Posted on 01/24/2018 9:03:48 AM PST by Kaslin
This week, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine weighed in on the question of whether e-cigarettes are a public health menace or a public health boon. The answer is yes, according to a NASEM report published on Tuesday.
The report, which was sponsored by the Food and Drug Administration, concludes that "e-cigarettes cannot be simply categorized as either beneficial or harmful to health." While that is true in principle, the report gives too much weight to scenarios in which these products could be harmful, even while confirming that they dramatically reduce exposure to toxins and carcinogens for smokers who switch to them.
NASEM's advice is important because it will guide the FDA as the agency decides how to regulate the vaping industry, which last year got a four-year reprieve from rules that threatened to drive the vast majority of companies out of business. The demands that the FDA ultimately imposes on manufacturers of vaping equipment and liquids will affect the options available to consumers and their knowledge of them, which in turn will determine the extent to which they take advantage of products that could save their lives.
The NASEM report, which is the work of a committee chaired by University of Washington toxicologist David Eaton, acknowledges the harm-reducing potential of e-cigarettes. "E-cigarette aerosol contains fewer numbers and lower levels of most toxicants than smoke from combustible tobacco cigarettes does," Eaton et al. say. "Laboratory tests of e-cigarette ingredients, in vitro toxicological tests and short-term human studies suggest that e-cigarettes are likely to be far less harmful than combustible tobacco cigarettes."
When people who otherwise would be smoking use e-cigarettes instead, that represents an unambiguous gain from a public health perspective, which seeks to minimize disease and preventable death. "If e-cigarette use by adult smokers leads to long-term abstinence from combustible tobacco cigarettes," the report says, "the benefit to public health could be considerable."
But Eaton and his colleagues worry that e-cigarettes also could increase tobacco-related morbidity and mortality if they encourage teenagers to smoke. Depending on how big that effect is, they say, it might even outweigh the benefit from smoking cessation among adults.
That concern seems wildly implausible in light of current trends. Cigarette smoking by teenagers has continued to fall despite a surge in experimentation with vaping, and last year it reached the lowest level ever recorded by the Monitoring the Future Study, which began surveying high school students in 1975.
Two other factors make it unlikely that significant numbers of teenagers become smokers after getting hooked on nicotine in e-cigarettes. The vast majority of nonsmoking teenagers who vape do so only occasionally, and most of them use nicotine-free e-liquids.
Against these facts, the NASEM report cites studies that find teenagers who try vaping are more likely than those who don't to subsequently try smoking. According to Eaton et al., these studies amount to "substantial evidence that e-cigarette use increases risk of ever using combustible tobacco cigarettes among youth and young adults."
As the report acknowledges, however, these observational studies do not distinguish between correlation and causation. They may simply show that teenagers who are inclined to try vaping are also inclined to try smoking. Such research cannot tell us how many of these teenagers become regular smokers or whether they would have experimented with tobacco even if e-cigarettes did not exist.
Under the collectivist calculus prescribed by the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act, Eaton et al. note, it is not enough to show that e-cigarettes are much less hazardous than the conventional kind and therefore offer a big benefit to smokers who might want to switch. The FDA also must be persuaded that the product, on balance, benefits "the population as a whole."
I think e-cigarettes easily pass this test. I also think it is the wrong test for a free society that respects individual choices and the markets that respond to them.
Here’s all you need to know about this subject
nicotine is an evil beast and must be defeated like the evil Dragon that it is
This this coming from somebody who chewed Copenhagen for 25 years and then went back to candy and gum it was a great move
Again it is nicotine itself that is the evil beast which will get into your brain and psyche and make you a slave to it
It’s not good energy
Remember this key fact one drop of pure nicotine will kill any adult human being
bfl
NASEM folks, don’t look but Marijuana is smoking.........
Most people don’t know that the reason it is so hard to quit smoking is the ADDICTION to nicotine.
If they realized that what you will experience is withdrawal symptoms, and that they go away in as little as 4 or 5 days, a lot more people would be successful.
Plan it for a weekend, get your doctor to give you a 3 day supply of Valium (not Xanax) and 2 sleeping pills, and relax and try to sleep it off as much as possible. Also alka-seltzer for the headaches.
Drink lots of juices, don’t eat (you might throw it up) and in a few days you’re done. (you’ll also lose a couple of pounds)
I stopped and started at least 10 times. I was not that concerned or desperate about it, I just stopped when I felt like it and started when I felt like it.
I noticed the effects and learned from it.
I have not smoked at all in 15 years now.
“NASEM folks, don’t look but Marijuana is smoking.........”
In states where sales are legal, you can purchase vape cartridges with marijuana extract in them. No combustion required.
In other words they are a far more efficient nicotine delivery system than cigarettes.
vape cartridges with marijuana extract in them. No combustion required
That is the best part no fire and smoke, but overall no bag of weed, cleaning cutting rolling lighting all that smoke and stink and process is all gone.
I agree that nicotine is bad for your health in any form.
However, the overall point is that statistically e-cigarettes and chewing tobacco are much less likely to cause cancer, so switching to those is a lesser evil and would save millions of lives.
But the tobacco Nazis hide those facts.
DUH...
There is no benefit to society of they recruit another generation of kids unable to kick the addiction.
Also, e-cigarettes are drug delivery devices.
Four out of five doctors who smoked Chesterfields are dead.
Lungs were not designed to deeply inhale anything other than fresh air. Follow the money.
I tried everything to quit smoking...always went back. Picked up vaping a couple of years ago and never went back.
Same here. It will be four years in November.
Three years in May, and I ain’t giving up my caffeine or alcohol either.
. . . nicotine itself . . . is the evil beast which will get into your brain and psyche and make you a slave to it
It’s not good energy
Driving home today I was reflecting on the fact that I’ve never become a smoker.For one thing, it’s an acquired taste, and I never went to the trouble of acquiring it. I was given a cigar as a young man by a new father, and I smoked that. It made my mouth taste terrible. The one "good thing" I noticed was that I attended a gathering in a smoke-filled room that evening, and the smoke didn’t bother me at all, as it usually would have. So at least I understood how all those guys could enjoy gathering in an atmosphere which I couldn’t normally stand.
But the thought that occurred to me on my drive was this: people adapt to their environment, and if the environment includes nicotine (or whatever), the body adjusts to it and you feel about the same with the drug as you would have without it if you had not acclimated to it. So all you accomplish by developing a taste for a drug is pleasure during the acclimation period while you are getting “hooked.” After that, you need the drug just to feel about as good as you otherwise would have felt without it.
The same as what happens to exponents of the “Philips Curve” theory that injecting money into the economy boosts the GDP. Constant-rate increase in the money supply gets baked into expectations, and the only economic effect is inflation commensurate with the money-supply growth rate you have chosen. It is only acceleration of the money supply growth rate which can produce stimulus. And continual acceleration of the money supply can’t go on very long before people are "carrying around paper money in wheelbarrows.” All too soon you realize that you have to get off that merry-go-round — and there you are, undergoing withdrawal symptoms which are a concentrated form of the pain you wanted to get rid of in the first place. And Jimmy Carter still doesn’t know what hit him.
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