These things are causing the new health crisis.
So says our government and the media
E-cigarettes are popping up everywhere
They’ve got serious potential harms
Vaporizers, or e-cigarettes, let people get
a hit of nicotine without actually burning tobacco.
So the government scares people about it.­
The FDA warning about liquid nicotine.
Scientist say it can change your brain.
But Vaping is a much less harmful way to consume nicotine.
Extraordinarily less harmful.
It's about 95% less harmful
than a normal traditional cigarette.
Michelle Minton of the Competitive Enterprise Institute
studies vices like vaping.
She’s concludes:
We should really be encouraging people to use vaping
and there's only a couple of ways
Encouraging people?
absolutely because there's no controversy
at this point, the fact that vaping is much
less harmful than smoking.
Actually, there is some controversy.
E-cigarette battery suddenly exploded.
Some vaporizers are defective, but most important:
vapor contains harmful chemicals too.
Nevertheless...
Vaping is far less harmful than smoking.
It’s nicotine that makes both e-cigarettes
and regular cigarettes addictive.
But nicotine itself isn’t that bad.
It’s a stimulant.
It's similar to caffeine.
Similar to caffeine?
On the spectrum of drugs
that you can become addicted to
nicotine and caffeine are very similar
to each other.
Enjoy a cigarette.
But tobacco smoke contains 7,000 other chemicals
some of which cause cancer.
Taking in nicotine is not as harmful as inhaling
smoke from the burning of paper and
tobacco leaves.
What's harmful about nicotine is
how it is delivered.
Delivered through cigarettes
it's incredibly harmful, incredibly deadly.
By contrast,
while e-cigarettes may deliver these
big puffs of smoke, the smoke is mostly
flavored vapor. Less likely to harm anyone.
Also It doesn’t smell as bad as cigarettes.
Somebody who's vaping a huge cloud of vanilla
cherry blast whatever they're vaping is way
more pleasant than standing next to somebody who is
exhaling smoke from a combustible cigarette.
So these are less intrusive, and safer.
So what does our government do?
There is an epidemic spreading.
It launches campaigns against vaping.
Your kids are not an experiment,
protect them from e-cigarettes.
Actually, kids have been vaping a little less
since 2014, according to
data from the CDC
but recently there was a spike.
The only explanation I can come up with now
is the CDC and the FDA has been doing the
most advertising of these products
by talking about them so much
Young people should never use these kinds of products.
Telling children "you shouldn't be doing this thing"
is not necessarily going
to make many of them say "no."
Maybe makes it more attractive to them.
Kids are going to the bathroom
smoking it in stalls
Next thing you know you’re hooked like that
My former employer, ABC News
is eager to talk about the dangers.
Addicted to nicotine
before they even graduate from middle school.
Recently, they ran more than a dozen
scare stories about vaping.
Another recent study suggests that e-cigarettes
are a gateway to traditional cigarettes.
Gateway to traditional cigarettes.
Someone is going to use cigarettes
they're probably going to start with an e-cigarette first.
However,
some children who might have gone on to use
actual cigarettes might just stop with e-cigarettes.
If I take a puff of this
I get,
"Oh that smells good! What is that? What flavor is that?"
If I smoke a cigarette I get funny looks and
brushed shoulders.
Do we want children to become addicted to anything?
No, no one's going to say
they want kids to become addicted.
But, keeping a small percent of teenagers from
trying e-cigarettes is not worth sacrificing
adults whose lives could be saved.
Why not ban all these things?
They're all bad for you.
That would be a tragedy for public health.
A really good example of this is what happened
in Europe with something called Snus.
Sweden was built on premium quality Snus.
Snus is a moist tobacco chew
that has been banned in the EU
for about two or three decades now
except for in one country, Sweden.
And Sweden currently has the lowest smoking rates
and the lowest lung cancer rates of
any EU country.
The EU’s banning the tobacco alternative
didn’t work out very well.
If we do this with e-cigarettes, it would be as bad as what the EU did with Snus.
We've seen this with vaping already
Cities across the country are starting to ban e-cigarette use in public
The states that have enacted over 21
to buy e-cigarettes or over 18
the teenage smoking rates go up again.
Because when teens who want to do something
like smoking can't get ahold of e-cigarettes,
they just go to smoking.
It can release dangerous chemicals
like formaldehyde into your bloodstream.
Children aren't the only people seeing these ads.
Five years ago very few adults believed that
e-cigarettes were as harmful as smoking and
now thanks in large part to
these government warnings,
adult smokers think that
vaping is as harmful or even more harmful.
How many adult smokers think that?
We're talking on the order of
60% at this point.
So, it used to be-
It's just wrong.
And it's dead wrong.
There are a few lunatics out there
who say that e-cigarettes are more harmful
based on zero evidence,
but every legitimate, rational scientist
who's investigated this issue has said,
"We don't know all the risks,
but we can say that they are less harmful than smoking."
Now Minton’s think-tank has received
some money from companies that make e-cigarettes.
But best I can tell, her science is right.
Vaping is a safer alternative.
You may think it’s unusual that Minton spends all her
working time studying and writing about vices.
What's wrong with you?
Alcohol, gambling, vaping...
11 years studying this stuff.
Why?
I like some of those bad things personally
and it's also personal for me
because we're talking about the essence of
what it is to be a free human being,
which is to make decisions about risk in your life.
There's nothing more fundamental
to human choice than being able to decide for yourself
what kind of risks you want to take
with your body, with your money, with your life.
So it’s a fundamental freedom
for myself that I want to protect not just for other people
but also for them.