Clive Bates takes issue with the study we highlighted last week:
The reasoning for claiming e-cigarettes do not help people quit smoking amounts to a crude non sequitur: “e-cigarettes were associated with more, not less, cigarette smoking among adults“. More, not less… but compared to what? The study found that more smokers were using e-cigarettes than non-smokers. However, this banal observation does not confirm that e-cigarettes do not help quitting any more than finding that [Nicotine Replacement Therapy (NRT)] is used more by smokers would suggest NRT is not used for quitting. The real test of the impact of e-cigarettes is hard to gauge because it requires knowledge of what would have happened in the absence of e-cigarettes. If you could show there is “more, not less” smoking than there otherwise would have been had e-cigarettes not become available, then that would definitely be a concern. But of course the study does not and cannot do this, given the limitations of its methods and the available data. That doesn’t stop you claiming the following, which as far as I can see, is based on nothing at all:
“E-cigarettes are likely to be gateway devices for nicotine addiction among youth, opening up a whole new market for tobacco”
Kleiman piles on:
The editors of JAMA Pediatrics should be embarrassed by this; the methods in the piece don’t pass the giggle test. The good news is that the tobacco control research and policy community is not united on this issue, with plenty of dissent from the anti-e-cig party line. The bad news is that politicians in places such as Los Angeles have allowed themselves to be buffaloed by junk science into making junk policy.
The Dish 