US, usually from California, and focus to three claims: that e-cigarettes are as dangerous as smoking, that they don’t help people quit and that non-smokers who use them are more likely to start using tobacco cigarettes.These claims have been debunked so many times that they can fairly be described as ‘zombie arguments’. Impervious to reason, they stagger on. Only yesterday, a high-quality study funded by Cancer Research UK showed that e-cigarettes are vastly safer than smoked tobacco — but this will not stop someone in the Bay Area claiming the very opposite next week.For every piece of evidence showing that youth smoking rates have plummeted since e-cigarettes became popular, there is a blowhard in Philadelphia who insists that vaping is a gateway not only to smoking but to crack cocaine. For every report from the Royal College of Physicians showing that e-cigarettes help people quit smoking, there are a hundred activist-researchers in San Francisco claiming that vaping makes quitting more difficult.
Do read it all.
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