Earlier this month, the Food and Drug Administration announced that it plans to impose limitations on the sale of flavored e-cigarette vaping liquids, with the intention to squelch the alleged health crisis posed by this smoking alternative. The ban, however, could lead teens who use the product to turn to smoking — a much more dangerous alternative.
Though vaping clearly is unsafe, unhealthy, and has caused serious injury and death, banning flavored e-cigarette cartridges could cause greater, more dangerous consequences.
Since 2011, cigarette smoking among middle- and high-school-aged teens has declined. Though the purpose of the Trump administration’s ban would be to promote teen health by combatting underage vaping, the ban could lead teens and adults alike to smoking.
The so-called crisis surrounding vaping-related illnesses began last spring, and since then, 57 people have died due to a vaping-related injury or illness and 2,600 others have fallen ill due to the products.
Though these illnesses and deaths are terrible — and wholly preventable — the toll of vaping is nowhere near that of cigarette smoking.
In 1964, U.S. Surgeon General Luther Terry released the first report to detail the dangers of smoking cigarettes. The research found that average smokers were nearly 10 times more likely to develop lung cancer than non-smokers. For heavy smokers, the risk of getting lung cancer was 20 times greater.
Though only 14 percent of the population still smokes cigarettes today, smoking still causes more than 480,000 premature deaths annually, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The CDC also reported that an average cigarette smoker will live 10 years less than an average non-cigarette smokers, and that cancer and heart disease are the two leading causes of death for smokers over the age of 35.
Cigarettes expose smokers to 7,000 toxic chemicals, and though scientists are unsure of exactly how many chemicals are in vaping liquids, Dr. Michael Joseph Blaha from Johns Hopkins University said he has “no doubt” that the liquids contain much fewer chemicals than traditional cigarettes.
Blaha reports further that most of the illnesses and diseases that result from using e-cigarettes are not caused by the flavored juices and pods that the Trump administration is looking to ban. Rather, Blaha found that the illnesses were largely caused by vapers modifying their devices and purchasing vaping liquids on the black market.
This certainly isn’t to say vaping is safe, or that teens should vape. Some vaping juices contain vitamin E acetate, one of the main culprits for vaping-related illnesses which is often found in the illicit, unregulated vaping liquids that are sold on the street.
Vitamin E acetate is also found in vaping liquids that contain THC, the chemical in marijuana that causes a high. And on Tuesday, the CDC reported a new study which found that 82 percent of individuals who were hospitalized for vaping-related illnesses had at some point used vaping liquid that contained THC. Many vaping juices also contain nicotine, making vaping addictive, like smoking cigarettes. Beyond these findings, Blaha says there is still much to be learned about the harms of vaping.
But that doesn’t mean vaping should be out-right banned. Teens, especially 18 and 19-year olds, are old enough to make the decision for themselves whether or not to smoke or vape. And though the public has known for half a century the plethora of negative health effects of cigarette smoking, cigarettes are still legal for teens in many states to purchase and smoke.
Further, the issue of regulating vaping and smoking should not be within the jurisdiction of distant federal government agencies, and would be better handled at state and local levels. In fact, many states have already imposed limits on the sale of flavored vaping liquids. And before Congress voted in December to raise the federal tobacco-purchasing age to 21, 19 states and 530 localities had already done so.
Older teens and adults are more than capable of making a decision for themselves whether or not to vape, and a ban on flavored e-cigarette liquids could lead many who would have vaped to the more dangerous alternative: smoking.
Alex Nester is the opinions editor for The Collegian and is a senior studying economics.
