Neutrally: 5 facts you need to know about vaping

The activists and some local governments, and even their news media, prefer to hype vaping and flavored tobacco products as a health hazard, but the reality is that vaping could help save smokers’ lives.

Recently CEI consumer policy expert Michelle Minton has uncovered five facts about vaping you probably won’t hear about from the news media or anti-vaping activists.

• Vaping is significantly less harmful than smoking. Vaping exposes users to 95-99 percent fewer harmful and potentially harmful chemicals.
• For existing adult smokers, smoking is far more harmful than vaping. Researchers recently estimated that getting smokers to switch to vaping could avert 6.6 million premature deaths.
• Banning the sale of vaping products will only discourage smokers from using safer alternatives. That’s a terrible outcome, because some studies have found that smokers who attempt to quit using vapes are 60 percent more likely to succeed than those using over-the-counter nicotine replacement therapies or willpower alone. Legislators should realize that the risks of electronic cigarette vape are far smaller than the risks of smoking and they should be cautious in how they regulate these products.
• Vaping has not led to a rise in adolescent smoking. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has documented an astounding 30 percent decline in self-reported use of vaping by high schoolers and a nearly 40 percent drop among middle schoolers. In fact, it seems a low proportion of teens are vaping at all. Based on CDC’s latest population studies, at worst, less than 0.0015 percent of middle school and high school students are regularly vaping nicotine.
• Congress can help prevent needless smoker illnesses and deaths by improving the approval process for less harmful tobacco products, allowing advertising of truthful health-related claims about less harmful nicotine products, taking steps to ensure products currently available to consumers can remain on the market, and rejecting proposals that eliminate vaping flavors or restrict sales to adults over the age of 21.

Original post: https://cei.org/blog/5-facts-about-vapes-media-and-activists-don%E2%80%99t-want-you-know