EDITORIAL: Teen smoking down, but health alarmists still fret

According to the recent Monitoring the Future study, vape use among teenagers is exploding — so much so, in fact, that both the Food and Drug Administration commissioner and the surgeon general have labeled it an “epidemic.” But while in a perfect world teenagers and kids wouldn’t smoke or vape at all, let’s not pretend that e-cigarettes carry the same long-term health risks as cigarette smoking.

As Reason.com’s Jacob Sullum reported last week, the study showed the largest year-to-year increase in substance use ever recorded for 10th and 12th grade students. The jump in underage vaping was similar to the one outlined in the National Youth Tobacco Survey, which is conducted by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and was published in November.

“All the great gains that we’ve made in this country, reducing smoking rates … all of that will be reversed or lost if we can’t address the youth use of e-cigarettes,” FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb on Politico’s “Pulse Check” podcast.

As Mr. Sullum notes, Mr. Gottlieb is worried that “some proportion” of adolescent vapers who “otherwise might never have initiated on tobacco” will “become long-term users of combustible tobacco.”

Sharing that concern is Surgeon General Dr. Jerome Adams. After the Monitoring the Future study, Dr. Adams issued an advisory saying “any e-cigarette use among young people is unsafe, even if they do not progress to future cigarette smoking.”

Buried behind all this alarmism, however, is the fact that cigarette smoking by high school seniors, which reached an all-time low last year, has dropped again. The Monitoring the Future Study found that only 7.6 percent of 12th-graders reported they had smoked cigarettes during the previous month. As Mr. Sullum points out, that is the lowest rate ever recorded in the 43-year history of the survey and 80 percent lower than the peak rate of 38.8 percent recorded in 1976.

This has happened, at least in part, because of vaping. But an “epidemic”? Hardly.

The National Youth Tobacco Survey pegs the number of teenagers who are frequent vapers at 845,000. As Reason observes, if those 845,000 were smoking cigarettes instead, that number would read “more like a solution than a problem.”

“Even for the adolescent vapers who otherwise never would have tried nicotine, the long-term health consequences are likely to be minimal,” Mr. Sullum writes. “On balance, the increase in e-cigarette use by teenagers is more likely to be a public health boon than a public health disaster.”

Would anti-tobacco zealots would prefer teens vape or smoked traditional cigarettes? They should be celebrating that far fewer youngsters are taking up the latter. In fact, their crusade against vaping may itself threaten public health.