Matt Ridley explains how it happened at the Rational Optimist:
More people use ecigarettes in the UK than in any other European country. It’s more officially encouraged than in the United States and more socially acceptable than in Australia, where it’s still banned. There is a thriving sector here of vape manufacturers, retailers, exporters, even researchers; there are 1,700 independent vape shops on Britain’s streets. It’s an entrepreneurial phenomenon and a billion-pound industry.
The British vaping revolution dismays some people, who see it as a return to social acceptability for something that looks like smoking with unknown risks. Yet here, more than anywhere in the world, the government disagrees. Public Health England says that vaping is 95% safer than smoking and the vast majority of people who vape are smokers who are partly or wholly quitting cigarettes. The Royal College of Physicians agrees: “The public can be reassured that ecigarettes are much safer than smoking.”
Lots of doctors are now recommending vaping as a way of quitting smoking. It is because of vaping that Britain now has the second lowest percentage of people who smoke in the European Union. The youth smoking rate in the UK has fallen from 26% to 19% in only six years. …
Professor Gerry Stimson of Imperial College, an expert on harm reduction, points out that it’s much easier to persuade people to do something if it is enjoyable rather than a painful chore: “For those trying to stop smoking, ecigarettes have profoundly changed the experience. For the first time, quitting cigarettes is no longer associated with being a ‘patient’ and with personal struggle.” …
Today, Britain has more than twice as high a vaping rate as the rest of the European Union: 5% versus 2%.
2.9 million The number of ecigarette users in the UK (of these, 1.5m have completely quit smoking cigarettes)
£400 Amount the average smoker in Britain spends every three months on cigarettes
£190 Amount the average ecig user in Britain spends every three months (if buying from supermarkets)
95% How much safer vaping is than smoking, according to Public Health England …
Smoking’s health risk comes not from nicotine, but from the chemicals created in the flame.
So giving smokers nicotine without giving them any smoke just has to be safer. In 2016, a series of key scientific papers from the lab of Dr Grant O’Connell, a scientist working for the ecigarette manufacturer Fontem Ventures, reported that smokers confined in a clinic for five days who switched to ecigarettes got the same amount of nicotine but much less exposure to the harmful toxicants known to cause smoking-associated disease risks, such as nitrosamine and carbon monoxide. After five days, the levels of harmful toxicants measured in their blood and urine was like that of smokers who went cold turkey over the same time. The subjects also had improvements to lung and heart function.
This year the team published one of the first long-term clinical studies, which monitored 209 smokers who used ecigarettes for two years. It found no evidence of any safety concerns or serious health complications in smokers after two years of continual ecigarette use. …
For vaping to be beneficial, it does not have to be harmless. Surveys suggest 98% of vapers are smokers, so even if vaping carries a moderate risk, so long as it is less than the risk of smoking, there will be harm reduction. …
Yet, despite official endorsement and the growing strength of the evidence for vaping’s harm reduction, public opinion has been moving against ecigarettes. More than 25% of people now erroneously believe vaping to be at least as harmful as smoking, up from 7% in 2013, thanks to tabloid headlines claiming as much.
Much of this misinformation came from vested interests. The pharmaceutical industry lobbied hard behind the scenes to defend its lucrative line in medicinal nicotine patches and gums against a new competitor. Both patches and smoking cessation services have lost about half their business since 2011.
As ever with prohibition campaigns, this was a coalition of what the economist Bruce Yandle once called “bootleggers and Baptists”: profiteers and preachers. Much opposition to vaping came, and comes, from puritans horrified at the thought that somebody, somewhere, might be enjoying themselves. If quitting smoking is pleasurable then it must be sinful. …
Opponents of vaping still worry it is a gateway into smoking, fearing the young are being lured into nicotine addiction by vaping before moving on to smoking. Clive Bates, a former civil servant and campaigner for progressive causes, lambasts the gateway argument as patronising: “Kids have been weaponised in an activist battle to bend the adult world out of shape where it serves an abstinence-only agenda.”
Bates points out that smoking rates among young people are falling faster since 2010 than they were before, that surveys show the majority of underage vapers are former smokers or would-be smokers, and that young people give harm reduction as their main reason for vaping when asked. As with adults, ecigarettes look as though they are protecting children against smoking much more than luring them into it. In short, the gateway argument just does not hold up.
The argument that vaping cannot yet be proven safe, so must be assumed to be unsafe, is an example of what can go wrong with the “precautionary principle”. If an existing technology is killing people, and a safer alternative comes along to save their lives, then waiting for watertight evidence about the risks of the new technology is effectively culpable homicide. The precautionary principle thus applied holds new technologies to a higher standard than existing ones, stifling beneficial innovation. …
Britain stumbled into world leadership of the vaping industry. It’s a textbook example of disruptive innovation: a new technology, a decision not to block it, a history of harm reduction, a flowering of experiments, lots of research into the impacts, a lot of lives saved and financial benefits shared between consumers and producers. Plus a sudden acceleration of the race to extinguish for ever a nasty habit. And all at zero cost to the taxpayer. What’s not to like?
There’s lots more at the link. Read the whole thing!
