Meghan Neal flags a new study finding “that vaping makes adolescents more likely to start or continue smoking tobacco, and less likely to manage to quit”:
That’s after surveying 40,000 middle and high school students, first in 2011 and then again in 2012 to follow up. Researchers at the University of California San Francisco parsed the data and published their grim results in the journal JAMA Pediatrics [yesterday].
Highly publicized research claiming that e-smoking gets teenagers addicted to cigarettes deals a tough blow to e-cig advocates, who strongly believe that puffing on vaporized liquid is a healthier choice than inhaling burning tobacco, and that making the switch from analog to digital cigs can help wean smokers off the habit.
Sullum takes issue with the study:
Even if we knew that some people start with vaping and move on to smoking, that would not necessarily mean that e-cigarettes made them more likely to smoke. We still would not know what would have happened in the absence of e-cigarettes. Would those same people have started smoking anyway, or did the experience of vaping somehow prime them to like a habit that otherwise would not have attracted them? The same sort of question comes up in discussions of marijuana’s purported role as a “gateway” to other drugs. In both cases, symbolism and emotion seem to carry more weight than evidence and logic.
The Dish 